St. Rumwolds Raft Race at Bonnington
A small hint to anyone taking part next year, don’t pick a fight splashing the opposition if:
The crews of Mamma Mia and the Silver Duck found this out to their cost. The school children enthusiastically water ballooning the rafters. It was great fun to watch.
Attack on the Silver Duck
This sign was at the London Aquarium. Spot the maths mistake.
London Aquarium shark exhibit
A bad start to the Easter weekend was being turned away at the entrance to The Hop Farm at Paddock Wood to see Peppa Pig. Staff told us that it was too crowded inside and we should “come back tomorrow”. That isn’t really an option when you have already driven a long way. When others that were coming out were asking for a refund because they had not even seen the Peppa Pig character when they were at the show, it was clear that a different attraction had to be found to avoid disappointing my 5 year old.
Leeds Castle was the next nearest big attraction for Easter weekend. There was a treasure trail that lead to a chocolate Easter Bunny for the children and a kite display. The children could make their own kites in a big marquee and a kite shop was on site with reasonably priced kites if you wanted to join in. Everyone was having a brilliant time. It is easy to forget how much fun children can have with a kite. Safe to say that being turned away from the Hop Farm gave us a much more involved family trip out at Leeds Castle.
Today I was a passenger on the first Eurostar train to carry passengers on the High-Speed rail link through Kent.
I had volunteered to take part in the evacuation exercise within the tunnels and had assumed this was beneath the channel. Unfortunately the evacuation exercise was for the new tunnels under London and the Thames. Not nearly so good a talking point. More disappointing to for my mate Andrew Jones who was probably thinking that he had been invited under false pretences. The passengers were nearly all men, most of whom were carrying expensive cameras and camcorders. We also got to see the newly redeveloped St. Pancras station which is still under construction.
The evacuations went smoothly without any noticeable problems and then it was on to the first high-speed passenger train journey in the UK. We made the journey from Folkestone through Ebbsfleet to London in about 21 minutes. The ride was smooth and the speed hardly noticeable until you watched as the cars on the motorway were being left far behind. The train manager announced that we were doing 300 km/h and a small, self conscious cheer went up from the passengers. At this point Andy said he could not let the opportunity pass for another first and he headed off to the toilet for his first 300 km/h pee. The experience was obviously a good one as Andrew returned grinning from ear to ear.
Andrew over exagerates the effects of travelling at 300km/h
Spent today at the V Festival. Heavy rain was forecast all day, but by the time I got there it stayed dry, much better than some other years.
Tha bands I caught were:
If the people at V really want a decent festival then concentrate on providing a good listening experience instead of squeezing extra stages into the venue. Channel 4 should be livid that the stage they sponsered was pretty much ruined by the bass bleeding over from the Bacardi tent on the right and from the Strongbow tent on the left.
Despite my moans I really enjoyed the day.
Is it just me or does anyone else see jobs advertised with the line
salary: neg
and think that neg means negligible and not negotiable?
Interesting to see that programming langauges were not really discussed. Games can be easily developed in languages other than C/C++. If I didn’t already know C I am quite sure I would give up from frustration over learning the language. With the great control you get from C, there is also a lot to learn. Python is an alternative and there are links on libSDL for Python developers. At a job interview I was told that it didn’t matter that I had no experience in Python. The interviewer said I could learn enough to be productive in a weeked. Saying that – I still haven’t tried it.
Anyway, Ryan reckons you can write a Tetris clone in a night and have it debugged by morning. I am going to give it a go. If I finish it I will post it – perhaps FLOSS can have a page of links to all those Tetris clones that are spawned by this podcast.
If you want to listen to the podcast head over to twit.tv.
The news of an MOD report into the existance of extra terrestrials has been all over the “Oddly Enough” pages of the news sites today. Reuters and the BBC had both been reporting on an investigation into the causes of the UFO phenomena by the MOD.
The full report is not out until the 15th of May but the conclusions have been reported on, perhaps a little disappointingly, as
Evidence suggests that meteors and their well-known effects and, possibly some other less-known effects are responsible for some unidentified aerial phenomena…
and
Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere.
After a little searching around I found a list of reported UFO sightings since 2002 on the MOD site. I have included those that happened in Kent during 2005 below.
27-May-05 15:15 Kent
Was a small white object, that was moving parallel with an airliner.
22-Nov-05 Sheerness Kent
A ‘V’ shape of dim lights, that went into a straight line and then back into a V again.
22-Nov-05 Gillingham Kent
Five lights in the sky, that looked very strange. The lights were flashing.
24-Dec-05 21:20 Whitstable Kent
Three bright, orange lights in the sky, and then a forth orange light appeared and followed the other three.
27-Dec-05 Whitstable Ken
Strange lights were seen in the sky.
The descriptions from the report are somewhat lacking in detail which is disappointing. Kent only receives 3% of the sightings in the report. Either the aliens don’t think that we are interesting enough, or we just don’t get the unusual atmospheric weather conditions.
Shame.
Disaster strikes.
I was going to tell you all about the great interview that the BBC’s Zane Lowe had with Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante. The interview was available for download as part of the BBC podcasting trial. Unfortunately the BBC does not hold an archive and only interviews for the current week are hosted. By the time I got to write this post it had been removed.
There has also been a hilarious interview with Russell Brand by Tim Westwood. It sounded like the pair grew up on completely different planets and not within commuting distance of London. I was in fits of laughter as the two of them played off of the others styles. Russells “Best Bits” are available for download from the BBC. Lets hope he is as funny as he is when presenting “Big Brothers Big Mouth”. You had better download them now before the BBC takes them off line 
If I find the RHCP interview hosted anywhere I will post the link.
A friend of mine has been working on some freeware games and has posted them on his website.
The games play well, are nicely presented and are well worth a look. I really like the attention to detail in the homage to Pac-man called Cac-man. The sound effects are spot on and brought nostalgic memories of the original flooding back.The author, Blitterbug, has even been seen playing Cac-Man himself during lunchtimes. I have suggested that he could add networked highest score table so that we can see how well we perform against other players, but I think this project is considered complete and something new is probably in the pipeline.
The games can be downloaded from here.