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Chariots Of Fire 2008
I trained for months for this, up to three times a week, and managed in a very respectable 11:24. Similar to previous times, I found after I checked this blog, which was disappointing, but much better than the times I was getting running the test route near work (12:45 often). Our team came 87th, maintaining similar position we had last year - not bad considering over 450 teams! Of course, one of my (younger!) students ran it in 10:something..

As I ran with my new GPS, I have Tracklogs of
test run and the the race itself
or if you have google earth, you can use these for test run and race itself

Posted at: 08:16:01 4 Oct 2008 [] permanent link

Cambs County Council and the Geospatial web!
I'm looking for new halls for my Tai Chi (and hopefully Kickboxing!) classes, due to issues with my previous one, which is turning out to be fairly tricky to find. On a whim, I phoned the council, and asked the receptionist if they had a list of halls for hire, expecting to get passed onto another department. "Oh, yes" she said, "would you like me to email you the link?". Sure enough, a few mins later, I was looking at this. Browsing it, I realised what I wanted was it overlaid onto a map, so I could see where would be appropriate. Looking at the source, it was in nested HTML tables, and inconsistent formats, so I gave up the idea of writing a web scraper, and mailed the site admins on a handy link, asking if they had the info in a CSV that I could use in a google maps overlay.
A day later the reply came back; "Oh, we've done it! put "Halls for Hire" in the Search For box (including the double quote marks) and put the village/town you are thinking of moving to in the Location box leave the Show Results on a Map box ticked then click on the Search Cambs.net button.

Live Earth rather than Google maps, and in a tiny window, but otherwise superb - great job Cambridge County Council, and completely unexpectedly competent and on the button!

Posted at: 07:59:24 4 Oct 2008 [/martialarts] permanent link

Just upgraded my Macbook's hard disk
Remarkably painless. The most difficult part was ordering the right hard drive (not all 2.5" drives are the same size, apparently. Yes, I know.). So poor marks to Dabs, which took a week to ship my order ("usually ships in 24 hours!"), and only decided to when I complained, and full marks to macupgrades.co.uk, which, for 30 more than I was going to pay at dabs for a smaller disk, sold me the right sized disk - and one thats 320GB!
You'll need a Phillips #0 Screwdriver and a Torx T8 Screwdriver - which was the hardest for me, I ended up using one at work, so must buy some v. small torx.
Using SuperDuper! I made a bootable clone of my current 120GB disk (which as its part of my normal backup routine, took 15 mins to update the image), swapped out the drive in its caddy, booted into disk utility from an OSX install CD, formatted the disk, and selected restore from the USB disk. Took about 3 hours, all told. Now I can start creating and using the assorted Virtual machines I need!

Now to buy a USB caddy for the old disk, and partition the huge USB dsk into Time Machine and 320GB clone for my new disk!

Posted at: 07:49:40 4 Oct 2008 [/gadgets] permanent link