Office move to Thames Valley Park.

I’m to move offices from Camberley to Oracle’s offices in Thames
Valley Park, Reading.

My current commute is by bicycle, on an average day I travel approximately 5 miles and do the trip in under 25 minutes. The distance and time very much depend on the weather as I do enjoy my ride in through the woods in the area. But how am I to get to TVP?

It seems I have a few options:

• Bus: Number 72 will take me from Fleet, Reading Road South to
  Reading Station in approx. One hour. Cost £7 return.

• Train: From Fleet station to Reading station via Basingstoke in
  approx one hour.

• Car: Only I currently share a car with the wife. In the interest
  of the environment I would like to car-share.

• Bicycle: Approximately 17 miles door-to-door, I estimate it will
  take 1 hour and 45 mins

• Work From Home:

I’m thinking that I would ideally like to continue to cycle. But I have to confess its been a while since I road that sort of distance and even longer since I rode it on roads.

I imagine the easiest method would be car. Travel time I’d expect to be under an hour, say 40 minutes. Though picking up others for the car share could well add some time to that.

Putting the idea of a car-share on hold for the moment The train seems like a good option, I’d cycle to the Station on the Brompton and then take the train. Each train only takes around quarter-of-an-hour but to that there is a waiting time at the start and middle stations which takes the total travel up to around an hour. Plus the possibility of missing a connection. I shall of course try the train another day.

So today I’m trying the bus. I cycled up to the bus stop on Reading Road South, arrived at 8:05. I brought the bike as I’m undecided on my return route at this time; for a start the bus is rather infrequent and I’m not sure if I’m going to take the Oracle bus from the station or cycle down the river path.

First thoughts – Very friendly bus driver – to the passengers at least, very uncomfortable seat. There is a parcel shelf where I stow the bike so that is at least not under my feet. Towards the end of the journey I’d imagined a bus lane ran through Reading. But the bus takes a detour down side streets (Basingstoke Road) collecting other passengers. At west hill Tobacco smell causes my nose and throat to twinge – Yes it non-smoking but those smells linger.

Noted times:

• 8:14 Bus arrives
• 8:22 Fleet Station
• 8:35 Exit Elvemeheath
• 8:38 Hartley Witney
• 8:43 Pub Shoulder of Mutton?
• 8:48 Wellington Country Park – Riseley. (Erm 30mph???)
• 9:04 M4 Junction
• 9:17 West Hill?
• 9:20 Bridge Street – The Oracle (shopping centre).
• 9:23 Station – drivers says 10 mins late.

As I get off the bus the Thames Valley Park courtesy bus service is there so I jump on. I really shouldn’t have on such a lovely day – but its bus day. Driver tells me the service runs every 8 minutes. Four other passengers also get on. Lots of space for bike in wheelchair spaces and two parcel shelfs – though the shelfs are four feet off the floor. A bus lane is provided for part of this journey along Kings Road. I’m told the service is rather busy in the mornings and afternoon. I intend to cycle up the river path to get back this afternoon.

---

To which I did, it only took around ten minutes along the river path on Sustrans route 4 and 5.. I got the bus as far as Elvetham Heath and cycled the last two miles directly – where as the bus goes around the houses – and thus took ten minutes off the morning journey.

Music Man

BATS latest production of The Music Man is now underway at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke and running through to Saturday 22nd.

Both of my girls, Emily and Alice, are in the show performing together on alternating nights. I’m looking forward to seeing it on Friday as I’ve heard that this is another excellent performance by BATS.

The show features the signature song ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’. The story sees ‘Professor’ Harold Hill, a con man, whose scam is to convince parents he can teach their musically disinclined children to play instruments. He takes pre-orders for musical instruments and promises to form a band, when he promptly skips town and moves onto the next before he is found out. Harold arrives at River City, Iowa, where he meets their townspeople and therein the fun starts.

test

ublog test

I’m it!

Peter tagged me! I’m like the school boy who, while lining up in the
playground to play one game, is suddenly rushed upon and touched in a
fleeting moment to the cheer of “tag” as the ascendant races off. I
liked playing tag, though I always preferred
“Stuck in the mud” (apparently known as Freeze Tag in some places).

So, five things you may not already know about me….

1. Thinking that I may have had a very minor dairy intolerance I gave
   up eating dairy produce in my early twenties. Obviously this
   means no Milk, Cheese or Chocolate. But that’s only the half of
   it. Wey solids and powder are found in an amazing host of foods
   like biscuits, cakes and crackers. And all those really nice
   things like cakes (did I say that already), custard, pastries,
   and a whole lot more…. I’m not sure the diet had much
   effect on my Asthma, but I sure did put on the pounds
   once I came off of it (I have subsequently lost that weight,
   with help from the Hackers Diet) and my bicycles. I was certainly glad to no longer be having water on
   my morning cereal.

2. This may not be so surprising to those paying close attention to
   my blog… OK, so its a surprise to you all! I used to be
   cleaner at Express Dairies.
   It helped me save up for the
   road “racing” bicycle that I still ride to this day.
   My section included a small hall with a free milk dispenser
   which was always in a real slimy and smelly state come the
   evening (people,
   be considerate with your unwanted beverages). I still remember
   with joy the first time I used the floor polishing machine. It
   whizzed around taking me with it and wrapping me around
   with the power cord. Took a few times to tame it, but it was
   always fun.

3. Somewhat like
   Clingan
   at school I was interested in long distance running. I used to
   take part in the cross country race each year and for
   sports day entered the 1500m and 5km race. Though I never took
   it seriously, I just seemed to have a lot of stamina. These
   days I really don’t enjoy running and much prefer to be on my
   bike where my stamina still sees me through..

4. I was in a Secondary School (high-school) production of “My Fair
   Lady”. I was in the chorus and several non-speaking parts
   including a chimney sweep and ballroom dancer. I enjoyed every
   moment of it, especially learning the waltz (shame I don’t
   remember it now). I dare say it’s those memories why I
   encourage my girls to take up the thespian joys that
   they have. Mind, they can sing unlike myself.

5. On the theme of Musicals, my favorites all time is the film “The Slipper and the Rose“, staring Richard Chamberlain and Gemma
   Craven. It is in my opinion the best adaptation of the
   Cinderella Story. My favorite bit is when the fairy god mother, played
   by Annette Crosbie, exclaims “I know, I’ll borrow time!” (or something to
   that effect) which
   for me explained why the magic had to be withdrawn at midnight.
   So why don’t the slippers disappear? Well that magic clearly wasn’t
   borrowed 😉

So, Jonathan, your it!

Stace

Fun Family Camping in the Netherlands

My Brother phoned me earlier asking where it was that I went on Vacation last year, the place that was on a fun park, with a pool and zoo? Where it was really good for young families?

Well, it was one of two places: one has a Safari park on site and the other claimed to have the longest water slide within its multi fun-pool complex in Europe. We went to both places with Eurocamp, which is very easy to get to from the South of England in the car.

Hilvarenbeek Beekse Berg.

Also known as Speelland
where we have been twice.

Situated on a Safari park and children’s amusement park.
Has small swimming pool and large lake with boats and several petting zoos, a very large site that is lovely to cycle about. In the evening we cycled up to a little known vieing point and watched the Zebras and Giraffes. It’s also affiliated with a fun-pool in town (not far away).

Dunrell – Wassenaar

Dunrell is also situated on an amusement park. We likened it to Thorpe park here. This park would perhaps suit older children as it has some additional activities (High ropes, toboggan and age limit rides). But it also has lots for the younger members of the family, including a playground with the equipment playgrounds had when we were kids. Like the Witches Hat, Two storey high slides,large swings, Helter-skelter; all of which we no longer seem to have
in the UK these days :-(. But every day you just have to go to the fun pool which is nice and warm and has so many fun slides… It might just be the best in Europe. I believe our fees covered entry for 2 hours in the pool (at 11am) when we were there.

Both places are not far from Efteling (though Speelland is nearest) which the girls loved.

Check it out… Stace

Petition feed back

Following the Inheritence tax petition I received some feed back from the Prime Ministers Office. I didn’t expect that, wish I could say the same for the response.

Petition our Government

I’ve been sent a link to a petition entitled Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.  Which as a person who cycles to work every day wont affect me financially daily.  However I do own a car and thus would be effected should this particular scheme go ahead.  However the detail of the petition, limited as it is,  asks to "forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion" which I’m not sure I fully agree on.

What ever the solution is it must be fair and apply to all, including visitors to our great country.   Fuel tax does not affect most vehicles arriving in our country as they fill up before they get here and these same vehicles are not going to be fitted with fancy gadgets to charge them.  So how about this: Put a toll on the entry for all vehicles without a UK tax disc?  There could be an exit toll too, depending on the mileage or time.  Of course I’d expect other countries to follow suit thus levying  an extra charge on us when traveling from our shores.

With the current price of the housing market in England I feel that the "petition the Prime Minister to Abolish inheritance tax" is a more worthy cause at this time.

Other petitions exist, and you can even create your own.

A Day In History

I was forwarded by Jonathan to the History Matters One day in History link. I have included below my un-abridge entry, which alas was over the 3999 character limit. Enjoy:
A Day In History
My wife, Kirsty, and I awoke to Sara Kennedy on Radio 2 at 6:50am. We listened to Sara’s voice as she read out the headlines from today’s news papers; I don’t read a news paper my self as they have too much sensationalism and gossip to be worth the while in my opinion. We don’t lie listening in a slumber for to long, no Terry Wogan for us today. As Kirsty, a primary school teacher, is working as a class room assistant at Portesbery School, a special needs school, for the first time today.
Kirsty leaves the house at around 7:50. Emily, my eldest daughter leaves for Secondary school at 8:20 and I take my youngest daughter, Alice, to school by bicycle at 8:25am. It’s exactly a mile away and takes around 5 minutes to cycle there. I returned home to work rather than going in to the office today.
I work in Computing, I’m a senior software engineer for Sun Microsystems, specialising in naming protocols such as DNS (Domain Name system), LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and NIS (Network Information Protocol). In brief I diagnose issues and where necessary provide corrective actions, advice and or address the issue in the source code.
At home I work on a Sun Blade 150, a SPARC based processor designed by Sun. On which I run the current in-development version of the Solaris Operating Environment. I keep the system up-to-date with the latest development release using Live-Upgrade, which allows me to upgrade one disc partition while continuing to work on another one. This was the first thing I did today, before breakfast and making the pack-lunches I resumed Solaris, started a secure shell connection to the office, mounted the relevant NFS partition and started the upgrade process, luupgrade to build 50 of Nevada.
After returning from the school run (well, cycle) I started the online chat tool, Gaim, and email client, Thunderbird, and proceeded to wade through todays email. On average it takes two hours to work through the email. It’s a mixture of technical questions, bug updates, resource notifications, test results, third party developments, new projects, announcements… and much more. Email is the preferred communication tool and as such is revisited throughout the day. Almost everything is done electronically; I rarely receive post at work.
My plan for today was to investigate an issue with the DNS resolver; a software library which translates names to Internet Protocol addresses. The latest changes caused one or two other software applications to fail horribly. By which I mean an uncontrolled fault causing the operating system to stop the process and create a memory dump (core file), otherwise known as a crash. Thus I needed to analyse why Solaris seems to be mostly seeing this issue, look for other possible faulty applications (as not all are seeing this issue) and investigate if any changes could be made to the resolver to help guard against these faulty applications from crashing.
At lunch I cycled up to the local plumber merchants in search of a smaller u-bend. At the plumbers they have a knack for making one feel rather small if not inadequate; I’m not a plumber and am not sure if different size u-bends are available… I have been replacing our on-suit bathroom over some months and needed a different u-bend to fit the bidet; as the one I took off the other bidet would not fit in the space causing the bidet to be raised off the floor! Turned out that a standard bidet u-bend has a shorter neck for this very reason and I returned home triumphant.
Alas while I was away my Virtual Private Network tunnel to the office had gone down, reset, and vanished! Not a big issue, nothing is lost by this as I use a combination of software which is well suited for working in different locations. Namely, screen: for managing remote terminal sessions. And GNUEmacs: for file management, editing, text formatting, source code management, searching, just about everything else.
In the afternoon I worked some more on the libresolv issue. Documented my findings in the Change Request database , changed some libresolv source code which would prevent one of the crash scenarios and started the business of cross compiling for testing and verification.
Emily returned home around 2:40pm and began her homework by herself. I cycled back to school and collected Alice on my bike around 3:05pm. By 3:30 I was back in front of the terminal considering how I might address some of the issues that I had discovered today. I signed off just after 6pm, when I noticed that my live upgrade had stalled…. The secure shell (SSH) which I had NFS mounted the disc over would have been reset when the VPN tunnel was lost earlier. So rather than suspend the machine I invoked a new SSH session, NFS automatically recovered and subsequently live upgrade continued.
I joined my family for dinner and discussed my wife’s day at the special needs school. Seems she enjoyed it and is looking forward to working there again.
In the evening, around 7pm, I set off for a night time cycle with Jonathan and Keith, colleagues from work. We cycled up the Basingstoke Canal from Fleet towards Farnborough and headed in to the woods surrounding Tweseldown race course. We cycled around in the dark looking for single track routes, finding what we thought was one and then getting lost in trees and bushes. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and despite the number of brambles we encountered we all avoided a puncture. When I returned home I found that we were ridding in an area called Outridden Hill!
I returned home around 9:30pm and watched the final half hour of the excellent new BBC drama called “The Amazing Mrs Pritcahard”.
Before bed I returned to the computer, the live upgrade had completed. I selected the new OS and powered off the system; ‘init 5’.

Emily: Young Writers’ Poetry winner

Winchester Uni. Young Writers’ Poetry

Emily receiving award from Poet Keith Bennett

On Saturday afternoon we went to Abbey House as a guest of the Mayor of Winchester. Where my eldest daughter Emily was presented by Keith Bennett with her prize in winning Highly Commended in the Winchesters Writers’ Conference, Young Writers’ Poetry competition. After which we had Tea and cakes with Mayor Sue Nelmes. We are needless to say very proud. We look forward to visiting Marwell Zoo and the Watercrest line which was part of her prize.

Saturday morning was spent applying “smoothover” to a small section of alcove in my on-suit bathroom. It was not that easy. Each time I ran the applicator over the ceiling it seemed to leave a small indent across the middle or one edge. I don’t think I will be doing the rest of the ceiling, that should suffice with a coat of paint.

Sunday I spent some more time in the bathroom trying to fit the Bidet and toilet. Alas the u-bend and my arrangement of pipe fittings is too tall to have either installed correctly at this time. In the afternoon some friends came over for dinner, which was most enjoyable. After they went I picked up several hundred acorns from my patchy grassed area out back… Formerly this was a lawn prior to our dry summer and the badgers digging it up! More about the badgers another day.

Sailing in the Solent with old friends

PRATs Sailing Weekend 2006

Oct 6, 2006 – 88 Photos

Went sailing for the first time this weekend with some of my old Pr1me Computer colleagues. We set sail from Lymington on Saturday morning and tacked and gybed through the Solent eventually harboring in Cowes. On Sunday we returned to Lymington via Yarmouth where we stopped for lunch before using the headsail to carry us almost directly across with a couple of tacks for fun, and one to take us off a collision course with a ferry. I had so much fun I’m now considering following it up with a Competent Crew course.