I love maps, I masochistically enjoy the whole tactile experience as I struggle with my unwieldy foe in the wind or rain. Whilst a Sat Navs may get you to a destination with little stress they fail to give you any sense of the place or the terrain you are travelling through. I spend hours pouring over my maps, the flat two dimensional representation of my three dimensional world and then by adding time scales into the mix the adventure starts. Ten cm on Michelin 711 is only 100km but that takes a whole day, standing high on the pegs of the bike as I navigate the 890 to Kjolnes and onward to Gulgofjord – getting lost… what’s the worst that can happen?
Category Archives: Computing
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If you get a chance go to Bletchley Park. Its a haunting place that was the location of the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), and perhaps most famously the site that allowed Dilly Knox and the team including Alan Turing to build the Bombes which helped crack the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. I had to double check my facts after my first visit as I just could not believe that in the UK homosexuality remained a criminal offence until 1967. Turing committed suicide on June 7th 1954 after begin persecuted for being gay. It is little recompense that the UK government officially apologised to him for the “the appalling way he was treated”, but on the 24th December 2013 Turing was pardoned posthumously by the Queen – its not the finest moment for our democratic system and tolerant culture – live and let live.
Blogging Hardware
Blogging, poetry and writing on the road has always been done by me using pencil an paper but I have just specified and had delivered a semi rugged net book designed and built by Novatech in Cardiff – 500GB SSD and running Win 7 Pro with Open office and all my mapping software (BaseCamp and MapSource) lets see how the equipment performs this year in the shakedown tours before the 2012 expedition.
You can now follow me on Twitter
New Web Site Launched
My twitter following is almost in double figures now – not bad for a man who is a bit of a technical luddite but precisely 3,734,435 behind Steven Fry…so I have decide to launch my separate travelling and photography website – welcome.