Power Cut

About 6:30pm we had an unexpected power cut. Not only was it confusing as the power went out -- it took me a couple of minutes to work out what was going on as i still had power on the laptop (from the battery of course) and was typing up and email. Boys upstairs, parents downstairs - but all hell breaks lose as it's very dark in house without power and the boys freaked big time! They couldn't see a thing o happy times suddenly went bad! Good news is that the amount of shrieking and shouting going on we could locate them quickly. Took us a while to calm them down and explain to a 6yr old and a 2yr old whats happening. Managed to get emergency phone installed, locate so torches, candles (and a single match!) and get some sort of normality resumed. I rang power company and whatever happened seems to take out about 5 major market towns/villages in the local area! It took just over 2 hrs to restore power (if we have a cut it's normally on within 15 mins!) Be interesting to see what the power company has to say about the outage. Equipment failure, vandalism or too much load?

"Just nipping out on the bike for a pint of milk" !

Booked the BMW advanced off road motorbike course in the Brecon Beacons for July 08! Two days of advancing my knowledge and skill in riding off road.

So the wife had better be worried when she hears "just nipping out on the bike for a pint of milk" as it might mean slightly longer distances covered!

She did want yaks milk didn't she? :)

Stacy's Mom!

Thank god for itunes music video section!

Finally, the fountains of wayne song - Stacys mom - has finally been uploaded to the itunes store! A classic song from a bunch of fine upstanding gentlemen. I have to confess the interest in this group had nothing to do with the lyrics, music or the ability of the band. These guys had the smart idea to include rachael hunter in their video!

Route Log from the bike

So i found sometime tonight to download the route log from the Garmin Zumo from Sunday's ride.

You can load the data back into Garmin's software and then export it to Goggle Maps!

It's great as i can locate some of the off road sections i did and with my newly acquired Ordnance Survey Map of Salisbury Plain i can now see where there a vehicular rights of way!

I feel a new route coming on with more off road sections!

1000th Legal Download

Just realised tonight that I broke through the 1,000th purchase from iTunes tonight! I can't remember the last time I went into a record store and browsed CD's, just don't have the time to do this any more. It's far too easy to either buy the CD off amazon or just sit quickly for 20 mins trying to find either something new to listen to or maybe find something i heard on the radio earlier.

What was the 1,000th item? A music video called "numb" by Linkin Park. It joins over 200 other music vid's on my video ipod.

Interesting my music collection is now nearly 6,500 tracks and 15% of it's been downloaded from legal sources [just for the record the other 85% were legally ripped from CD's I own]

Just off to work out how much money I have given to Steve Jobs!

The Germans have invaded....

...with a little help from the Americans!

If you look closely this is me heading southwest for 1.4miles down an unpaved road in the middle of Salisbury Plain. For those of you who don't know this is the main training area for the British Army. Not a great place to be riding a German motorbike! But thanks to Garmin (programmed by the Americans!) I ended up on this road.

It was great. The surface deteriorated and there were puddles all way across the road. So there was only one way to deal with it. Stand up on pegs and go for it. Bike coped well on the Metzeler road/touring tyre. They are groved, but only just.

Couple of other unpaved roads and will attempt to upload sat nav log and plot some more routes across the plain. Shelling permitting of course!

An experiment with public transport

I went up to our Cheshire office last week - just over 450 mile round trip. Driving takes about 3.5 hrs to drive up on a good day. Flying is 1hr flight time (plus the getting to the airport, check in delays, etc) so it makes it about 4hr trip. So i looking into the train. Cross country from Winchester to runcorn, avoiding London with a change at Stafford - 3.5hrs!

Upsides - £81 return and leaving at peak time as well. Sleek new Virgin trains. Power at your seat. I get to read paper, cup of tea and then do some work.

Downsides - Blooming cold standing at the stations waiting for the train, gets a bit crowded around Birmingham, but the big problem - the women sitting next to me for part of the return journey had a bad case of the flu! Just hope i stay bug free.

Might try it sometime soon on a long journey. Sure as hell beats sitting on the motorway around Birmingham or getting stuck at an airport!

Blu-ray wins over HD-DVD!

Interesting press release from Warner Brothers studio last week. They were one of the big guys to support HD-DVD and Blue-ray formats. Seems during 08 they will stop HD-DVD and only produced high-def material for distribution using Blue-Ray only! (DVD remains in play for a wee while!)

Why so interesting? 20% of DVD sales in the US of A belong to Warner!

Major victory for the Blue-Ray camp.

I've also seen UK disc retail figures just for November. Blue-ray were outselling HD-DVD discs by a significant factor. Be interesting to see what Decembers figures are like.

So the PS3 is starting to look like a good play (US PS3 console sales show they shipped 1.2M consoles over Christmas period. Looks like Sony are getting back in the race!)

(the image? could only find dull images of blue-ray stuff so this looked fun!)