Snow at last

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Yesterday it started to snow at around five in the afternoon.  Today we have six inches of snow, measured with a ruler and measured in several places on flat hard ground away from walls.  This is not a Blasdale exaggeration, so no need to divide by 2.  Nice fluffy snow because the temperature is still below freezing.

I hope the sun will come out so I can get some nice photographs, but for the moment here are some I have taken.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Snow scene taken in Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Plough and Anchor, Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

Plough and Anchor, Kingswood, Buckinghamshire on the 6th January 2010 after overnight snow fall of 6 inches.

The weather

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As soon as it gets a little cool, and that white stuff falls from the sky, chaos ensues. Here in the UK we have had some snow, I am sure you have all heard of  Eurostar and fluffy snow putting a hold on travel plans. The Eurostar operators blame a very cold France, where the weather has been the coldest for at least 15 years.  Interestingly I never realised how many people now traveled by Eurostar.

Closer to home Easyjet cancelled hundreds of flights from Luton.   I expect the cold will not last, and flights will be back to normal in January.  Important for me, because I have some work in Scotland starting in January.

Even closer to home, there are stories of people taking 2 hours to travel through Aylesbury.  I don’t understand that one, I see at most 2 centimeters of snow outside on the drive.

It is cool, last night was the coldest, going down to -6 Celsius on our thermometer.  (That’s outside, not inside our house.)   Google tells me Oxford was actually -9.  Rosemary’s brother living over in Canada sent a cutting from a local paper where the temperature had made a record low in the nearby city of Edmonton.  A minus 46.1 Celsius.  This record was 10 degrees colder than the previous record.  The previous record was set last year.

Europe is suffering the cold as well.  I suppose with global warming, there must be some places suffering incredible heat to make up for our record lows across Europe and Canada.

Christmas is now almost on us, so on a Christmas spirit thing, take a look at Santa’s check list.  This is suitable for children to view, as if I would put anything that was not 🙂  christmas-risk-assessment

Christmas is in a couple of days, rain is predicted for later today, so there will not be a white Christmas. 🙁

Bradford Curry

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I spent two days in Bradford, one night.  I did not sample the Bradford curry.  I am told they are very good in that town.  OK I did have one for lunch in the canteen of the uni.  It cost £3.90, and was a mixture of several different curries.  Not hot, but very much better than the normal curry sold in a pub.  Rice was not Basmati, but for under £4.00 can;t expect the world.  Alas having that curry at lunch meant I was not hungry for tea, hotel restaurant was closed for Christmas party, so ended up with a takeaway from Tesco.

No matter will be back there another time, so will do some Asian restaurant reviews.  Now is Bradford better for a curry than Birmingham.

On my way to Bradford

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Sitting here on the train to Leeds, the countryside looks so beautiful as the sun rises.  Yes the sun is shining.   Just about to pull into Leeds station on time, so better put away the laptop.  Then a quick trip to Bradford, where I shall spend a couple of days at the uni there.

Commuting to Broxbourne

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Last couple of days I have been driving around the M25 to Broxbourne.  Working on applying some modifications to a system there.  I find it amazing how you can be in a quite leafy town just a mile off the rush of the M25.

Its also amazing how that at rush hour the M25 is pretty free flowing with no delays.  I expect that though won’t last, but I will be away up to Bradford for the rest of the week.

Butterfly Days

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Despite the recent bad weather, we seem to have had some lovely butterflies in the last few sunny days, so Steve took their portraits and has posted an album of them –

http://www.blasdale.com/blog/picture-albums/blasdale-picture-gallery-2009/2009butterflies/

We have yet to add their names – Small Tortoiseshell, Peacock, Red Admirals (is one just faded into that “Orange” Admiral?), Comma, Painted Lady.

Another Sadgits Reunion 7-9 August 2009

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The weekend of 7th-9th August saw us meeting up in Essex with friends from Steve’s university days.

This year from our base in a quiet country village courtesy of our hosts, Richard & Andrea, we visited Frinton-on-Sea and honed our sandcastle building techniques before a visit to Beth Chatto’s Gardens.  Richard & Andrea had done their usual brilliant organization, including a Community mini-bus, and had topped it all with wonderful sunny weather.

Rather a lot of talking, drinking & eating was done, but it made a splendid weekend and photos can be found at https://www.blasdale.com/blog/picture-albums/blasdale-picture-gallery-2009/sadgits/ The leading lady is Andrea and the house, in Frinton, is where Richard’s grandparents had lived and hence his knowledge of that quintessentially English seaside town.

Sad git thought

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I have been reading some bits on the Intel Website.  (Whoever said we never click on the Google Ad words?)  An interesting topic with two points:

  1. We used to think of IBM mainframes and MIPS (Millions of instructions per second).   Then PCs came along and it was the clock speed.  This got irrelevant when Intel got the chips to do more and more in a CPU cycle.  Then came along duo chips and quad chips.  The word now is BOPS  – Billions of Operations Per Second.  So a Quad Core Intel chip Xeon E5345 can execute 153,500 BOPS, or 153,500,000,000,000 instructions per seconds.
  2. This chip that executes at 153,500 BOPS consumes 335 Watts.  That’s a lot of power, but compare that with a single core Intel processor which executes at 33,115 BOPS and uses 323.4 Watts.  Yes a 4.47x improvement in instructions per Watt.  Yes global warming and power consumption are now big issues in the compuer industry. 
  3. Now I see there are some CPUs with 6 cores,  are these called  Sex-Core?  At 2,700 dollars, I will have to wait a while. 

Goodwood festival of speed

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Near Miss

Near Miss

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

Sunday we went to Goodwood to meet Rosemary’s niece Anne, her partner Peter, and Anne’s son, ie R’s great nephew, Colin. They were over from Canada on holiday and visiting various relatives. Robert (Anne’s brother & hence Rosemary’s nephew) and his lady Kirsty were there in attendance. Goodwood was running the Festival of Speed. This is a three-day event of cars and bikes hill climbing and vocalising their engines.  (Many engines sounded to me in need of going into a garage pronto, but I was informed that was not the case.)  Very clever “sculpture” in front of Goodwood House itself.

Red, White and Blue

Red, White and Blue

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

There were many stands, and many cars that motor heads could drool over. (There were also quite a few old sheep dressed as lamb, which weren’t worth drooling over.) Celebrities were around, Jenson Button and Chris Evans to name two. The Red Arrows performed for the crowds.

On the way back we stopped off at Biceser village for a set meal at Carluccios. Quite reasonable value thee course meal for two and a couple of glasses of wine for £35 including tip.

There is a car up there

There is a car up there