Malty goodness

It's all Franklyn fault that I enjoy the occasional dram of scotch especially a fine Scotch malt whisky. After a spicy, fine curry late one evening we sampled a few from his collection.

Beginners general guide to scotch and malt Whisky in particular is available here.
Descriptions of scotch production areas are here.
The area and distillery having a dominant impact on the flavour and nature of the final drink.

My own personal favorites being the peaty Islay produced Ardbeg and Laphroaig. Of the others, of which there are many , I enjoy the occasional highland Dalwhinnie.

There are long traditions, history and quite a few myths about Scotch and fine whisky. Exploring a few to find what you like and how you like to savour the flavours is one of lifes delights. Mines a Laphroaig Quater cask with a single (no more) ice cube, allowed to melt, then savoured at leisure.

Cheers

Gannett

PS: Times not to enjoy malty goodness .. Breakfast, just before school sports day, when motor racing, rock climbing, when being captain of a cruse ship or at a job interview.

The computer history museum, San Francisco

On the Sunday before my flight home from SF last week I embraced my inner geek and went to The Computer History Museum just off 101 in Mountain view. I thought would just be a dusty ware house full of broken down electronics but it turned out to be a bright modern facility with a wonderful collection of exhibits. Tracking the history of computers from mechanical through valve electronics to integrated circuits and beyond this collection shows the rapidly evolution computing has gone through in the last 150 years. As expected most of the exhibits are from the last 30-50 years being the time when innovation and evolution has driven computers from frames of code braking valves to slivers of hot silicon.

On the mechanical side the most impressive exhibit is the Babbage difference engine No2. Designed in 1850s by English eccentric and inventor Charles Babbage but only built in 2005 on commission at the London Science museum this mechanical calculating engine, is an impressive 5 Tons and measures aprox 3 meters wide by 2 meters tall. The mechanical intricacy was designed to remove the production errors discovered in the printed books of tables used for calculations. Programable by use of cam wheels and initial settings the machine used alternating columns of number wheels to generate logarithmic tables. If the innovation of automatic calculation was not enough the machine includes a printer to remove the transcription errors normally found in the results to page process.

On the electronic side of computing, I had one of those "You know your getting old moments" when in the supercomputer area I saw the Cray-2 on display. I saw one of these machine from the late 80s in service when I visited the Royal Aeronautical Establishment in Farnborough. The Cray-2 introduced the twin innovations of total liquid immersion cooling and a huge memory. Used for the first effective computational fluid dynamics these systems helped evolve aeronautical wing and hull designs. I had the privilege of working on high performance Cray machine during the 90's but few of those machines had the charisma of the early Cray-1 & Cray-2 on display here.

Further on round the exhibits the smaller machines dominate with personal computer, games consoles, mobile computing and internet related items.

Overall a great place to spend a few hours immersed in the stream of innovations that comprises the history of computers. When planning a visit be sure to check that you will be able to see a demo of the Babbage difference engine for a truly inspirational sight.

See also Cray-History.net

On the beaten track

After a week long project meeting, last week I had a day off in San Francisco The weather was warm and dry so there was no excuse for not using the day to the best advantage. For me that was hiring a mountain bike and heading for the hills above the Golden Gate bridge. This area is hilly with a big H but offers fabulous views and stunning outdoor locations to explore.

Strangely some of the trails on the map that look to be suitable for off road mountain biking are marked on local signs as not for bikes. These trails start out as suitable but change to steep, narrow paths only really useful for hikers. I went from the hire shop on Columbus Av. down to Fisherman's wharf, past the bay side marinas then up to the Golden Gate bridge. After the bridge crossing, currently restricted by repair work to a crowded two way bike and people path on the west side, I turned left and climbed the steep hill road to the costal artillery battery emplacements. Beyond there past Rodeo beach the real country hills begin. After nearly getting stuck on Wolf ridge, I headed toward to Sulsalito and then along the ridge back toward the bridge and city beyond. It was only 29 miles but certainly some of the most satisfying off road riding to be found.

There is lots of information on the net about mountain biking in Marin county and reasonable quality bikes can be reserved and hired from Blazing Saddles in Columbus Ave. If you intend to go off road be sure to get a proper Marin bike rather than just one of the regular tourist hack bikes also available from this and other nearby shops.

The Triumphs of Big Ben

The Triumphs Of Big Ben by John Darwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting book on the back history of Big Ben the world famous clock and bell in London. Goes into the original troubled build and the serious failure in 1976 that nearly destroyed the clock.

Clocks mark off and record passing time and fascinate in way unlike any other mechaincal device. This is the story of the big clock that has been at the heart of the British establishment for over 150 years.

Reading this book gives some insight into what makes Britain tick. (pun intended) The book shows that despite troublesome committees and contention between vested interests we still have the determination to get something great done.

View all my reviews

For a short potted history of BigBen online see this link.

If you want a copy of your own check out the Advanced book exchange.

Virtual Fitness challenge 2012

I have a fitness challenge for the year that is to cycle&row a virtual track from Bideford, Devon to Eiffel Tower in Paris. It's 500 miles of road and 23 miles of sea and the target it to get there before birthday in June. To track the endeavour I have a wall chart printed out A3 with a bike ikon sprite to track progress. Sample to the left.

The driving instruction have a cumulative mile count that makes tracking easy. To make progress any time I am out on road or mountain bike I use Runtastic application to collect the miles.

Going well so far with 57 miles chalked up this month.

The chart was built using directions from Google maps and In-Design to compose.

o2 new year network fail

Most annoying noise while on holiday ?

Take a moment out of your busy day to picture yourself on holiday. Think relaxing in the sun and snoozing by the pool as the world goes by. Which of the following noises would most disturb that calm tranquility ?
* Next door badly maintained gate opener clanking and screeching.
* Thuba, Thuba bass from a passing car,
* Distant car alarm,
* Truck reversing bleepers,
* Ambulance, police, fire truck siren,
* Very large truck with broken baffles exhaust note ( and burnt derv smell wafting through the palms )
* Kids electric truck with hollow plastic wheels rolling round on gravel scattered tarmac driveway,
* Tyre screening round a corner or from roundabout Grand-prix,
* V8 pickup truck doing domestic shopping,
* Small 2-stroke scooter being over revved going up and down road,
* Salvation army xmas collection bell tinkling from when supermarket opened and going non-stop the entire day from 1 Dec..30 Dec,
* Late night party (to which your not invited) including yelling, bad singing to 60s Disco hits from a knackered boom box,

No wonder it took a little longer to relax and chill out on recent holiday. Next time will take a bit more time to choose a villa that is more than 200 yards from nearest road and habitation.

Gannett

Best PC tools for Processor and Disk space usage

If you ever get the feeling that your PC is working for some one else ? or that HDD space has disappeared without a trace for no understood reason ? Take control with these utilities.

ProcessExplorer takes over when the [ctrl] [alt] [del] task manager leaves off. Process Explorers originally from Sysinternals provides graphical details of what's happening inside your machine. Its free, lightweight and will provide clear insight as to which processes are eating your machine. Each of the graphs provides a rollover tooltip with the process name causing the peek. This graph shows the cpu consumption of a screensaver recently deployed across our organisation. The large drop in cpu usage is when the user logged back in. Having Flash based screen savers such as shown here is a really bad idea; power consumption goes up and all those idle time processes become work time activities.



For C: and other disk drive space; find out what is eating your HDD is made clear by WinDirStat. Originally this drive visulisation tool was created on Linux but this free port delivers a reliable way to find what is eating your hard drive. The interactive bump map shows by size when the large files can be found. Hovering the cursor over a bump will reveal the file path and clicking will show the files place in the file directory hierarchy. Each of the squares of the bump map represents a directory contents.

In this example a data loss prevention utility decided to copy all data sent external hard drive to a location in /WINDOWS/vendor/software name/temp directory location.


Take ownership of your own PC know what happening inside with these useful free system visualisation tools. Other tools available for interior PC examination can be found on this link.