Author Archive

Oak Orienteering

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

SOC held a local event at Knightwood Oak (just west of Lyndhurst) today and we went along with my in-laws. The area has some nice runnable patches but unfortunately last night’s rain made other parts hard going. I’m sure the Forestry Commission volunteers who were removing conifers in the open patch near control 206 had a good laugh as one orienteer after another disappeared up to their waist in one of the ditches!
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Current Cost

Friday, January 16th, 2009

I decided to make a belated entry to the Current Cost meter craze (in Hursley) when some were being sold off at half price before Christmas. (For those not in the know, the device measure electricity usage for the entire home with the important addition of a serial output port.) I started off with Dale Lane’s GUI app at which point I was disappointed to realise that the historical data held by the device was only averaged.
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Highfield Street-O

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Tonight it was the second SOC street event of the year. This time we were starting at The Crown, Highfield, Southampton. There was a much better turnout from the club this time probably reflecting the more central location.
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Thursday night run

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Tonight was my first Tuesday night run of the week having attending the SOC club night last week. We did the Thursday Night Run backwards (apparently!). I was just glad to keep my dinner down having finished eating only half an hour before the run. I’ve got used to eating at half five these days and find it hard to wait until eight o’clock or later. I put it down as good mountain marathon training!
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Frosty Cross-Country

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

706It was the Hampshire Cross-Country Champs today which, as in recent years, was held at Dibden. The temperature was in the low single figures and, as we drove down to the event, the trees had a good frosting on them. The timing of the senior races is always a bit awkward with Christine off at 12:50 and myself 50 minutes later. This meant I was feeding Emma her lunch whilst Christine was out running and trying not to eat too much of it myself!

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WordPress upgrade

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I’ve finally had a chance to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. It’s relatively painless since I’ve switched to updating via Subversion. The only problem I hit was with text widgets. I was seeing an error along the lines of “Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 1044” which, if you Google it, currently appears at the top of a whole host of other people’s blogs. Deleting all (three) of my text widgets and recreating them seemed to fix the problem. It’s good to see that threaded comments have finally made it in to the base product. I’ve previously experimented with a couple of plugins but never turned them live for users as I’ve never been entirely happy with the way they’ve been implemented. (As a consequence though you’ll see that some historical posts already have threaded responses from me.) I have to say that, right now I’m not a big fan of the revamped admin pages but that may be just lack of familiarity…

New Year Score

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

704Happy New Year! We’re over with Christine’s family at the moment and today took the opportunity of some more local orienteering by attending NGOC’s score event at Parkend. When Christine, her Dad and I set off from home I still wasn’t quite sure whether I was going to run as my cough/cold is still lingering but, as we drove through the frost covered forest, I decided that it was simply too cold not to (the car thermometer was showing -2°C)!
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Post-Xmas Orienteering

Monday, December 29th, 2008

We spent Christmas at my parents’ this year and had a relaxing few days. The excitement of Christmas was slow to grow on Emma and she had to be enticed in to opening presents. She started to warm to it a bit after that. Thankfully our Fisher Price heliport and lift and load depot off eBay went down well (they just don’t make them like that any more) and The Tickle Book and The Bedtime Bear are now regulars on the reading list. Yesterday we headed back down to Southampton via the Southern Navigators’ event at Long Valley.
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