Night O is the deviant branch of standard orienteering. Tonight it involved navigating around Hampstead Heath in the dark and the pouring rain with nothing but a headtorch and a compass. Now, I’ve been orienteering since I was a teenager and I love it but until tonight I’d never done a night event. Navigation skills are really put to the test since you can’t see more than 5-20 metres away (depending on the power of your headgear … more on that later!). Techniques that normal orienteers use sparingly in daylight become essential in the dark – pacing, use of handrails and catching features for example. Read the rest of this entry »
Last September we went on a beach holiday to the Turkish village of Çiralı. Before going I’d had a quick Google to see if I could get into the nearby mountains easily and Mt Tahtali (Tahtalı Dag or Mt Olympos) seemed the best option. Found in the Bey Mountains in the western branch of the Taurus (Toros) Mountains, it rises to 2366m from the coast 9km away and rather handily, a new cable car had opened up in 2007 allowing access to the top. For several days I’d been able to see the mountain from the beach and it had to be conquered! Read the rest of this entry »
I saw a friend had a tag cloud on his web page of all his 2009 Facebook status updates. So, here’s mine. First, you need to get your word list. Go to this Facebook app and get the data, then strip out the date/time column in your spreadsheet program (I used OpenOffice) and finally paste the remaining word column into the Wordle app.
I just found this rather brilliant mapping portal for Ireland. There’s nothing quite like this for the UK as far as I know – that shows all UK Ordnance Survey data layers in a viewer with historic mapping, orthophotos and links to buy maps. Is there?
It’s a rare gem this cafe, really tasty light snacks at this really tiny cafe in a corner of a city farm. Sylvia had a bowl of pasta and I had gnocchi with pumpkin sauce, wild mushrooms and goats cheese. They serve a really nice cup of coffee and homemade cakes. Perfect with kiddies.
