Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - beer

Bright Lights, Big City

2011-08-05T18:29:00+01:00

I took advantage of my proximity to the big city 45 minutes away on the train yesterday. I joined Rich and Al and the growing number of Northern refugees at the Great British Beer Festival at Earls Court. While I'm afforded free entry to most beer festivals courtesy of my CAMRA membership I only got a discount at this one. Having said that the £8 entry does grant you access to a massive beer hall with pretty much the largest range of beers I've seen for some time. It seems the money had gone somewhere as it was the first festival I've been to that has gone to the trouble of running lines and fitting proper hand-pulls to the normal festival beers.

Despite the best efforts of Lee to derail my sensible drinking strategy with the last pint of the evening I came through the whole experience is reasonably good nick. It was great to catch up with a whole bunch of people I hadn't seen for some time. I still hate travelling around London but I guess it's not so bad from time to time.

Looking back

2011-06-16T09:48:00+01:00

Looking back at last years visit by Jeff and Phil I can see the June weather was also a little changeable - I'm hoping it will improve for the weekend. Fliss' dad is currently visiting from the land down under so yesterday afternoon we wondered down to the local riverside drinking establishment to watch the first day of the May bumps. It may not be the best place to see the action, but it's the best location that serves beer :-)

I've got the next couple of days off. In theory we were going to be doing a bike pub tour today. However weather and other events seem to be conspiring to derail those plans. Still a few extra days of relaxation do feel particularly warranted even if we don't have to earn those beers with exercise.

Ale to the chief

2009-10-19T14:27:00+01:00

Had a good but slightly tiring weekend exploring some more of the pubs of Cambridge. I've made a few more discoveries that will be useful to remember for later although I missed out on the Kingston Arms which I shall have to visit next time I'm in town.

There was a lot of technology involved in the weekend with GPS enabled phones and shared maps in the Google Cloud informing us of potential places to visit culled from the Good Beer Guide. Latitude did seem to work quite well although one lesson learnt was to pay attention to the area circle around icons or you can end up chasing around a ghost position if people aren't updating via the more accurate GPS.

We also had visit from Rich and Al with Rosie and the local family in tow on Sunday which was nice. It was followed by the first Sunday lunch of the season at my parents with by brother and one of my cousins visiting as well. We enjoyed the post-meal digestion while watching the penultimate F1 race where Button claimed his crown. I've fallen out of favour with F1 over the last few years as it turned from exciting motor sport to a procession of cars with very little overtaking. However yesterdays race was exciting to watch and I think benefits from the uninterrupted coverage the BBC can give it. While I doubt I'll be going out of my way to watch every race it's certainly up in the rankings for those lazy Sunday afternoons.

Putting on my drinking trousers

2009-10-16T13:22:00+01:00

The drinking posse will be in town this weekend for Matt U's birthday celebrations. As the geek quotient is high I'm taking the opportunity to immerse myself in the magic Google juice that my new phone makes available. I've pondered the danger of getting too tied to Google before but I'm getting more relaxed about it as I go on. I'm now signed up Latitude so the orbiting mind control satellites will always be able to find me, and more importantly so will Fliss. The privacy controls are actually fairly solid and I'm not about to start publishing a public location badge. If I really want to go off the grid I'm going to have to turn off the phone anyway (and change car, go completely cash based and only ever access the 'net via Tor), it's a good job I'm not likely to ever be on the run from the state.

My address book has gone from my Palm through various phones I've owned to the "cloud". Luckily Google are pretty good about making it easy to export backup copies. As more of my documents are stored in the cloud (sans any important data like passwords and identity details) I thought it was about time I backed them up. I found a nice little python app that I can run on a regular basis to stay synced.

I shall probably be posing more about the phone later. However I've just upgraded to the latest firmware (sadly not yet the donut release) and as a result have to spend some time configuring the phone more sensibly. However I can generally report it's a lovely little phone and a very diverse platform.