To get to the jump park involves riding down from the top lift on a series of berms. It’s a fun little ride down, although Jon did manage to come a cropper on it. You may notice me pause on the track before dropping down into a berm. Apparently that’s where Jon got himself a concussion!
The second of the helmet cam movies is mostly a view of my hands working the paddle as I try to follow the orders of our river guide Manu.
The mtb-thrashers are now back from their trip to Les Gets, a village in the French Alps renowned for mountain biking. You can find all Jon’s quality photos at mtb-thrashers.com, but as well as that good stuff, I managed to get some helmet-cam footage. It’s hard work getting the camera pointing in the right direction, so to be honest there was a lot of wasted footage. However, I reckon I managed to pull together some almost watchable segments. But I’ll let you decide…
First of all, on a day of rafting we had to climb up a large rock and jump into the rapids. I did this wearing a helmet cam which hopefully captures a feel of the event.
My wee bro Antony married his very-long-term girlfriend Jenny on 7th October 2006. I didn’t take many photos of the event, but here I present some of the better ones.
Andy runs a small business called “Andrew Fereday Gardening Excellence” based in Halifax. He provides a bespoke maintenance service, specialising in perennials and flowering shrubs, many of which can be hard work to look after well. It’s a field that he takes very seriously and I can certainly recommend his skills. The business is beginning to bloom (sorry … couldn’t help it) and as a birthday present this year I thought I would buy a domain and set up a small site that would give him an online presence and make it easy to put up contact details, news and example photos from gardens that he works on.
For the moment the site is only just being set up, so you can expect quite a few changes in the near future. But hopefully it will eventually become useful as an online face of Andy’s business.
Dom’s one of my earliest friends, if not the first. Well … our mothers were pregnant at the same time, working in the libray in Hull. On June 15th 2007 Dom got himself hitched to Isabel in Albacete, Spain. Leanne and I made our way over there and made a week of it, staying in Alicante for a couple of days before travelling to Albacete. It was a wonderful wedding, enjoyed by all and somehow we managed to make it all the way through to 5:30 in the morning, at which point Dom was dumped in the fountain in the hotel courtyard. Actually he was allowed to take off his trousers first, which I think was quite generous.
Last week, Andy came down in order to pay a visit to the Chelsea flower show. He’s a member of the RHS, so we were able to head down on the Wednesday, which is one of the RHS-only days. We were hoping that it might be slightly less crowded than the general public days, but it was pretty packed full of folks. Given a bit of patience around the edges of the gardens it was still possible to get some decent positions for taking photos of the displays.
Read on to view the gallery…
The financial industry does seem to be loath to share the fruits of their efforts. There doesn’t seem to be a lot around. And certainly not much that is regularly updated. Maybe everyone is worried about sharing trade secrets, but the rules for calculations are well established and I’m guessing that everyone must be writing their own implementations or buying in over-priced modules.
As a developer of financial systems, I’m constantly disappointed by how difficult it is to perform precise decimal arithmetic in Java. It’s fairly common knowledge that the use of double is not much use for financial calculations. As a quick example, take a look at the following piece of code.
public static void main(String arg[]) {
BigDecimal bd = new BigDecimal("58.99").add(new BigDecimal("0.99"));
System.out.println("BigDecimal result: " + bd);
double d = 58.99 + 0.99;
System.out.println("Double result: " + d);
}You would have thought both results should be the same. However, you end up with:
BigDecimal result: 59.98
Double result: 59.980000000000004The following image shows what I have just been listening to, as determined by last.fm. Hopefully it’s not showing anything too embarrassing.
I already mentioned my foray into MySpace in search of new music to listen to. As a result of that I ended up setting myself up on last.fm. This is another social networking site oriented around the music you listen to. To get anything out of it, you will need to install their client software. This is a little app that checks what you are listening to in iTunes and uploads your playlist to the site. Based on this, it will provide statistics about your musical taste and let you know who your neighbours are each week, based on how similar their tastes are to your own. They also provide handy little things like generating images periodically that you can put on other sites, showing what you have just been listening to. You may not actually want to share such information, and from what I can gather, users do become rather careful about what they listen to, in order that they look as cool as possible. All those tunes that you are embarassed about liking get published out for all the world to see.