Status-Q

Sometimes I really think I ought to move to Sweden.

My statistic for the day comes from this week’s Economist:

An average day for a UPS driver in America involves 150 destinations

Arrrh! How many of you landlubbers knew that it was International Talk Like A Pirate Day, then?

Of course, I learned everything I needed to know about pirates from Captain Pugwash, a wonderful children’s TV series written and drawn by my (distant) cousin, John Ryan. If you were unlucky enough to have missed it your youth in the 50s, 60s, or early 70s, you can enjoy it again today through the magic of YouTube…

I have a couple of the original drawings used in the Pugwash series at home somewhere. They were a bit like a pop-up book – the movement of the characters’ arms etc was done by moving cardboard tabs which emerged at the side of the drawing, and it was an unusual technique when first done because it was filmed ‘live’ rather than using stop-frame animation. I must get them framed…

More about John Ryan on Wikipedia.

I’d like to apologise to regular readers for the slightly lower rate of posting here recently. I’m in the middle of raising an angel funding round for my new startup and, as anyone who’s tried this before will know, it can be quite time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time!

But never fear, Status-Q is alive and well, even if the status of Q is ‘a little more frazzled than usual’!

Oh, and if you might be interested in investing in the latest exciting new Cambridge venture then do let me know. 🙂 Things are going well, but we may still have a slot or two open…

Watch this space…

I’ve just been flying around the English Lake District.

Not in reality, sadly, but using a cool new flight simulator which is hidden in the latest version of Google Earth. It leaves something to be desired in terms of the realism of the flight controls, but it’s not bad, and I don’t know of any others that will let me fly over Catbells, across Derwent Water and up over Ashness Bridge.

I crashed somewhere near Watendlath. Mind you, if you have to come to a sticky end, I can’t think of a nicer place to do it…

David Hopkin sent me this rather nice picture:

It originally comes, apparently, from Worth1000.com, a site which I found appallingly difficult to navigate but which has large numbers of examples of what you can do with Photoshop. They’re of rather varied quality, but many are rather fun.

This is just the sort of thing at which the web excels: ParkAtMyHouse.com. If you have a parking space available near a station, airport, or other public venue, you can advertise it here, and if you’re looking for one, this makes it easy to find.

Neat.

Fun today at BarCamb. For those not familiar with the Bar Camp model, it has nothing to do with mixing drinks. Usually. It’s basically a conference where you turn up prepared to give a talk but where the agenda is unknown until you arrive. The first activity of the day is that everybody who wants to then signs up for what they’re going to talk about.

It was a one-day event on a much smaller scale than Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, which I was lucky enough to go to a couple of years back. But it was good fun and I’m looking forward to the next one.