Cambridge opportunities · 12 hours ago by Michael Dales
As most of you know, I work for a small startup called Camvine, where we’re having a lot of fun. We’re trying to expand our little team, and I thought it might be worth mentioning here.
Currently we’re looking for very good technical and sales/marketing/business dev types. Specifically, we’re looking for at least one tech and one s/m/bd type person right now – so if you are one or know anyone then do get in touch!
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The Science of Why? · 4 days ago by Michael Dales
A few weeks ago Laura blogged about Duncan Lockerby’s song the Science of Why, which is an excellent example of pop and science crossing over, and you can hear it here.
Now Null Hypothesis, a website looking at unusual science, have wised up to it – here’s to the continued success of Duncan’s pop career! :)
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Playing with Kings · 6 days ago by Michael Dales
Fiddling in Aperture with a picture of King’s College Chapel I took this evening:
Toormakeady waterfall · 6 days ago by Michael Dales
A waterfall in the People’s Millennium Forest, just outside Toormakeady.
Another clichéd shot I fear :)
A sign of Ireland · 8 days ago by Michael Dales
One of the things I liked about Ireland was their road signs – they had a somewhat ad hoc feel to them, indicative of a more relaxed out look on these things. I captured a small selection below:
Some need a bit of pondering – bottom left presumably indicates a tree in winter ahead, bottom right is a workman sat on wall. Top right, well, answers on a postcard… ;)
The best one though was spotted by Laura. We’d love to have helped by pushing porsches into the water to keep the slipway clear, but there were none around at the time (presumably they’re already in the water).
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CamVine Wildlife · 9 days ago by Michael Dales
For a while now we’ve had three frogs in the CamVine pond. Usually we just hear them splash into the pond as we head for coffee in the house, but if you know what you’re looking for you can see them hiding in the mud. More recently we spotted a common newt, and now we’re sure there’s at least three newts, possibly more.
All well and good, but we were taken by surprise yesterday when we spotted the new visitor to the pond – a snake!
We appear to have taken on a grass snake. This was quite exciting, in that I’ve never seen a snake in the “wild” before. Alas it’s probably less good news for the other residents of the pond, as they seem to be what grass snakes eat, and grass snakes are protected species and the others aren’t.
I’m just wondering if it’s any good at coding in python… ;)
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Death of Bugs · 10 days ago by Michael Dales
There are many little things that people say indicates the start of summer. After an hour out on the May Day bank holiday, this seemed to confirm it to me:
For those that haven’t found this trick yet – the solution is to lay damp kitchen towel on your visor for 5 minutes, then it cleans up quite easy. The trials of motorcycling… ;)
Freedom · 11 days ago by Michael Dales
I liked this picture a lot:
Taken on Mallarany beach, north of Clew Bay, Ireland.
Ireland · 11 days ago by Michael Dales
Laura and I have just been to Ireland for a week – specifically to areas around the south end of County Mayo and Galway. It was a beautiful place, and quite nice to get away.
Ireland was an interesting place to visit. It reminds me both of central France and California in places – I think it’s the fact that all three places have more rawness to them than the UK – the UK population density is so high that there’s not really anywhere where you get any sense of wilderness or humans only starting to make an imprint. The areas we visited, which are the least populated as they suffered the worst due to the famine in the 1800s, still had that feel. Even the road signs had a sort of ad-hoc feel to them, which I can see might be frustrating after a while, but had some charm to it.
Anyway, I can heartily recommend the areas around Westport and Connemara. Great landscapes, great food, and (as we discovered when our car needed jumpstarting…) great people. I’ll blog some more about it later, but for now you can see the pictures from the trip.
War On Terror: The Boardgame! · 25 days ago by Michael Dales
On Saturday I was attending the Salute gaming convention in London, which is an opportunity to see the vast array of games available over the world, from card games, to board games, to full on live action role play – though it has to be said that some of the StormTroopers we spotted seemed to have had more pies than the ones in the original Star Wars films…
In amoungst the usual array of table top wargames and boardgames based on just about any sci-fi franchise you care to mention, one game stood out as having a spark of originality, looked enormous fun to play, and seemed to have more than a drop of wit about it: War On Terror: The Boardgame!
Players take part as one of the many modern empires, and their aim is simply to liberate the people of the world, most notably the ones with oil reserves. Clearly there’s some level of trying to be mighty in this, but there’s all the top level tactics you’d expect with such a benevolent aim of securing world peace – such as funding gorilla fighters in those pesky troublesome regions. But beware, these fighters might come back at you, and then you’d perhaps have to call them terrorists…
Clearly the game’s makers are reveling in the bad publicity that their game has received, but it’s hard to see a better game for the modern age – clearly Monopoly is no good in these times of economic strife. And did Monopoly come with a balaclava with the word “evil” written on it in bright red?