April 26, 2005
PR, blogs and Lisp hackers
Paul Graham has posted a new essay at his site. He discusses PR companies, and how good they are, and also has a fair bit to say about blogs. It is interesting reading, as always.
It is also interesting to see that he picked suits as one of his examples, given the work that Hugh Macleod and Tom Mahon are doing on their blogs, to promote Savile Row. These guys seem to be having some success in selling Savile Row tailoring, using blogs and a clever PR guy in New York. I have to say that I am tempted, though, for me it would be a waste, as I rarely wear suits.
Posted by JohnC at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
Hikers in the mist
I ache, but I am smiling. Over the weekend I took up a new sport, geocaching. Geocaching is a type of high-tech. treasure hunt. People hide a small box, containing trinkets and a log book, somewhere, and publish the GPS coordinates of its location on the geocaching website. Other people, like me and my friends, then go looking for it.
I went geocaching with three friends: Al, Jim and Min. Al was our party leader for the day. He is the most experienced hill walker, of the group, and also the guy who got us all into the sport. He planned our trip and advised us of what we needed: waterproof boots, good socks, a good waterproof coat, gaiters, and probably waterproof leggings.
We were glad we had all that stuff on the day is the weather was a bit damp. We went looking for two caches. The first was at the top of Luggala, a hill whose peak is just under 600m above sea level. The walk from the carpark was an easy one, over boggy terrain. We found the first cache but unfortunately we didn't get the great view of Lough Tay, that we would have on a fine day. Mist and rain saw to that. Jim, who found the cache, signed the log book, while the rest of us started our lunch.
The low visibility meant that we had to use either GPS units or map and compass to stop ourselves getting lost. This was the highlight of the day for me. Al taught me how to navigate properly using a map and compass, and set me the task of getting us to the second cache - the one on top of Knocknacloghoge. He was such a good teacher that I managed to find the trail down to the valley towards our second hill. Not an easy thing in a mist.
The bottom of the valley held the only real surprise of the day, a rain swollen Cloghoge Brook. Al, who had intended wading through it anyway for the practice, got all the practice he wanted assisting us newbies across. Nobody fell in, and two of us even kept our feet dry.
The trip up the hill nearly killed me. Bonny heather? Ptah! Bloody knackering heather, more like. A trek of 850m, climbing 234m, with heather forcing us to really pick up our feet. I found out just how unfit I was, then.
At the top we found the second cache, had a bite to eat, and rested.
I got us slightly lost on the way back to the car. While trying to follow a spur, I drifted south by 200m into boggy ground. Al soon corrected that, and after about 1km of walking we were back on the road, and shortly after that, back at the car. It was tiring but heaps of fun, and something I will hopefully be doing over the summer. As a means of getting fit, it sure beats a treadmill.
Posted by JohnC at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
"The time has come, " the Walrus said, "To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships -and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings"
Well, I have started a new blog. I had a blog before at LiveJournal, but I wanted a few extra features, like trackbacks and a place to upload my own pictures. Add to that, the desire to have access to the nuts and bolts, like stylesheets, and hey presto, here we are.
I have a few objectives for my new blog. By writing here, I hope to learn how to write well. That is, I hope to learn how to write clearly and concisely, and be interesting at the same time. I also hope that this blog, and in general the whole website, will become a good professional advertisement for me - something that says, "Yup. That guy is a decent programmer."
I am not sure what topics I will be covering. I will make a guess and say it will be rather diverse. Maybe not as diverse as the range covered in the quote, at the start of this entry, but pretty eclectic. Shoes are almost a certainty to be covered. The software industry is a certainty too.
Speaking of the quote, it comes from Lewis Carroll's, Through the Looking Glass. The title of the blog is also derived from that book. In the book, Alice goes running with the Red Queen, but they don't seem to make any progress. Alice remarks on this, saying, "Well in our country, you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing. The Red Queen replies, "A slow sort of country. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place." The Red Queen Effect is quite applicable to the software industry, and as I probably will be talking quite a bit about the software industry, I thought it would be a good name for a blog.
Posted by JohnC at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)