Balmoral wanderings

A few days ago we were at Windsor Castle, but this time it's Balmoral, which is the Queen's Scottish residence on Royal Deeside.

I notice that the area is being labelled as Aberdeenshire nowadays as well, presumably with all of the Brexit and separation debate somewhere in the mix.

We'd simpler thoughts as we strolled around the gardens and popped into the ballroom for a quick look at some of the paintings and other artefacts.

There's a stack of those chocolate boxy Landseers of Royal pets and similar, which I just don't like.

More interesting to me is the collection of Royal Christmas cards, varying from staged portraiture to a few less formal. My favourite for its oddity is the 1969 one, shown below.

But best of all is to walk more than ten minutes in any direction away from the main castle. It's guaranteed to evoke the sounds of nature with easy walks to summon up the pretty scenery.

fishing for githubs

I doubt that Trumponomics is driving a US manufacturing business boom.

Right now it all seems to be more related to technology futures, banking and probably defence in its widest sense.

Even some of that is almost hard to believe given the latest Facebook news about another 60 companies having had access to that dubious Facebook client data.

Oops.

But right now I'm intrigued by the latest move of Microsoft who, after a week of rumours, bought the Github source code management system for around $7.5bn via a share swap. Some estimates put Github's market value at closer to $2bn, so the Microsoft markup (even with its recently increased share price) is pretty steep.

It must mean Microsoft have a great idea. Something more than melding their own Visual Studio developer works with the equivalent facilities available in Github. And the idea must heavily use the collaborative capabilities inherent in Github. World domination of application development? Nerdy but an interesting attempt to play catch up.

British readers are already seasoned to the Github's dubious name.

No, it doesn't stand for anything, instead it was originally an in-joke by Torvalds Linux, who liked the connotations of the improper English expression and named his own open source Linux code management after it.

Nowadays a huge proportion of the applications developer market use it for collaborative code and document management, irrespective of the target platform. But these folk are one removed from the consumer of the services.

So it's like we can see Microsoft going overtly technical again. An implication could be that they missed the boat with something? Remember Blackbird, when they missed the Internet/HTML by trying to impose their own Object Linking and Embedding?

So we are expected to wonder what this next new thing will be?

Expect a blend of a new technical evangelism about to spin up, alongside an ongoing pac-man swallowing by ever larger fish.

Ballater duck race

We were at the Ballater duck race this afternoon. It's a little chaotic, fathoming out how the odds on the individual ducks are calculated before they start their race along the River Dee.

My duck didn't win, and the victor is pictured above crossing the line.

Eagle eyed will notice that the ducks differ in size and that some are pushed and others towed by kayaks. It makes no difference. I'm pretty sure that the odds on any duck were the same as any other.

Then, after the winner crossed the line, it was pipe and drummed back into the centre of Ballater. Unsupervised, the traffic was forced to wait as the crowds surged along the road behind the victorious yellow duck.

Coincidentally, tonight I see Ballater gets its own slot in BBC's Countryfile on the telly. It's because of the heavily Royal warranted status it has, just a few miles from the Queen's place along the road at Balmoral.

I even bought a snack from Sheridan's today. That's the firm with two royal warrants mentioned in today's TV show. And we'll be in Strachan's as soon as it's open again on Monday.

Cam (no) bridge

An overnight stop around Cambridge.

This time the Italian car's sat-nav easily beat Google Waze. It was simply a matter of where it placed the destination on the map. Unfortunately the Waze mapping placed the hotel the wrong side of some railway lines. I came but no bridge.

I suppose I could have parked on the wrong side of the tracks and walked to my venue, via an adjacent station, but the Italian car's route voiced by Stephen Fry was determined to find a straight line to the sunny garden of the pub as quickly as possible.

Ciao Ciao.

waze of connection

We were using two sat nav systems simultaneously. There was the one in the Italian car, which was based upon TomTom, but used Stephen Fry's voice. The other one was Google Waze, which is actually pretty good and has the ability to give countdowns (in feet!) to vehicles parked on the hard shoulder on motorways.

Waze uses the idea of a connected citizen protocol to provide the realtime updates and is surprisingly good, considering the current uptake of users. It's almost as if it has wider access to, say, cellphone positioning, so that a non-wazer might be providing an anonymous input to the system.

Of course, Google want to monetise the interaction. Sell adverts on the map. Pizza places, coffee shops and no doubt much more.

The challenge of a Waze map will be to keep it placid enough so that it could be used as a primary source for a driver, without distractions.

How well did it work?

Excellent except for the last few metres...

It's that last vital section to a destination when the fun kicks off.

We were aiming for somewhere behind an industrial park (not the section shown on my illustration).

The roads were a mixture of established and new. "Go left", said Stephen. "Go right," said the female voted Waze.

An argument ensued for the next few turnings, but fortunately our destination was also signposted, so good old analogue roadsigns won out for the last 800 twisty metres.

Devon Belle

Time to try out the newly-restored Devon Belle observation carriage on the Kingswear line. The line runs regular services which are steam hauled along a pretty piece of the Devon coastline. Add some sunshine and what's not to like?

The observation car runs at the end of the train, so in one direction it is the last coach and in the other direction it is coupled to the engine, in this case 7827 Lympston Manor, an ex GWR 4-6-0, in a black British Railways livery.

The journey time is around 30 minutes to the other end of the line, along the river Dart and then the pretty coastal bays leading towards Paignton. Getting into the observation car is a case of first-come, first-served, with a separate modest supplement to travel in Pullman splendour. I noticed that there was a separate Champagne bar too, sensibly closed when we made our way along the line.

Chelsea in bloom

Around Chelsea during the flower show, it's a good idea to plan routes to avoid getting stuck in traffic. That's both road traffic and simply pedestrian people traffic.

An extra and fun dimension is the extra show that takes place at the same time, in and around Sloane Square and Sloane Street. Chelsea in Bloom's theme this year has been Summer of Love, so there's Haight Ashbury corners and plenty of hippy-dippyness.

Spot the VW camper vans and the inevitable red buses as well as many floral arches suitable for posing underneath.

My favourite this time was the store right on the corner of Sloane Square. Not Peter Jones, but Rag and Bone, the store diagonally opposite,

renewal?

I was looking at that Jordan Wolfson sculpture in the Tate the other day. The one where a larger than life puppet boy gets jerked around on huge chains by mechanical cranes.

I suppose its a metaphor. Something about morality teetering on a brink. The puppet boy's soundtrack is also pretty bitter. Like it wants to break free and wreak havoc.

There's a room full of spare parts too. The forces are so great that the puppet requires regular renewal.

a brief stopover in Windsor

Like many, we took a slice out of the day to watch the wedding.

It's good when the capital city and its surrounding areas are shown off in such a good light. The wedding might be partly about hereditary privilege and establishment ritual, but it's still an excellent excuse for a good time and an opportunity to reflect upon potential change.

We've already been along to Windsor and noticed that it's almost instantly resumed its normal somewhat touristy self, across the river from the the expansive playing fields of Eton. And with all of the fine weather we spotted far more wet bobs than dry bobs.

busy with the backfill

I'm rushing about a bit at the moment, and the blog is suffering from a lack of posts.

My snapshot of a favourite view of City Hall on Thursday could illustrate a kind of speed distortion, and no, I've not manipulated the angles.

re cycle

My cycling fitness is starting to rise again after a longish period of inactivity. I've even started to look up some of the cycle friendly routes around this area, although I'm travelling again and won't really be able to do much cycling for another few weeks.

To my astonishment, the Strava stats show I am only about 250 miles behind my 'year to date' pace which I define as 4,000 miles. I'll need to look into that more carefully because it doesn't feel to me as if I've been cycling that much over the last few months.

Around here I'm using my rugged bike to begin with, until I know more about the quality of the cycle paths. At least I've had a few flybys on Strava, which has given me some access to other people's routes.

Handy to trace the way that 'proper cyclists' go, so that I can find the best routes without too many false starts. Once I've tried one of the proper routes, expect (at last!) to see a map.

IKEA köttbullar without jams

The newest IKEA in the land is now open quite close to us. We had an invitation to a preview open-day on Tuesday and late afternoon we made our way along.

I'm pretty sure that IKEA grapples with the challenges of road systems and parking, with my memories of huge delays when foolishly visiting an IKEA in Southampton at a weekend and long delays at one close to Bristol. Both times within sight of the store but unable to get in for over an hour.

I gather there's 21 of them in the UK now, so presumably the pressure on individual stores reduces, although, IKEA is still an example of destination shopping, with this one 90 minutes closer to the far west than the prior one. I think the nearest one to Penzance is in Brest.

Anyway, this one has its own slip roads and traffic lights and for these early days a series of cones to regulate traffic flow. A right turn into the site has been coned off and a way to access it from a nearby housing area has also been coned.

Our own journey was therefore easy and reminded me of the simple way to access the IKEA adjacent to Metro Centre in off-peak times. I suppose IKEA have done a soft start to the store, with a friends and family day, press day, 'locals' day and 'family card members' day all ahead of the main opening.

Sure enough, there was music and balloons as we approached, but once inside it was just like walking around in any large IKEA store. Arrows on the floor. Plenty of Billy and Kallax and the cafe just before the marketplace. A feature here, which I don't remember from other stores, was the special shortcut signage reminiscent of a tube line graphics. And there was an outdoor living area in a greenhouse. By the end there were plenty of lanes open to avoid any early rumours of excessive queueing.

So far it all seems to have worked, although there's an upcoming test when The Chiefs, the County Show, the Scouts and Guides camping weekender and the new IKEA all compete for roadspace.

I must remember to stay away from that particular stretch of road.