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The snow today inspired a lovely circular walk. Three hours, three pubs. Here’s the plan. Because it’s circular you can start or finish anywhere.
1. Start in Flackwell Heath at the roundabout near the Parade.
2. Walk South down Chapel Road, then continue down the footpath towards Sheepridge Lane.
3. Cross Sheepridge Lane and follow the footpath towards Little Marlow Cemetery.
4. Walk along A4155 towards Little Marlow.
5. Drink a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord in the King’s Head.
6. Continue South down Church Road
7. Turn left and follow footpath around the Spade Oak lake to the Spade Oak pub. If so moved pop into the pub for a nice Chenin blanc or pint of Staropramen.
8. Take the Thames Path to Bourne End
9. If so moved, pop into the Community Centre in Wakeman Road.
10 Head east along A4155 Cores End Road, then take footpath along old railway line towards Wooburn Town
11. At egress onto A4094 head to NE corner of Wooburn Manor Park (via Old Bell pub if so moved)
12. Take diagonal path through Farm Wood to Bergher’s Hill, then road to Wooburn Common and the admirable Royal Standard pub.
13. Drink a pint of Deuchars. This is obligatory.
14. Take the footpath to Wooburn Green,
15. Walk along A4094 towards Loudwater.
16. At junction wtih Revel Road take footpath left onto Flackwell Heath Golf Course.
17. Follow footpath parallel to A4094 then take left right-of-way to clubhouse.
18. On exit from Golf Club go left up Treadaway Road, then Common Road & Straight Bit back to roundabout.
Finished the walk last Sunday – with the only significant rain during what turned out to be a splendid walk.
Some honours:
- Pub of the Week – the Sportsman, Amberley
- Poshest B&B of the Week – DownsView in Upper Beeding
- Beer of the Week – Harveys
- Views of the Week – Amberley to U Beeding via Washington
- Dinner of the Week – close winner was duckling (the Bluebell, Cocking): honours to burger (White Horse, Ditchling) plaice (Abergavenny Arms, Rodmell), and to the King’s Head, Lewes
- Smallest Accommodation of the Week – White Horse, Ditchling
- Worst Pub of the Week – the Plough, Pyecombe
South Downs Way trip starts tomorrow. Here’s the itinerary…
- Monday – S Harting to Cocking
- Tuesday – Cocking to Amberley
- Wednesday – Amberley to U Beeding
- Thursday – U Beeding to Ditchling
- Friday – Ditchling to Rodmell
- Saturday – Rodmell to Alfriston (or stay in Lewes)
- Sunday – Alfriston to Eastbourne via coast
Can’t wait!
In October 2010 I (finally) took delivery of my new desktop PC from Mesh computers.
It took longer than anticipated as they were waiting for a new AMD Phenom™ II X6 1100T Processor six-core processor . This didn’t surprise my as the CPU was highly regarded, offering an excellent price/performance sweet spot, so demand was likely to outstrip supply. Furthermore, I’d added an internal multi-card reader to the spec.
Earlier this year, the multi-card reader failed. Actually, it broke: the circuit board with connectors for SD cards had come adrift with the result that cards disappeared into the device instead of connecting. I had to dismantle the unit retrieve the card, before phoning the service department at Mesh.
They advised me to send the card reader back, which was going to incur shipping charges. Instead I bought a new one – the identical model – which cost around half what Mesh wanted to charge me for collection. Delivery included.
In April, the PC died altogether. Wouldn’t even run through power-on-self-test. I duly returned it to Mesh, at a cost of £42.
After four weeks, mid-May, alarm bells were ringing. They had changed the motherboard but were waiting for a new processor. Delivery was imminent, they said.
On May 31 Mesh Computers went into administration. I didn’t find out until I got back from holiday on 13 June. The goodwill of Mesh was bought-up by a company called PC Peripherals Limited. The assets and liabilities remain in the hands of administrators.
A phone call to the Federation of Small Businesses legal advice helpline confirmed what the approach should be. The PC is mine – it’s not an asset of Mesh. I should contact the administrators and ask for it to be returned.
A phone call and two emails later, we’re told that PC Peripherals will honour existing warranties. Like many others, I’m waiting for a response as to when it will be repaired or returned.
Note: A Facebook group has been set up to support and advise customers of the late Mesh Computers: Mesh Computer Complaints
I’ve been meaning to write about text editors for a while. Notepad was never good enough for my needs, especially HTML and XML coding, and it’s proabably my #1 software requirement.
Over the years, I’ve tried nearly all of them. For a long time PSPad was my first choice, but others have left it behind. Most notably…
- Notetab (not bad, but you need the Pro version to get the best features)
- PSPad (great but hasn’t been updated since 2009 – unstable on my Vista and Win7 machines)
- Notepad++ (excellent)
- Codelobster (I liked the name)
- Komodo (too tied-in to the IDE)
I’ve finally found one even better than Notepad++, at least for my requirements: RJ TextEd.
In particular I like the tabbed interface. I like the code highlighting, folding and code explorer view. The XML/HTML syntax highlighting is great and I like being able to jump quickly between opening and closing tags.
Among the other great features is the search/replace. Like Notepad++ you can search/replace in files and, better, there’s multi-line search as well as regex. HTML snippets, file compare and code beautifiers are all there as standard, unlike the third-party plug-ins needed for Notepad++.
Oh and it handles UTF-8 code – a must-have for our work.
A week after installing RJ TextEd, I’m still finding new things to love about it. And still there’s nothing to dislike.
What is Hellotxt?
Hellotxt is your personal social networker…a Social Dashboard for your life online. Our free service, accessible via web, WAP, and smartphone apps, is designed to help a user communicate easily with their contacts, whichever networks they are on, and in both inbound and outbound communication. Our tool also makes it easy to engage and have more fun with the media you post to web 2.0 services. Hellotxt works with the world’s most popular social networking and web 2.0 sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress. Hellotxt was launched in 2007, and is currently a part of the new business line of mobile entertainment leader Buongiorno SpA. For more information on the company and philosophy, visit the About Us page.
Weight loss continues, albeit less quickly. Nevertheless I’m now 34lb lighter than October.
Determined to ignore my age, I’m now (more or less) committed to walking the South Downs Way in September. Is it a (vain?) attempt to regain my Sussex youth? Probably. But, even at 55 – as I will be then – it surely can’t be that difficult: 73 miles over 5 days. It’ll be nice walking Chanctonbury Ring, Ditchling and Firle Beacons as I did 40 years go,
And I have a trip to Yorkshire in April to gain some walking confidence. Hopefully I shall climb Pen-Y-Gent, even though everyone says “Good luck with that”. I fear I’m on my own with that one.
I’ll keep blogging and tweeting, so watch this space!!
I’m trialling Twitter Tools and experiencing a few problems. Maybe changing from JQuery to Prototype will help?
I’ve recently been commissioned to build a Blog for a client, and this blog itself was the main test-bed to try out all sorts of extensions. You can see the results for yourself, here on the Neesham PR blog.
We’ve used WordPress before, as a CMS, for example on the Racing Bug website. Never mind the design (the client had very fixed ideas on the look-and-feel), but WordPress allowed us to build-in a lot of features like video, image galleries and scrollers; significantly faster than creating static Web pages from scratch.
For Neesham Public Relations, the blog is part of a strategy to build communities of clients, journalists and like-minded people via social media.
Now, we’re extending from blogs out to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. All the elements are there. It’s just a case of figuring out the best (of many) ways to do join them together.
I’ll let you know how we get on.
See if this works – should tweet when I post
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