I was in London, staying near Trafalgar Square recently. I took a walk down to the river thames and took this picture from the middle of the Golden Jubilee Bridge. The London Eye is on the left and St Stephens Tower (Big Ben) is on the right.

I had a great time learning the joys of kayaking with Derek Hairon of Jersey Kayak Adventures . For five mornings in August a small band of us explored the coast of Jersey, learning essential skills in the use of these fabulous craft. I enjoyed my time so much I have signed up to the closed cockpit course to follow. I am told that I can expect to get a lot wetter on this one !

Earlier this morning, I upgraded both my iPod Touch and iPhone to OS 3.

I then had a panic, when I discovered that my purchased applications had all disappeared. I re-synced, a few times, but no joy, so I went off for lunch to drown my sorrows, with Thai Chicken Curry.

When I got back, I discovered all my apps were indeed back on my phone, the issue seems to be that now there are more built in apps, my other apps get bumped off onto other pages, so they were there all the time, but I was not paying attention to the little dot indicators at the bottom of the user interface telling me that I had more pages to scroll to.

You will see by the attached collection of screen grabs from my iPhone, what I mean.

So if you think you have lost all your apps, like silly old me, take a second glance, then start to rearrange them as you like. To move an app, you press and hold them then drag, or use the little x to delete them.

My son says that when you press and hold, the apps shake with fear because they may be deleted.

Well hope this helps some other suckers.

Yesterday, I attended the London Ruby Users Group evening meeting at The Old Session House in Clerkenwell Green. A talk by Patric Sinclair got my attention. The talk was about the concept of Linked Data. I remembered watching a TED Talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the subject some time ago.

I find the whole concept about linked data fascinating. The ability to present data in a more “Machine Readable” form in the format of RDF is truly powerful.

There is a saying that says “knowledge is power”, linked data give more power to the knowledge, allowing analysis of data across diverse data sources.

I was passing thru Gatwick Airport earlier today, about to get on the train to Victoria, when an announcer came on the tanoy with the following request. “Would a Station Porter please report to the Porters Station on the Station Concourse”. What a mouthful, all those “stations”. Surly there would be a shorter way to request a porter.

Snapped this amazing natural site or the sun setting beneath the horizon at St Ouens Bay, Jersey at about 9:15pm yesterday while driving home from picking up my son from Scouts.

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It has been many many years since I have walked around the nature reserve at Les Mielle, Jersey. The place was a rubbish dump up until the 1970’s. I worked with the conservation volunteers while I was at 6th form, in the early 1980’s, and have not thought much about the place since.

The network of paths has been really well maintained. As I wondered around I saw a lot of rabbits diving for cover as they sensed my foot steps. There was lots of bird life, for some reason Magpies all over the place, no chance of one for sorrow, two for joy e.t.c, as I gave up counting at 20. It is really tranquil sitting in the evening sun listening to bird song.

I hardly saw another sole as I wondered around the paths, just one couple walking their dogs, and a chap in a shiny new green landrover.

Walking in nature is such a revitalizing activity. It really seems to recharge the batteries, both emotionally and physically. It would be a good place to come and meditate so long as one could tuck themselves out of the way so as not to be disturbed by other walkers.

I have always been concerned about just using a username / password combination for access to online resources.

Ok, I use a strong password generator, to create stupidly ugly passwords that I them have to commit to memory. This works well, in most cases, but sometimes I need a little help remembering them, which means my password need to be stored in some kind of key chain, more of less safe. The issue then comes when you want access to a financial side, and want just that extra level of protection.

Well in steps good old “two factor authentication”. This used to mean carrying round a separate “authenticator”. Well it seems VeriSign have come to the rescue and launched some authentication software for mobile phones. I have installed the iPhone version from the Apple App Store, and set it up with both PayPal and eBay. Now every time I send a payment from PayPal, I need to load up the application on my Phone and enter the magic number it gives me, after I enter my usual username and password.

This gives me a feeling of comfort, knowing there is that extra level of protection baked in. One hopes that these devices can be opened up to a larger number of organisations. The current list is somewhat small and includes mainly US based financial institutions.

I was just listening to the latest Greenpeace UK Podcast . They have recently purchased a plot of land within the proposed site of the new third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Many people believe that this runway is just expansion for expansions sake. Owning a piece of land and signing up people to be “Beneficial Owners” of that land will help in the process of highlighting the issues that face us and hopefully sway opinion toward the cancellation of the 3rd Runway.

You can help by signing up at the Airplot Website

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I have just watched a video presentation about an up coming product from Google, named Google Wave. This looks to be an amazing piece of technology. It is amazing how the way a browser becomes the application environment. As time goes by, we become more and more cloud dwellers as our digital lives leave the confines of our desktop and laptop computers.

For me “cloud computing” as it is called, had revolutionised the way I work. With my servers in scattered data centres, I can pretty much work from any “net-connected” location. Ok some places still have pretty shitty connection speeds, but for the most part this can be dealt with for a short time, so long as the machine up in the cloud is on a decent connection things work fine for the most part.