Our Standard Poodles enjoy their 15 minutes of fame

Morgan and Bree, our two Standard Poodles, along with my wife Wendy and I feature in a Rugby World Cup-related article and photograph on the second page of Wellington's main newspaper the Dominion Post on Saturday, 17 September 2011. The dogs had All Blacks and England team logos applied to their fur when they were groomed on Friday.

Morgan does actually watch the television, although he tends to prefer watching quadrupeds rather than bipeds, and Bree is obsessed by balls.

Countdown to startup of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer-long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France just outside Geneva, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September, and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C.

On 30 June 2008 The Guardian published a number of articles about the LHC and what it is hoped to discover. (See previous post.)

On 2 July 2008 Scientific American carried an article about what five physics Nobel prize winners thought about the LHC.

On 31 July 2008 The Economist ran an article, noting the LHC's US$10 billion cost.

On 1 August 2008 The Boston Globe had a story with a magnificent set of 27 photographs from CERN of the equipment that makes up the LHC.

By way of comparison, the London Underground's Circle line is 22.5 kilometers long.

Spectacular photos of unusual clouds

A 7 April 2007 post on the Thrilling Wonder blog has some spectacular photos of cloud formations, including lenticular clouds and the rare mammatus.

A flight across Canada and back in an old C172

While hunting for information comparing the energy efficiency of the different transport modes, I came across the homepages of a Canadian, James Strickland. He has a wonderful collection of photographs and a detailed description of flying his 1962 GPS-equipped Cessna 172 aircraft from Victoria, BC, to Ottawa in 20 hours flying time and back in 23 hours during the summer of 2003. The weather conditions on the return legs turned it into quite an adventure.

My longest cross-country flying effort was Wellington to Whangarei and back which took me just over three hours each way piloting a Piper Arrow (ZK-EIF).

And yes, James does have an interesting page of energy efficiency comparisons for passenger transport modes. Unfortunately it is information on modal comparisons for energy efficiency in freight transport that I am currently trying to track down.

Rail Photos taken in Geneva

I first visited Switzerland on holiday in 1986 and for part of my time there travelled around by train and boat using a Swiss Pass. I also travelled on the Glacier Express and the very expensive Jungfraubahnen. It was a wonderful experience and a great way to see the Swiss Alps. More recently my visits to Switzerland have been to attend World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Geneva.

Here are a few photos I took on different more recent visits to the main railway station in Geneva, Switzerland. The lighting conditions were sometimes less than ideal.

A modern electric Swiss Rail train with double-decked passenger carriages.

An older Swiss Rail electric engine pulling single-decked passenger carriages.

The RER operates local services as part of the Geneva public transport system.

A TGV that operates between Paris and Geneva is visible on the left of the photograph above.

Aircraft Photos taken in Germany

Photography has been a hobby of mine for many years. I now take my digital camera with me when travelling. Photos out the windows of aircraft from altitude are usually disappointing but when on the ground at a busy international airport the results can be quite interesting.

Here are couple of photographs I took last year out of aircraft windows while taxiing for take off.

The JAL B747-400F above was about to take off from Frankfurt as we took off for Geneva.

The Lufthansa A319 above was being pushed back at dusk around the same time as we were departing Munich for Asia.

I have a few of my photos stored and displayed on Flickr, including sets of photographs taken around Bruges, Belgium, and Rome, Italy. I have just added three photographs taken last year in Moscow.

Web 2.0 - How much of it is hype?

The "summer" holidays - the weather has been unseasonably cold and wet in Wellington, New Zealand, a good excuse to stay inside - have given me a chance to revamp my Home Page, which now links to around 930 sites on the web, and explore some of the new web sites that are part of so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon. Much of this seems to be about getting individuals to generate and select web content, but having had my own home page on the web since 1998 (or was it 1997?), the concept of making "amateur" contributions to creating new content on the web is not exactly new to me. As noted in a previous posting, I started the New Zealand Aviation Yahoo! Group back in 1998. I have also been posting some of my photographs to Flickr since 2005 while more recently have made some very small contributions to Wikipedia in areas where I have some expertise.

Looking at some of the notable new web sites gives me the impression that, while there is much hype, there is now some useful development occurring and it is helping one to find particularly interesting nuggets of material amongst the mass of information now available on the web. For example, I found the 2007 Web Trend Map from Information Architects Japan to be a brilliant way of summarising the key web sites that are part of Web 2.0. The number of private individuals making a solid contribution to this phenomenon actually seems relatively small but this is clearly changing.

My recent exploration of Web 2.0 has included starting this weblog, contributing factual comments to a small number of other "blogs" that cover some of my interests, revisiting digg, and joining Newsvine and reddit. Newsvine, in particular, impresses me. I have joined its small but active Aviation group and started setting up a Column. As for reddit I have yet to see evidence of any great skill in filtering the stories that would be of particular interest to me, something that Amazon.co.uk does relatively well in terms of making book recommendations if one enters and rates previous book purchases.

In the right-hand side column of this weblog I have also been experimenting with the Eurekster swiki software by creating a search engine for Civil Aviation. My initial impression is that this software needs quite a bit more work but please feel free to contribute to improving my particular swiki.