Holiday 6 - 13 May 2017 Edale

Day 1 - Travel to Edale

A day of driving, made good time ~5 hours Southampton - Edale ~230 miles
So that's M3 / A34 / M40 / M42 / A42 / M1

Stopped off at Warwickshire services half way.  I was looking for signs of the difference between north and south.  Past Lecistershire the traffic petered out quite a bit.

I was using a Garmin sat nav, which did pretty well.  On the preperation I noticed it was doing something strange on the M40/M42 changerover, throwing in a couple of A roads.   I kept to what it said and it did have a spurious come off and back on the motorway scenario.   Chesterfield was a bit confusing and I followed the A61 further north than I should have done, but the sat nav corrected fine.

Past Warwick castle was the furthest north I have ever travelled.  I'd heard bad stories about the M1 congestion but it wasn't too bad.  There was a long stretch of lane conversion road works at 50 mph - but if anything this temporary thing helped traffic flow.

The local roads to Edale and the farm we stayed at were fine, only right at the very end going to single track.

Day 2 - Initial trail walks

Today we set out and walked some of the basic trails.  The morning was spent walking 4 miles on the Penine way.  The afternoon was spent walking about 2 miles in the other direction which leads to a second farm.  Beautiful weather and a lot of people on the trails.  Had lunch at the Coopers Cafe in Edale which served some nice sandwiches.

Day 3 - Trip to Manchester

I've never being to any big cities, and Manchester now marks the furthest point north I have travelled.  Edale is a direct train so I thought this was my one chance to do it.  I was expecting a lot of run down and seen better days type of city centre.  But Manchester seemed like it has had a lot of redevelopment mixing the old buildings with new.  There are some classic old architeture like the Corn exchange, or the Midland hotel - but also some new pedestrianisation of the city centre.  What looked like a neat tram system also ran through the centre which seemed a lot better than an underground or fragmented bus network.  We had a good walk round a nice lunch, did not quite make the art gallery as it was tricky to find (once we'd given up, someone asked us for directions!)

Day 4 - Chatsworth House

Took the car out today to find Chatsworth house, about 20 miles away.  We got there as it opened, and spent the morning looking around the house and the afternoon walking the gardens.  The house had a fashion and sculpture twist as well as giving a family history.   The gardens were beautiful with lots of features.  This included a hedge maze, and a water walkway down to the house.


Day 5 - Walking, Grindsbrook and Ringing Roger

Today we tried some of the harder climbs.  At the top of Edale we walked along Grindsbrook which was a weaving path alongside the river.  This ended with a quite hard climb to the ridge we we declined.   We tried another route which was a path climb up onto Ringing Roger which gave some spectacular views. down onto the valley.

Day 6 - Walking, Penine Way and Jacobs Ladder

Did about 5 hours of walking today back to the Penine way we initially did some of on day 2.  This time we followed the trail on to the climb at Jacobs ladder a long spiralling climb up to the ridge  This took us onto a ridge and we stopped at a high point at a group of rocks.  This walk took us to the open country proper and the views were spectacular.  On the way there and on the way back we saw two RAF Tornado's flying overhead.

Portsmouth League Two champions

Portsmouth leave league two in style, with a win and draws elsewhere that mean they become champions:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39753910

It has been a long haul for Portsmouth, four years in the division.  A couple of seasons fighting relegation.  For the first couple of years they suffered from the problem of drawing from the ranks of their own ex-pros as managers.  People like Awford and Whittingham - total club heroes, but never good enough as managers.

Paul Cook at first seemed an unlikely guy - I don't know what he's got, but he has delivered the best win rate since Redknapp.  The club feels very different to the overspending days of Redknapp and co. - Money flying out on unsustainable signings and wages, something Portsmouth paid a heavy price for and those responsible never really held accountable for their misconduct.

But we could be going back there with the Eisner bid - I don't think they can turn down the bid, but why on earth does this guy want to buy a lower league football club?

IoT security risk - who'd have thought it!

I think to anyone in the industry the mad rush to produce pointlessly internet connectivity from everything from light bulbs to fridges while not thinking too hard on the security aspects was always going to become an eventual disaster.

The main problem is the no sense of obligation on the part of the manufacturer to keep devices up to date even if they have done a good job on security in the first place.  You can understand their reluctance, there is no direct money in it - just a small amount of consumer appreciation.   The average consumer will also not really understand the hacking war that is going on around such devices especially if any covert surveillance could be obtained (thinking of the security agencies hacking TV camera functions here).

Also trivial device like a light bulb being connected to the outside world has a short lived wow factor, now a trashy app can turn on your lights when you are out - it's simply not that useful. A read a hilarious article about the Zuckerberg toying with automation at home, and controlling things from his mobile - I hope that keeps him from world domination.

IBM to hire veterans

At first I thought a change of policy, re-employing a tiny percentage of their own veterans that they have fired over the years while moving to cheaper overseas employees with less rights - or "global talent" as IBM would have it.  But no, military veterans to be trained in use of IBM services and software:

https://www.axios.com/ibm-2000-jobs-exclusive-2317626492.html

So cynically this gets IBM back in the governments eyes, and puts them in line for government contracts.  While that's not bad, it is when IBM has done so much to reduce it's headcount in expensive countries.

Social Media Advertising

The world of social media has become to interwoven into regular media, that every news story seems to carry an implicit advert for a social media platform to "find out more".

In the case of the BBC, who are usually incredibly stuffy about not mentioning brands and if they do usually chide themselves with "other brands like this are available" to kid us that there is some impartiality going on.

But in the case of social the BBC forget all this and always trumpet what was said on Twitter, what was posted on Facebook.  So if you do not care for such things you cannot get away from it.  There is an implicit assumption here that this is part of normal life and not a product that although free is selling you're personal data like crazy behind the scenes.

Cisco

I sometimes look at what is happening at the beleagured Cisco systems on thelayoff.com

Here was a great comment that I think sums up the fake image the corporation endlessly tries to promote - but anyone who has worked there for a while would recognise as false: 

"The old Cisco is gone. Sorry to break the news to you.

Take a look at the images and stories on the CEC home page and on Glassdoor and have that paint a picture for you. The marketing tells the story, in every human-interest story and in every picture:

• A gaggle of smiling 20 something's in t-shirts doing a group limbo or a massive selfie at work
  
• All of them a mix of multi racial, good looking kids with an equal number of men and women
  
• Random story about how some salesguy saved up all his PTO so he could climb some peak in Nepal and put a Cisco flag on it
  
• A catchy story about how we are going to be the TESLA of IoT, Smart Cities, (insert shiny object here) and rule the world
  

It is all rather transparent, somewhat desperate and sad. Maybe I'm just bitter about where we are now and I'm seeing stuff that doesn't exist. Maybe not."

Film: Midnight Cowboy Directed by John Schlesinger

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064665/