Photo: Windsor Castle, Windsor. A nice day for a walk around Windsor and a boat trip and ice cream along the Thames.
There’s a Victoria in B.C.
Interestingly enough, there’s a place called Victoria in British Columbia (Vancouver Island – sounds like it’s just about feasible to visit, given a few hours), in addition to the one I knew of in Ontario. This I learned from some travelling Canadians I met on the train today. They’re over doing the Europe thing during a long summer vacation from college (which I took as a N.A. reference to University rather than an attempt to adjust vocab to my local context). Cool. They told me the places they were planning to go and I was able to point out a few useful bits of information – like the fact that “Barcelona Airport” with Ryanair is over an hour from Barcelona. It’s about as much in Barcelona as any other similar airport and the bus costs almost as much as the flight. Still, I was able to tell them about the bus service and recommend it over a taxi. I also recommended taking water if they go in search of historical landmarks like the Acropolis while they are in Greece (well, Athens) – it really can be quite hot indeed at this time of year and heat sickness is not something you want to have, if my firsthand witnessing of others (I presumed it was heat sickness) is anything to go by.
I spent the day oscillating between Reading and other places. Some of that time was in Bracknell (where an interesting concept was being discussed – yes, I’m being vague, if you’re a close friend then I’ll probably explain it to you) and some of the time was in Windsor/Eton for a lunch meeting with the folks at a post relational database company (magazine stuff). There’s only so much excitement to be had over the ability for millions of objects to persist peacefully (no matter what database, but it was a reasonably interesting conversation). Meh. Anyway, I took a few photos of Windsor Castle – since I’m not sure I’ve ever actually been to Windsor itself (or maybe I did when I was a kid, but I can’t recall). I didn’t pay to go and look around since that might be conceivable as an indirect endorsement of the Monarchy 
I didn’t take the GPS along, so there was no geocaching on this occasion. A pity, JP II still needs to find a home. Couldn’t find the microcache at the Oracle this evening, even though we had a reasonable look where I thought it might have been.
So, I’m still up, ostensibly doing some writing and planning this presentation for Sunday. I’ve got a lot of random bits of junk here that need to be ready. The fan started to screw itself over in apogee’s power supply and so I swapped out the PSU tonight. Only to find that the CPU fan was also fscked – and borrowed the fan from another machine as a stopgap to get online again. I need to rationalise a lot of this kit over the coming months as I prepare to move – all depends upon what I decide I want to do next. We’ll see.
Jon.