Category: Life

Categories
Cycling Life

General Ollie Update

2009 has been pretty busy so far – as you can see from the lack of activity on here! Its almost 3 months in ’09 and this is my first post!

For those of you interested in what I’ve been up to…

At work – we are in our busy end of FY period, I’ve been going to Brussels quite a bit for a project for the European Commission. Experienced a first – a meeting/workshop with (almost all) the EU Member state countries which was really interesting.

Lots of other exciting projects kicking off at the moment – looks like I will continue to be busy well into the next FY, which is good. Fingers crossed the economic downturn isn’t used as an excuse/ is a cause for cutting back on environmental and climate change projects.

On a personal level (also linked to work) Kat and I signed up to participate in trials for a new type of improved home thermostat (‘chrono-proportional’) for the EST (its a project that work are running).  It involves putting a few temperature sensors up indoors (and one outside) and we submit weekly gas/elec meter readings. These will monitor the effectiveness of our current thermostat – then later in the year we will have a new type of thermostat fitted and we’ll do the monitoring again.

The improved weather means I’m out on the bike alot more now which is good news, have also combined the riding with my new toy (which I got for Christmas) a Digital SLR camera – I’ll probably post up some photos soon.

Recent/Interesting Web Links:

Came across www.goodguide.com which is a product comparision site which lists how ethically produced,/green/healthy products are. Bit US specific at the moment but worth keeping an eye on.

An article on The Guardian’s (Free) Open Content API and DataStore. In fact the whole http://infosthetics.com website is worth a look at.

I’ve started playing around a bit with Twitter – have to say I was (and still am a bit) skeptical of this – so we’ll see how long I use it for. So far I have linked it with my Facebook status messages. Perhaps there’s a way of linking WordPress to it so it can announce new posts?

Thats it for now – hopefully it won’t be as long until my next post!

Categories
Life

Happy Christmas!

speedy-santaHappy Christmas blog readers (it would appear that there have been almost 3,000 of you this year according to Google Analytics!)

Check out my favorite Christmas Game – Speedy Santa!

Cheers!

Ollie

Categories
Environment Technology

Some recent browsing (Green Issues, SOA, Dashboards)

Some sites that I found interesting recently…

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of Green IT/Business type issues recently www.climatechangecorp.com is a good site (even if it does heavily promote its events on the content).

Carbon Calculators article: http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=5119 Its disappointing it mentions AEA only in the context of providing the emissions factors – we actually do a whole lot more including building online carbon/emissions data platforms (and calculators) ourselves.

Great article from Adobe on Web 2.0, SOA etc – gives a great overview: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/web_end.html

Sun Microsystems came into to talk to us about their Java CAPS recently and it looks really interesting. We’ve already started to look at NetBeans IDE more closely (particularly the PHP plugin and its SOA/Business Process (BPEL) diagram/visualisation to BPEL XML code features…

See http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Dashboards, Flex with PHP etc:

One of my current projects is update our (data) visualisation and dashboard piece of our offering – as such we’ve been researching whats out there that we could use to enhance our technology stack:

Flex and PHP http://devzone.zend.com/article/3580-Building-Dashboards-With-PHP-and-Flex

Zend Framework/Adobe Media Remoting – http://corlan.org/2008/11/13/flex-and-php-remoting-with-zend-amf/

Interestingly Microsoft seem to be about to launch a new Dynamics AX product which is focused at Environmental data management – interesting to see the main IT vendors start to move into the space that we’ve been in for some time. This is really good news as it will give more deployment and integration options moving forward (eg for customers already using Dynamics).

Categories
Environment Technology

Talking Green IT strategy at the Green IT Expo!

Ollie talking at the Green IT Expo

Work asked me to talk at the Green IT expo Tues/Wed this week at the Barbican in London – so I put together a talk on how we see IT being used strategically to address Environmental management and other business critical issues (eg cost minimisation).

I talked about how Green IT should be more than just trying to reduce IT’s energy/environmental footprint (through initiatives such as virtualisation) – but also how IT can capture critical business data (eg on Energy use, and employee behaviour) and also how it can help with the digitisation of products and processes (reducing energy/waste – eg through elimating paper production).

My first proper public speaking gig so a bit scary; but I’d love to do more of it! Photo is one of my colleagues managed to grab during my talk on Tues – I am holding one of our brochures.

The Green IT expo was an interesting event – IBM had a big presence and the general focus was mainly on the data centre and IT end of life equipment waste. Adobe did an interesting talk on focusing on the usability of online processes (eg those replacing paper) dovetailing quite nicely with some of my content. Learn’t more about their LiveCycle suite – http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/ which looks really interesting for creating paperless processes although it isn’t cheap unfortunately!

Categories
Mountain Biking Travel

Photos from holiday in Tuscany

Photos from our recent holiday to Tuscany Italy (click)

More details to follow when we can find time to write up our notes.

Categories
Gadgets Life

I now have a PS3 – expect tumbleweed here for a while :)

Busy at work (lots of EU related stuff at the moment) and have now got some new toys including a PS3 80GB (one with the dual shock rumble pad) – so don’t expect many posts in the near future!!

I’m sure I’ll get the blogging bug again before too long………

Categories
Cycling Gadgets

New kit!

Prescription Oakleys…
Oakleys - hmmm...

Those of you are lucky(?!) enough to know me will know that I love a good gadget or 20. I took the plunge recently and bought myself some Oakleys with prescription lenses – some Livestrong Flak Jacket XLJ’s. The reason I’ve been wanting to get some (Oakley’s) for the last 5 or so years is for my cycling and skiing but haven’t got any because they are so damn expensive with prescription lenses in (about double the price standard price of Oakleys!). Of course it rains the whole weekend that I get them so I have yet to really wear them in anger…

One thing to note about prescription lenses in Oakleys is that they aren’t thinned (I’ve got thinned lenses in my regular glasses over the last few years as I’ve started getting more short sighted) so the lenses are quite thick. But they are wrap around so you get the feeling you can properly see (including peripheral vision) again (like wearing contacts – but I never got on with those). I’ll try and remember to take a picture for comparison next time I am with my 20:20 vision cycling mates.

Blackberry – aka “Crackberry” – as my former colleagues at 7city used to call them – as in they are addictive : – )

Work have been kind enough to ease my email (and keeping an eye on things) burden with a Blackberry 8820 which is nice. Has Wifi which is pretty useful. No doubt I’ll be posting some Blackberry related posts soon…

Categories
Life Technology

Funny blog spam

Quite amused by this bit of blog spam:

A new comment on the post #47 “Work on the real Oliver’s Yard is underway!” is waiting for your approval

Author : Gordon Brown (IP: 90.207.167.2xx , 5acfa7xx.bb.sky.com) E-mail : gordon.brown@number-ten.gov.uk
URL : http://www.the-prime-minister.gov.uk

Comment:
Oli, I love your blog, so enlightening. One complaint – it has been over a year and STILL NO F***ING TREES – WHERE ARE THE TREES?

Sometimes its difficult to know whether this is someone messing about or Spam!

Categories
Life

Married for 3 years!

Its Kat and I’s 3rd wedding anniversary today. Happy Anniversary Kat!

Top picture is when we got angaged at the top of the Eiffel tower and below is when we recently returned to Paris.

For the anniversary and as a gift to Kat I finally finished the DVD of the Honeymoon – its only taken me 3 years!! Here is some of the cover artwork:

Those that know me quite well can look forward to being bored by it the next time they pop by!!!

Categories
Environment Web Development

New AEA website

Really impressed with the work my colleagues have done on the new AEA website (http://www.aeat.co.uk). This also includes the ecopath website which will be vastly expanded in due course.

AEA home pageI can’t claim to have been hugely involved (other than some bits and pieces behind the scenes) although this is partly because they kicked off the project whilst I was in Paris (talk about quick turn around!). The plan is to move it to the Silverstripe CMS in due course which will make management and updates easier.