Suits you sir...

I don't think the large number of gadgets do him any favours, but you can't knock the originality.

Things to do before you're 30: Task 5

There's not been much blogging recently due to Clare being in Australia with the digital camera, and me being at home with two dogs (and not much to do).

However, the clock counting down the days 'til I'm 30 has not stopped ticking, and for March's task I have decided to run between Kenilworth Castle and Warwick Castle. I'm not a particularly athletic person, and I have never been all that good at running, so this is quite a tough challenge. The route is 5.4 miles long according to google, and I think I can do it in under an hour.

All I need is a pace car (well someone to take some photos and give me a lift back). Any volunteers? The day I run will depend on the weather (I don't like rain).

View the route

Smoking pipes

Yahoo recently launched 'pipes' (beta). What on earth are yahoo pipes? - well it's quite a cool internet based application which allows you to 'mash' the web. Which basically means that you can do clever things with RSS feeds to mix together content from different websites. I wasn't really all that excited about pipes when I first read about it. I've never seen a 'web mash up' which has been either interesting or useful. So pipes, although having a very impressive user interface, seemed like a bit of a waste of time.

That was until I was driving home last night, stuck in traffic, and I thought - I wonder if I could use pipes to give me traffic information for my daily commute? I drive through Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, and use the A46 and M40. The BBC traffic RSS feeds are organised by county, and just display all the roads affected. So I created a pipe that searches for traffic problems on the roads I use, for the counties I drive through. It outputs a single RSS feed, which I can add to my google desktop homepage. I know, I know - I'm cool.

Preview my pipe