D9 50th Anniversary running day at the Aston Manor Transport Museum

One of my favourite places to visit is the Aston Manor Transport Museum as old buses are one of my interests, well old buses from the late 1960s to late 1980s anyway. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BMMO D9 bus as used by Midland Red they held a special running day with some D9s and also Routemasters plus some other buses. I took a trip on a Routemaster and a D9. Bus travel is always a joy in times like this, maybe its because there arn't any awful kids on board who wish you to enjoy their music collection.





The full set of pictures are here, i'm impressed all 62 photos turned out reasonably well even though the camera's battery was in the red.

Neo-Amish

An interesting article on how some of computing's high priests like Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth actively avoid being online as much as they can, which Kevin Kelly has called "Neo-Amish". I can understand their point of view, being always online seems to breed an anxiety and paranoia especially if you get no messages. And many newer methods of communication like Twitter seem to just exist for the sake of it not for any real perceived benefit.

Thats why i stopped using Twitter anyway, i could no longer see the point. Recently i have also changed how i blog a bit, in the past i used to try and post to all of my blogs at least once a day but no longer. However i do get anxious if a blog hasn't been added to for a few days, but now i am trying to ignore it.

I bought a new watch

After about 6 years and 4 straps i decided it was finally time to replace my venerable Casio F-91W watch... with the very different F105W (not quite the same as the illustration but close enough). Really to me this is the best watch of all, it does everything you want, keeps the time, lasts for years and is very cheap. Why would anyone get any other kind of watch?

Apparently analogue watches are the vogue now, i can never understand that to be honest. I need to know it is 14:22 and 24 seconds. Maybe i am quite strange? Some say cheap Casio watches like this are not very stylish or elegant but i firmly believe form should follow function and thus the F-91W is a design classic.

US Navy hires kite-assisted ship

Earlier in the year i wrote an article on alternative propulsion methods for ships including kite-assisted propulsion where wind is used to pull a ship along using a computer optimised kite. Now MV Beluga SkySails has been hired by a rather notable customer, the US Navy's Military Sealift Command. The ship will carry military equipment from Europe to the USA. Considering the USN use a lot of ships and shift a lot of freight if the SkySails concept can reduce fuel costs by 20 to 30% as they claim then it could be a considerable fuel saving.

The Google Navy

Google are thinking of moving some of their data centres off-shore, literally. Barges up to 11km off the coast could house these data centres taking advantage of the ocean to cool the computers, use wave power to power them and take advantage of tax loopholes which is probably the real slam dunk. There are a few concerns with this, such as the safety of the barges in storms like hurricanes. I suspect they haven't thought about Baidu or Yahoo hiring submarines and sending torpedoes into their data centres though.

They arn't the only company looking into "greener" solutions, Microsoft are looking into building a data centre in Siberia. Thats where you'll get transferred too for introducing too many bugs into Word 2010.

Russia to centralise production of amphibious aircraft / flying boats

I have a weakness for flying boats i admit, the fact Russia is setting up a single centre for the development and production of flying boats and amphibious aircraft made me smile. The centre will include Beriev of course and the Tavia production plant with a testing base at Gelenzhik on the Black Sea. Production initially will be of the A-42 Albatros, Be103 and Be-200 and newer designs. As well as new aircraft the facility will maintain, repair and modernise existing aircraft. This is all part of the re-organisation of Russian aircraft production as the United Aircraft Corporation.


A-40 "Mermaid"

Be-200 Altair

Be-103

Google aim to digitize newspaper archives

Google are aiming to digitize every amount of information out there and make it searchable it seems (maybe one day even the notebooks my Mum has kept from the 1970s detailing how much food cost then). The latest step is to digitize the archives of newspapers which is truly going to be a massive task. There are already some of these archives available such as the Times Digital Archive which i find very fascinating. Though i'd really love to see some local newspapers such as the (Birmingham) Evening Mail and Sutton Coldfield News archives, i suspect these might not be in the Google search for a few years...