Roaming Zebra

On Saturday we travelled to Liverpool to see the arrival of the Clipper Round the World Race. My uncle was one of the crew members on the Hull & Humber yacht, so we thought go and see him arrive back after 10 months sailing around the world.

In the overall race, the Hull & Humber came second, beaten by just a few points by New York. In third place was Glasgow.

The race consists of 10 yachts, each one sponsored by a City. The crew is mostly members of the public (no previous experience required!) who can be either “Round the Worlders” or “Leggers” - the overall race is split into 7 legs, with each leg consisting of a number of races between ports. Points are calculated based on positions in each race, with deductions for any equipment that is replaced.

Technically the overall race finished at midnight on Saturday morning with a “first past the post” elastic race just a few miles outside of Liverpool. Basically towards the end of the final race there were a number of markers which could be added or removed as needed to ensure the boats mostly arrived on time…

We arrived around 10am into Liverpool by train, having found there’s a Merseyrail (Underground) link from Lime Street to James Street, just a few minutes walk from the Albert Dock. Given that the yachts were still a few miles outside of Liverpool, there was a final race (not counted towards the overall race) called the Mersey Dash -  a number of markers bringing the yachts to the finish line at the Albert Dock. Basically the race was to get the boats to the Canning Half Tide dock in time for the tidal level to allow them to safely enter.

After watching the arrival of the yachts, we moved round to the Canning Half Tide dock, where they paraded in in overall race order, led by the host boat Liverpool08.

During the Dash and movement to the Half Tide dock, we were “entertained” by the sports reporter from BBC Radio Merseyside, and whilst he did have interviews with members of the crew, some of music was rather cheesy! (And I still don’t get the relevance of some of the tracks chosen for the arrival of each yacht, which were presumably meant to be representational in some way!)… So there was much waving and cheering from the crowd as each yacht arrived.

Eventually, the 10 yachts made it into the dock do that the gate could be closed and the water level matched to that of the Albert Dock, given that it was going to take several hours, we decided to depart for lunch… as did everyone else I think! The crew’s however would have to wait until they finally landed in the Albert Dock (though they clearly had copious deliveries of beer…).

After lunch we made our way round the the Albert Dock in preparation for the final journey of the yachts and met up again with a number of other family members. After a long time, the yachts eventually started to move into the Albert Dock, this time in reverse order. This process seemed to take an excessive amount of time, however eventually the Hull & Humber arrived into the dock…

Unfortunately, our vantage point wasn’t next to the landing point for the Hull & Humber, so we had to shuffle through the crowds to try and get a better view of the crew and see the presentation of the 2nd Place flag, champagne and all.

Well, this week the roofer finished replacing the roof on our house. It was actually mostly finished the week before, but there’s a single story bit of roofing at the front over the bay windows and front door, and the scaffolding to access the top was resting on it i.e. they had to wait for the scaffolding company to take down the scaffolding before they could finish.

Our roof was suffering from nail fatigue (where the head of the nail rusts through) - hardly surprising given the house was built in the 1930s, before galvanised and copper nails were around. The old slate was also breaking up, which is apparently caused by a lack of roofing felt or torching, and then freeze/defrost cycles. I’d already been up last year and reseated a number of slate, and earlier this year we had a number of slates come down from the edges in high-winds.

We had a couple of quotes for the replacement of the roof, the cost varied dramatically between people, in fact there was a difference of about 3k between the cheapest and most expensive quote we received. I strongly advocate getting at least three written quotes and comparing them carefully.

The company we chose was called Securaroof, who advertise in the local paper. I found the guy who runs the company to be friendly and not pushy when he came out to quote for the replacement. He was also quite happy to give me a couple of options for roofing material. I was impressed that every day during the job, the ground was swept before we returned home - the first day I was wary there might have been nails or shards of slate on the driveway, but everything had been carefully collected.

In terms of roofing material, we opted for a Spanish Slate - La Roca, over a man-made concrete based replacement material. Generally I think that the natural look of the slate is much better than the mechanically cut lines of the replacement products, and though real slate is more expensive than a man-made product, it wasn’t prohibitively so…

So on Saturday evening, we decided to go to Satay in Lye for dinner. Its an Malaysian-Indonesian restaurant on Lye High Street. This is the third time we’ve been, the restaurant itself is quite pleasant with modern decor and the food is excellent quality. On the two previous times we’ve visited, its been quite busy - the first time was Valentines night and was a set menu, the second with a couple of friends and it was very busy. This meant that the food took a very long time to come out - its a good job we weren’t in a hurry! We’ve also ordered take-away before, though only once, and it took a very long time to arrive and wasn’t particularly hot by the time it got to us (we had to microwave some of it to warm it back up).

That said, I’d still recommend people to go there as the food is excellent … when you get it.

This visit however, the restaurant was only about half full and both the service and food were excellent. You seem to get Kurpak Udang (prawn crackers with a spicy tomato/chilli dip), these have always come out shortly after ordering, so in the past despite the long wait, we haven’t starved. The tomato dip is quite pleasant, though can be quite hot. We ordered the lamb and chicken satay starters (swapping half each) which are grilled pieces of chicken of lamb served with a peanut satay sauce. I really like them… however I’m still not sure about the chilled rice cake that comes as part of the starter. For main course, I ordered the Kari Kambing on the recommendation of the serving staff. Its a Malaysian Lamb curry and it was really nice - excellent flavour and the lamb was slowly cooked meaning it was very soft to eat. As accompaniment to the main, we ordered the coconut rice. Its a “Thai” rice, which is a different type of rice to the pilau rice served in curry shops. In terms of price, it has gone up since our last visit (some dishes by £1.50 or so), but even so, it used to be very cheap and now I still think the pricing is quite reasonable. I’d also give it extra points for being a place where they don’t try to rush you out with the bill as soon as you have finished your food.

One other thing to watch out for (and caught us out on our first visit) is that its not licensed - i.e. take your own alcohol. Luckily there’s a mini-supermarket at the other end of the High Street.

Overall, I highly recommend a visit to Satay, particularly if you’d like a change from visiting a Curry house (of which Lye has a number!).

Satay now has a website - www.mysatay.co.uk which has photos of the restaurant and copy of the menu - though at the moment, the prices on the website are the old prices (its gone up), and then the take-away pricing was always different from the “eat-in” pricing, so I wouldn’t assume the pricing is correct.

Yesterday was I spent the day on an ITIL course, “Apollo 13 - An ITSM case experience“. The course was arranged by our central IT quality team.

It was an interesting and amusing day - its not intended as a serious day and you are supposed to have fun learning whilst learning about the principles of ITIL. Basically you get to play part of mission control for the Apollo 13 mission. The aims are to develop business processes and to see how they can help you achieve your business goals in IT provision. How do teams interface and communicate? How can you escalate and track problems? How do you effectively manage change?

I can see how some of the priniciples can be applied to a general IT provision in a University, though in a University, I think you need to be careful not to apply to much metrics-based testing, particularly when you think about problem solving rates and solving times - its all very well solving large numbers of easy problems, but in a University there are likely to be a number of hard problems which take a long time to resolve and these are probably more important to consider, and probably more difficult to assess with metrics.

Well, just before leaving for work this morning, a large SIG roofing lorry arrived to deliver the new slate for my house roof! So we now have 758 slates sitting on the drive waiting for the roofer to come and install.

Now I wonder if I can get him to leave the pallets behind…..

This seems to be a bit of an ongoing thing at the moment… wet weather.

All during the day, it’ll be fine and then around 6pm, it starts to pelt down with rain. And then of course, the soil at the allotment just ends up as one lump of heavy clay. I think its a cunning ploy to stop me managing to dig the plot over!

And why can’t any of the weather sites decide on the weather for the weekend? Though clearly as its a bank holiday, it has to rain.

Beware the agapanthus … Just got back from a week at the Isles of Scilly - it was quite pleasant, if a little breezy! Evidently handling Agapanthus causes an allergic reaction, so my advice is don’t, though they do have pretty blue flowers. Of course they aren’t frost hardy, which means its going to have to live in the Greenhouse over the winter (and no doubt most of the summer!)

We collected our new car this week! Its a Level 3 New Fabia Estate … We ordered Satin Grey, so its officially registered as grey, though it has a distinct blue hue to it.

The trim levels on the New Fabia are coded by number and not by name as in the past (this confused the guy at the insurance company as he tried to insist it would have a name for the trim level). So level 3 is the “top” trim level, though there a number of options you can get added to that (EPS, type pressure monitors ….).

Having had a three-door Focus before, the car seems narrower from the outside, though I don’t feel like there’s any less space inside the vehicle - the Fabia is technically a “SuperMini”, as opposed to the Focus “Small Family Car”, though those names seem entirely random! Given that my drive is quite narrow, the width of the car is quite important to us!

The level 3 estate comes with front fog-lights as standard, there’s an option for “cornering” head lights, though I’m not entirely clear on what the benefit of that is …

On the photo of the dash interior of the car, you can just about make out the MaxiDot display at the centre of the dash display, currently showing a door open on the vehicle. When driving, it gives feedback about the current fuel consumption, you can switch this to give miles left in the tank, journey time and average speed. It also displays the current radio station. I assume it also gives feedback if a fault occurs, though that is probably combined with a warning light elsewhere on the dash, for example the seat belt warning light comes on if one of the front seats is occupied without the belt plugged in.

So, I decided finally to succumb to setting up a blog, and therefore I need to make a first post onto it.

I guess I’ll get bored of writing on it at somepoint, but you never know.