Old friends get together again!

Once again it's the time of year when a bunch of old friends get together for a meal and a blether. This time Mary was unable to attend due to feeling somewhat under the weather. But it was good be there and to catch up again.... remarkable how the conversation flips between reminiscing our younger days and also other newer topic such has the joys of grandparent hood ;-)

It was a delightful evening with lots of laughs and happy stories to enjoy.

Roll on next year when we hope to do it all again!!!

Mizpah!

;-)

PS
I just had to find one bonus photo to include here - and I think this is the one - sorry Barbara - could not resist ;-)


I published all the photos taken on Facebook - see here - when you can download and comment

Encouragement

My good friend and colleague passed me the following link which describes the circumstances when the above famous picture was taken. It makes interesting reading - so I encourage you to take a few minutes to read it.

Click to read the article

As it happens "Encouragement" was also the theme at the EngageYouth event which took place at Kemnay church at the weekend. It was a great evening taking place during one of the worst rain storms we have seen this year. Despite this people travelled from as far away as Aberdeen and had a great time. You can listen to the main message for the evening clicking here.

It is also possible to subscribe to the EngageYouth Podcast where you will find recordings of previous speakers also available.

Here is the Podcast link - which you can use to subscribe in iTune - or click on to for immediate access via your web browser.

http://web.me.com/jimbuchan/Podcasts/EngageYouth.xml

Serious Rain in Kemnay

Some serious rain in Kemnay over the last few days! So no possibility, of taking the usual route for the dog walk ;-)

1 year since Mam passed away!

During our October break in Kemnay it was one year since my Mam passed away! We visited her grave and left some roses to park the occassion! It is remarkable how quickly time passes and it certainly does not feel like a whole year since she died. As you can see below the grave stone has been updated to include reference to both of my parents who died more or less 3 years apart.

Memories, memories!

Gamrie - October 2009 - a relaxing holiday!

We have just come back from spending a week at a holiday cottage in Gamrie - see more by clicking here. This is a recommended way to get away from email, twitter, the phone - including mobiles!!! no signal!
We had a few days with the kids and then a few with just Mary, me and Abbie the dog! A very relaxing time for sure - we had the luxury of a real fire so enjoyed stoking it and lighting it each day!!!

The following photo was taken from St Johns Church graveyard during one of our many walks. You can see clearly how the village is situated at near the shore line well out of reach from mobile signals and the like!


See more photos by clicking here!

A very relaxing time was had by all ;-) Roll on next October when we will be on a cruse ship sailing up the east coast of America - that will be somewhat different!

SSDN Team Reunion - SLF09

Above photo taken as I walked from the hotel to the meal venue -
featuring the Squinty bridge as it is locally known.

The night before the Scottish Learning Festival and I was able to attend a reunion event for the team that conducted the procurement process for Glow. We all worked out of Learning and Teaching Scotland for the duration of the process but some of us have now moved on to new challenges. It was really great to have the chance to catch up old friends and colleagues and also to do this at the time when there is real evidence that Glow is now being used is some very innovative ways. It is quite rewarding to see that our collective efforts back then, backed up with the Scottish Governments resolve and finding is now starting to bear real fruits.

I have published the photos I took during our meal and just afterwards (these are all downloadable for the benefit of any of the team that want to have a memento of the evening).

http://gallery.me.com/jimbuchan#100241

You can also read John Connels post on the topic which says a little more about the event.

http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2257

Roll on next year ;-)

New addition

Today we took a big step regarding our love of camping ;-) We have enjoyed our trailer tent and have had our annual summer holiday in Keswick under canvas for the last 20 years or so! But after a particularly wet holiday this summer we decided to start looking around for a caravan. As fate would have it someone locally in our village was selling one which was in pretty good condition. We passed it with its "For Sale" sign a number of times and then eventually decided to approach the owner explore the conditions of sale!

We did not commit on the first visit be returned again on Wednesday and shook hands on the deal! So we now own a caravan complete with all the accessories that we could conceivably need! We will continue to look around for an awning but there is no real urgency for that since we will not use the caravan proper till next summer!


Mary is very pleased with the acquisition and is looking forward to getting up in the mornings when camping and not having to make the now customary walk to the campsite toilet for relief. The caravan has a built in toilet - what luxury !;-)

And you can have a look inside!

http://gallery.me.com/jimbuchan#100254

Cisco Telepresence - the facts

Further to my last post which is about the impact of HD TV on the network - see below a video which is about Cisco's Telepresence which provides an transformational improvement on traditional Video Conferencing.

http://www.twitvid.com/19B5B

I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of Telepresence meetings recently - the last was between three end points Glasgow, Bangalore and Sydney. The experience was as close as it could be to us all being together in the same room! I am afraid that you simply have to experience this to realise who true this is!

Of course for this to work you do need a pretty solid network with a need to support a minimum of 8 Mbps in each direction for each video stream. And to setup conference is a simple as scheduling a meeting in Outlook with a press of one button on the day to initiate the session.

One interesting feature is that the voice channel working in full duplex - which means that anyone can speak at any time and will be heard by all. That is a significant departure from H.323 based VC system where the voice is usual simplex ( one direction at a time ) which is necessary to eliminate audio feed back which is caused by the latency of such systems!!!

HD Video for Education

Becta have made some information about HD Video and its implications for network load etc... See the following link

http://emergingtechnologies.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=etr&catcode=ETRE_0001&rid=14433

This states that HD video requires about 1Gbps to transmit HD Video uncompressed in real time. There are of course compression techniques which reduce the bps required. In a school situation where it can be expected that there will be significant concurrent demands to consume HD resources as they become more available. The Glow project in Scotland is an example of a national Intranet for school users which could serve HD content. This content would be stored on a central server at the Glow Data Centre and would be accessible in any school in Scotland - and of course to users when accessing the service from home.

One essential link between the national data centre and the school is the link between the school and the Local Authority network. This could be anywhere between 2 and 100 Mbps in capacity. the uplink form a Local authority could be between 45 Mbps and 1Gbps. Clearly many concurrent streams of even compressed HD video could result in these links becoming congested to the extent that the network will slow down greatly. One strategy to overcome this problem for the Local Authority to block video traffic - and there are certainly some LAs that will already have implement such a traffic policy.

One has to reflect on the impact that this will have on the underlying network as use of HD video starts to take of. I am of the view that school users will want to use HD video resources to enhance the current range of online resources which are available for teaching and learning! Imagine the possible impact when lots of people, pupils and teachers using their Flip camera to capture HD video and then sharing them online!

One technology which can provide some essential support in this context is to implement a Content Delivery Network. This is a series of devices with one positioned in each school which has the facility to have HD assets pre-positioned on a built in disc during periods of low network usage - such as over night. If this is the case, each time a user in the school accesses a HD video and it has been pre-positioned on the local content engine, the video will be served via the schools Local Area Network. Which can be based on Gigabit Ethernet technology!

Thankfully the Scottish Government had the fore-sight a number of years ago to invest in such a network for all of Scotland schools which has the capability to pre-position network based content which cannot be delivered in real time. Of course it is also possible to increase the capacity of the network elements but I would suggest that this is a less viable strategy in view of the fact that wide area bandwidth still comes at a relativity high cost.

The Global Growth of Broadband

It seems that Africa is now connected to the Global Broadband network via a sub sea fibre optic cable - this lead to the BBC publishing a model which makes interesting viewing. It shows how the Internet had evolved since 1999. You can see how the density of broadband subscribers has increased over time and also how the international interconnect circuits have improved. According to the model West Africa has been connected since 2004 with the West coast being connected this year.

This caused me to reflect on my own trips to Botswana in the late 90's when I setup an email system there which connected to the UK via initially a modem ( dial-up ) link and and subsequently via the government network and a satellite link. The former was 9.6 bps on a good day and the latter over a shared 256kbps which was of course much better.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8255695.stm

The following article provide some additional background to the linking of Africa by means of this new sub sea link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8257152.stm

And a blog post about the experience of using the new infrastructure to do live video broadcast!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/09/live_from_mombasa.html