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Monday, 19 November 2007
Late last week, I visited fellow DD Tim Cutts at the Sanger Institute just south of Cambridge. I dropped off a couple more machines that the BOFHs there have kindly offered to host for Debian, and Tim offered me a quick look around their facility. Sanger plays host to a massive set of computers used for genetic sequencing and related tasks. They have a very impressive setup with thousands of machines in multiple machine rooms, connected via huge amounts of (very neatly laid!) power and networking. Oh, and multiple petabytes of disk storage, with terabytes more data generated every day.
The coolest thing? Tim told me that the majority of their machines are running Debian, mostly stock installations with no special tweaks needed. Yay!
22:45 :: # :: /cambridge :: 0 comments
Sunday, 14 January 2007A group of us have been doing the Every Pub In Cambridge challenge for the last year and a bit. There are various lists of the pubs in the City of Cambridge around the Net in various places, and we based ours on the one at www.cambridgepubs.co.uk. Most Thursdays, Phil, Pod, Jon and I picked 3 or 4 pubs from their handy tube-style map and went and visited. The rules are simple:
- All pubs must be visited during the period of the challenge. Earlier visits don't count, but people may catch up later on pubs they may have missed due to being unable to make a week.
- An alcoholic drink must be drunk in each pub (normally beer, but doesn't have to be)
Today, we visited the last 4 pubs and finished after 14 months. We would have finished in under a year, but the football World Cup and Pod's travel-heavy new job slightly dented our schedule. In all, we visited 108 pubs and couldn't make it to 11 due to them being closed.
The point of the exercise? We already knew of several good pubs in Cambridge, but expected there to be plenty of others. Plus, it was something fun to do on Thursday nights and a good excuse to drink more beer... :-) In the end, we each found some good new places to go, and some that we'd never go back to by choice. Our choices for best pub vary, but our respective best 5s basically agree. My own are the Live and Let Live, the Kingston Arms, the County Arms, the Castle Inn and the Free Press. Alongside those, there are plenty more I'd be happy to visit again. After more discussion, our other opinions were unanimous: the worst was the Duke of Argyle (nasty!), and without a doubt the most entertaining was the Cross Keys (with an amazingly funny barman).
At some point we may get around to writing up reviews and posting them somewhere, but not right now... *grin*
01:46 :: # :: /cambridge :: 1 comment