Last year, Steve Fossett made the first solo non-stop flight around the world. This year, he tries to go one better by attempting the longest flight ever made – targetting 26,000 miles, 3000 miles more than last year. The plane carries 18,000 lbs of fuel and needs 10,000 ft to take off, so it’s using the NASA runway at the Kennedy Space Centre. You can follow progress on the the attempts webpage; alternatively, download trackers for your mobile from Keni for that always connected feeling.

I’m trying to choose a restaurant in New York for a visit at the end of the month for an end of project party (assuming we get the website live by then!). Searching for ‘New york restaurant’ gives me 112 million results on google and even the organic results look like advertisment driven pages. This is definitely an area where personal recommendation and word of mouth is a far easier way of getting to a choice…time to try and narrow things down.

The Metro today features a high calory desert that is getting food campaigners up in arms – despite first appearing on the BBC food site over 2 years ago. It may be tied into the news that chocolate companies are going to increase the amount of information on packs to ensure we are educated about the damage we are going to do to a diet. Which means if you try and cook the Snickers Pie (I still mentally call these Marathons when I see the package) you’ll be able to tell what the 1250 calories per slice are doing to you. The pie is made up of mascarpone, soft cheese, caster sugar, eggs and 5 Snickers bars – all mixed together and just melted. A mix that may be just too much for me.

But it could be the perfect thing to cook for my sister as a treat. She’s just had a baby boy, the first male born into the direct family for 60 years – so something to celebrate. I have 2 sisters, 2 aunts, 2 nieces and 5 female cousins.

Where’s the time gone – didn’t think it’s been a week since I posted. I’ve been tagged twice (by Lloyd and Andrew) so here’s a recent meme…

Four jobs I’ve had:

• Bartender
• Insect Counter in an Entomology lab
• Warehouse packer
• Children’s Camp counselor

(all of these were before I started working for the current compnay a long time ago…since then it’s been project management all the way)

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• High Society
• Casablanca
• Wizard of Oz

Four places I’ve lived (and the meme mutates..as it started off as liked)

• Kingswinford
• Oxford
• Kirkintilloch
• Amsterdam

Four TV shows I love:

• CSI (all flavours)
• Dr Who
• Battlesatr Galactica (new)
• Buffy

Four places I’ve been on holiday

• Barbados
• Australia
• Gran Canaria
• Barcelona

Four of my favorite dishes:

• Fillet steak
• Chicken Korma as cooked by me
• Moules marinere
• chocolate

Four sites I visit daily (dull):

• Bloglines
• Gmail
• Flickr
• the work intranet (at least during the week)

Four places I would rather be right now:

• Barbados
• asleep
• underwater scuba-diving
• being pampered in a spa

Four bloggers I am tagging (you’re it!):

• Tara
• Ewan
• Maryam
• Nicole

This has just turned up in my inbox…

London (dpa) – A whale was spotted in the river Thames in London Friday swimming past the parliament of Westminster and Big Ben, eyewitnesses said.
Boaters and sightseers reported seeing the mammal, believed to be a pilot whale – which can grow up to 6 metres long.
Tom Howard-Vyne, head of communications at the British Airways-operated London Eye ferrieswheel on the bank of the river, said: “I saw it blow, it was a spout of water which sparkled in the air.
“It was on this side of Westminster Bridge and 10 minutes ago it was near the House of Commons. It was an amazing sight,” he added. It was believed the whale was being tracked by a lifeboat to make sure it would not get disturbed by the shipping in the river.
The sighting was described as “extraordinary” by experts, who believed that, like a number of dolphins previously, the whale had “got lost.”

If it’s up by Westminster, it’s definitely got lost!

And now it’s on the BBC

I’ve been looking at a couple of sites that have been designed to support people trying to keep to their New Years Resolutions.

The first is from Boots the Chemist, with its Change One Thing programme. They have hints and tips in six categories; the whole campaign is backed up with heavy instore promotion, tying in products with the different programmes. From a store perpsective, there’s some interesting matches, as one I’ve seen ties in condoms into the de-stress programme. On the website, you can sign up for supporting emails and text messages to support your journey – it allows you to set goals and reminders.

The second is from Diet Coke. This is far more ‘fun’ focused than Boots, with a resolution generator and a lot of stuff about reseearch showing that people are far more likely to stick to small changes for resolutions than large ones. The campaign appears to be heavily driven by press and TV. Again you can sign up for emails to keep you motivated. But in this case it’s not the pull marketing of Boots, where you get messages that you set on the days you define, but push marketing, where you are signing up for their suggestions plus adding yourself to their database for future random emails about games and stuff.

Two different approaches capitalising on the New Year mind. I think I prefer the boots and not the campaign that names its character after a type of law.

Update: If you want to send yourself reminders to do things, try hassleme.co.uk, where you can set it up to send you emails at set periods to remind you to do things

Download and listen to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, made available by Bret Fausett.

London Zoo started theirannual stock check today. As explained on the morning TV, they don’t really concentrate on the bigger things, because I think you’d notice pretty quickly if the count of elephants was out by a couple. It can take up to a month, ensuring a good record is done of all the births and deaths; this year they had a new giant anteater, a bongo calf, Francois langur monkeys and a penguin chick, alongside the successful breeding of a colony of rare Bermudan snails. They do cheat a little though…they don’t count all the ants, just call them a single colony.

A Happy 2006 to everyone. A traditional time to take stock, looking backwards to what has been and forwards to what may be. To make resolutions about how things are going to be different next year, how you’ll improve your life or try and improve the lives of others. Technorati are asking people to tag resolution posts with
2006resolutions and you can see the results here. A whole load of people wanting to do something different., although losing weight and getting fit is definitely a common theme ;o)

In my case, I’m definitely going to be doing something different and my resolution is to make a success of it. After over 14 years with the same company, I’m going to be leaving. My intention is to do freelance project management, starting off with doing some work for the Big Blog Company in implementation of blogs, after that, anything is possible. I’ve still got two months to set everything up (it’s a very long notice period) but after that I can see the year bringing losts of challenges. But it’s going to be a fun ride.

One of the programmes this morning was 50 things to eat before you die, a viewers poll by the BBC. Here’s the top 10 – not very imaginative are we…

1. Fresh fish
2. Lobster
3. Steak
4. Thai food
5. Chinese food
6. Ice cream
7. Pizza
8. Crab
9. Curry
10. Prawns

I’ve tried all of these plus most of the other 40. They illustrated the number one with a visit to Doyles, in Watson Bay, Sydney. I was lucky enough to visit last year, and fully endorse the recommendation – excellent fish in one of the best placed restaurants in the world – here’s the view from the restaurant.

For a few years I’ve been tracking down my family history; it’s been a very slow process and I usually spend only a few days a year on it. Yesterday was one of those. Usually I go to the Family Hostory centre, which is about an hour away, but decided to try the National Archives, which is about 1 mile away. Had some great success looking up a lot of census data so got a few new leads. The Archives are a fascinating place, holding documents from around the year 900, all of which are available for anyone to see – so you could see the Domesday Book. The Archives get into the news this time every year as they release records under the 30 years rule, (a rule that is slowly dissappearing under the Freedom of Information Act). All if have to do now is update all my records with the new information.

The wonders of family life! Spent the last 5 hours buying computers with the brothers-in-law and then ripping and transferring multiple CDs and MP3 files into portable devices which have been bought by other relatives who do not own computers to allow them to get music on the devices. I start charging very very soon.

That’s the day over for another year; the rest of the rest of the week will be spent in that perculiar limbo between holidays, not at work and still doing the family visits.

Yesterday, my nearly 5 year niece declared that she now likes me, as she can now speak ‘adult talk’. When she coould only speak baby talk, she did not like me as we had nothing to talk about! So yesterday we had a good day, we watched Doctor Who together, I introduced her to the Tablet laptop and we played Playstation games. So she’s started on the right track to cope in this modern life.

Season’s greetings from a dull, wet, Midland’s morning. Santa’s been and gone, but he’s still out there according to NASA

Up to visit the family for a few days, so blogging may be light…or may not be dependong on how much time I’ll need to escape from chaos ;o). Only a few final gifts to find, and get everything wrapped up and then I’m ready to face the festivities.

Singing together

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

I went along to the carol service in Parliament Sq, testing the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which bans any demonstrations within a half mile area around Parliament. Over a 100 people (and probably around 15-20 press) sang songs for an hour. The police were not present, A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: “We treated the event as a carol service and not as a demonstration so the legislation did not come into play.” Thus demonstrating one of the issues with the Act – what is a deomstration. See BBC and Guardian for more info.