As a Milton Keynes resident watching Red Bull do so well throughout the year with Vettel steering the Milton Keynes based teams efforts in the car to victory after victory was fantastic. As a fan of Jenson Button I have enjoyed it just as much to see him trying his best to spoil Vettels efforts and watching him take first today was just brilliant and in the McClaren which was built close to where I was originally born too. The top 2 teams in the Formula 1 Grand Prix’s this year both come out of the UK which shows that whatever you may say we can still produce winning products.

Well done to all the guys and gals in Red Bulls Formula 1 headquarters in Milton Keynes you do our City proud all around the world with the work you do right here.

The above mentioned learning curves turned me onto blogging before it became mainstream, and this blog is one of the little sidelines which keep me amused and give me an outlet for the crap I spout. Another blog I keep is found at http://thealternativetruth.com. And now I am experimenting with a new site which allows anyone to search for music to download. I’m hoping it may make me a little income too as there are ads and links to buy the music from.

The site at http://www.music-search.co.uk  links to Amazon and allows you to listen to song clips before you click the link to buy if you want to.  It also has posters and other links so you can look at your favourite artists in the privacy of your own room. Hopefully someone reading this will let me know how it works for them, and tell others too. If not it’s just an experiment and I’ll try again with something else.

Why not be among the first to try out my new music search engine right now?

Before I have a chance to reply
the telephone rings in a room nearby
the caller checks she has the right man
I might need insurance they have a plan

I tell her I’m busy and get off the line
my mobile beeps to tell me it’s time
to put it on charge or it will go flat
and no one could ring, we can’t have that

I think back it wasn’t always this way
we didn’t need more than 24 hours a day
just to keep up to date with people unknown
the distractions in life seem to have grown

I’m not a luddite don’t ever think that
but it might be nice to just sit and relax
without all the gadgets, mobiles and such
and talk to each other, would that be too much?

By Doug Titchmarsh

We have to accept it no doubting that
For what we did to our parents this is payback

By Doug Titchmarsh

The PC I wanted to try the Chromium OS on was one I built using a Mini ITX board inside a Nintendo Entertainment System a few years ago. The PC works fine but at 800mhz and a low power board with only 256 Mb of memory it needs all the help it can get. The problem was that it wouldn’t recognise the USB pendrive as a hard drive from the BIOS so I’m guessing it’s too old for that. The second PC I tried was a laptop but I couldn’t get to the BIOS to change the boot drive, and as it’s my daughters they might moan a little if it didn’t work again after my experiments.

I had another option on a very old laptop, but the charger has gone missing so after a fruitless search for that I gave up on this Chromium OS experiment for now.

As with all the Temperance Brennan tales, the story itself is full of twists and turns and maybe at times a little far fetched considering the scrapes a forensic scientist can end up in throughout the novel. I suppose if you are a conspiracy theorist then they could make sense. But the reason to read a story is to suspend belief and escape real life for a while, and the Tempe stories certainly make a great way to do that.

Spider Bones contains some unusual subjects too, like auto-erotic suffocation (look it up if you need to know more ) as the first victim has died in some strange self gratifying experiment gone wrong, or has he? Which is the second thing which makes this book readable, the mystery side of things as the plot unravels the strange web following the deceaseds life, and uncovers more riddles.

For me though the greatest achievement in all the “Bones” books and including Spider Bones is the superbly rounded characters. They are all believable, Temperance Brennan (Tempe) the divorced single mum and forensic expert, her on off boyfriend Andrew Ryan (Ryan) Canadian Homicide detective, and all the other characters with human frailties and emotions. Included in the characters profiles is a level of witty humour which rounds them out nicely, making the book more pleasurable to read. That is something else which Kathy Reichs has to be complemented on, mixing humour with world of the post mortem and carrying it off so well.

In addition to the characters, humour and readable story, there is also a lot of factual information about forensic science to take in. Again Reichs makes it simple to grasp, and plausibly uses up to date forensic methods to work with the plot of Spider Bones. You can learn a little about Mitochondrial DNA, fingerprinting and dental identification by reading Spider Bones, and you won’t feel preched to or like someone is being clever for the sake of it as the explanations are made to help characters and the readers understand why and how an identification is made on a body.

So all in all, Spider bones is a great read to while away the time, learn a little, chuckle a little maybe and enjoy a well crafted story with well developed characters you can believe in. Out of 5 stars, I give it 4.5 and if you haven’t tried a Kathy Reichs novel, Spider Bones is a nice introduction as it will stand alone without the other novels.

via Chromium OS builds by Hexxeh.

Having used the Google Chrome browser for a while I have found it to be very quick and also stable. The Chromium OS is a complete operating system (think Windows or Linux) but without the fluff. As most of us fire up hefty PC’s and then spend most of our time on Facebook etc. why not cut the bloat.

As Chromium isn’t available ready to use, you have to use a third party build, but at least it should work straight off of a USB drive. So today I am going to experiment with Chromium OS and I’ll post here how that goes

We found many good reasons for this visit to the Museum too, it’s not too far away from us in Milton Keynes and also it’s free to get in. So with an idea of where it was and the three of us (wife me and Phoebe) we set off, and were there in just over half an hour. We walked into a fantastic array of glass cases full of stuffed animals from all around the world, the first section we visited held all the primates and a lot of birds etc.

A chimp in the Tring Natural History Museum

Display Cabinet at Tring Museum

Tiger at Tring Natural History Museum

Tigers Head

Skeleton of gorilla at The Tring Natural History Museum

Rhinoceros head at the museum

A trip upstairs brought us to even more stuffed and mounted animals, who knew there were so many different species of Zebra, because they had a few to choose from..

Zebra from the first floor of the museum

Another Zebra of a different sub species ?

Around the corner and into a balcony section, there were animals in the centre

Giraffe, Camel and Rhino's on the centre display

At each end of the balcony were wooden display cases which could be opened to reveal creepy crawlies like this butterfly below, which was inside a case full of various specimens.

Butterfly in display case

Each case held different types of insects

Centipedes and Milipedes display

Butterflies, but I may be wrong

My wifes favourites the spiders, some big beasties here

Big Spider, scary things

More of the centre display seen from the balcony

Rhino in the middle of the balcony area

Elephant and tusk as seen from balcony

Fish in a display case

The next area had a history of the domestic dogs, from wolves and dingos up to the present day.

history of the domestic dog

History of domestication of canines

Also there was the natural wildlife like rats and mice etc.

Black Tailed JackRabbit

Skeleton

And then there were some more marine animals

Sea cow was one of many marine mammals on display

At the end of the displays there was another animal which needed including in the photographs

My daughter Phoebe stands in front of display

We all had a great day, it was free to get in and very well maintained with plenty of information. The pictures here are just a small selection of what we took, and that was a small selection of the huge amount on display. Tring Natural History Museum is more than worth the time taken to visit, and we may have to return in the future.