Mrs B and I were lucky enough to go to the Eat Japan Sushi Awards over the weekend. We had a great time, ate some amazing, truly world-class, food and made good use of the complimentary sake and beer. There were seven chefs from seven different countries, all with a very different approach to the challenge. The Czech entrant made a 'cute sexy hedgehog for pregnant ladies'. The US entrant had infused his with soil and the Italian entrant had used only Italian ingredients, even the rice.... Read Full Story

Currently in the midst of base-training which for cycling means lot's of long rides at a pace within yourself to lay the platform for the real improvements later on. On these rides you're constantly monitoring your heart rate, power output or pace to make sure that you're operating at the correct level. The problem is it can get rather dull. I had a couple of hours this afternoon that started out as another Zone 2 'endurance' but I pushed it a little more into Zone 3 'tempo' as I was ... Read Full Story

Finally got round to getting this up on YouTube. Unfortunately I ended up with the obvious use of ELO, Mr Blue Sky as Super Furry Animals, Hello Sunshine wasn't allowed because its WMG copyright. Vimeo doesn't have that kind of restriction so here is the original Director's Cut. Autumn Epic 09 from Adam Bird on Vimeo. Read Full Story

I've been wrestling with how to get some notion of backed-up source control for my Visual Studio projects that don't warrant going into the Esendex Team Foundation Server. Didn't want them to be open source so code.google.com, codeplex.com, etc were all out and I didn't want to pay any money for a secure service. Here's what I came up with. Firstly I discovered that OSX ships with and SVN server, very handy. I followed this link to set it up: http://www.martellventures.com/blog/files/... Read Full Story

I bought this book a while ago after a reference on a blog somewhere. I never got round to reading it but it was referred to during a course Julian and I were on at the University of Nottingham as part of the EMDA High Growth Program. I steeled myself for the read and it was entertaining and thought provoking in pretty much equal measure but I had to push myself through to the end of Part One. The key chapters for me came in the Part Two. 'Reconstruct Market Boundaries' and 'Get The Str... Read Full Story

I bought this book a while ago after a reference on a blog somewhere. I never got round to reading it but it was referred to during a course Julian and I were on at the University of Nottingham as part of the EMDA High Growth Program. I steeled myself for the read and it was entertaining and thought provoking in pretty much equal measure but I had to push myself through to the end of Part One. The key chapters for me came in the Part Two. 'Reconstruct Market Boundaries' and 'Get The Str... Read Full Story

As many of you will know, I've been pretty down on my experiences with Business Link. Well, this may be about to be consigned to history. As part of our acceptance on the EMDA High Growth programme, we had a business review which prompted Julian and I to consider some aspects of how we're running Esendex. It was suggested we speak to Business Link as the gateway to a host of services and, in truth a little grudglingly, we did. One meeting on and we're wiser to some relevant grants and... Read Full Story

As many of you will know, I've been pretty down on my experiences with Business Link. Well, this may be about to be consigned to history. As part of our acceptance on the EMDA High Growth programme, we had a business review which prompted Julian and I to consider some aspects of how we're running Esendex. It was suggested we speak to Business Link as the gateway to a host of services and, in truth a little grudglingly, we did. One meeting on and we're wiser to some relevan... Read Full Story

Running the web site for Beeston Cycling Club has been a real eye-opener as to the crap that stands in the way of legitimate use of the Internet. We run the site with a Wordpress blog at it's heart. Allowing our members to post and comment on rides, events and anything that takes their fancy, sadly it was thigh diameter last night, is key part of what makes our club different. Problem is the couple of us that administer the site have to deal with pages and pages of spam comments. Link... Read Full Story

Running the web site for Beeston Cycling Club has been a real eye-opener as to the crap that stands in the way of legitimate use of the Internet. We run the site with a Wordpress blog at it's heart. Allowing our members to post and comment on rides, events and anything that takes their fancy, sadly it was thigh diameter last night, is key part of what makes our club different. Problem is the couple of us that administer the site have to deal with pages and pages of spam comments. ... Read Full Story