Michael Nolan

So it was Moonlight on Saturday.  For the first time Explorers and Scouts were let off from different points - Scouts from Camelot theme park and Explorers (plus the two Veteran teams) from Yarrow Valley Park just outside Chorley.

We did fairly well losing just 2 or 3 lives depending on whether one of them counted.  Our plan to walk down the A59 stopping at every pub, Chinese and fish and chip shop on the way was scuppered by Chris changing the rules so we had to do without such luxuries.  In the end it was a good job we headed west before Burscough as continuing to Aughton would have added a significant distance and we were pretty tight for time.

Our total distance was 32km (about 20 miles) which isn’t too bad really!  We won the Veteran prize beating the firemen by a few minutes (and possibly a life).  Most of Alcatraz’s winners took the Explorer trophy and first prize overall while 45th Ormskirk won for the Scouts and Leigh, Tom, Nev and Jamie won the catcher prize.

My plan was to get home and start programming for PHP Throwdown.  Well that did happen… for about 2 hours before I went to bed for 9 hours and woke up feeling worse than I had before sleeping.  I’ve done a bit of work on the website and I’ll try to finish it off over the next week or so.

So next weekend is Moonlight. The finish was announced yesterday as Halsall School, a place I should know fairly well having done Explorers there for the last few months! Still a team member short but hopefully we’ll be able to sort that out before next Saturday.

Also next Saturday is the PHP Throwdown competition. Take a look at the website if you’re interested in all the details but it’s basically a race over 24 hours to make the best website application you can in PHP.  I’d really like to take part but I’m going to struggle a little I think - I’ll be up at 8am on Saturday but won’t be able to start programming until after 10pm and the last slot starts at 6pm so I’ll be 4 hours behind without writing even a line of code.

I’ve got an idea for a website so I’m going to try to work it out on paper this week to give me a chance of being able to complete it but it’ll take a lot of work and I’m going to be knackered by 6pm Sunday!

After several false starts doing the blogging thing - I kept it hidden so that people wouldn’t notice - I finally think that maybe I have something to talk about on a regular (and possibly even frequent) basis.

My Advent Calender published in the weeks up to Christmas was sort of blog like and although I gave up two days before Christmas, it proved that I can write and that was a pretty narrow subject matter.

On this blog I’m going to cover a pretty broad mix of things from Scouting and walking to work related matter such as developing with the Symfony Framework and web services in Higher Education.

So welcome, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed and give me a nudge when I’m slow at blogging.