The Pond at Chateau Gladstone (including live Pondcam)_Travel & Tourism

The Pond at Chateau Gladstone (with dead Pondcam)The pond was constructed in the fall of 1999 and actually consists of twoponds connected via a short stream and a waterfall. The total water volumeis around 1,000 gallons. The pond is instrumented to the extent of havinga camera (see below) and a temperature sensor in it. See the Chicken RFID page to see my latest project.The WeatherThe full gory details of the local weather can be found on this page.All graphs can be seen here -- this includes a calendar for historical information.I've just started a new page which describes the various sensors that I have.NewsWildwater World Championships22 Jul 2007We just returned from Charlotte, NC to watch our niece (Olivia Churchill - GBR) compete in the Junior Wildwater World Championships (Kayak). She ended up with 2 bronze medals for individual classes, and one gold for a team class. The Charlotte races were held at the US National Whitewater Center which has a completely manmade course suitable for the short sprint races. Apparently the water is swimming pool clean -- and there are some enormous pumps that pump it round to generate the raging torrent to kayak down. The photo shows Olivia on her second run (the sprint races involve adding the times from two runs together) which led to one of her bronze medals.USAir managed to cancel our (8 am) flight down to Charlotte on Friday morning and couldn't get us there until 8pm -- by which time we had missed the team race. For a full trip report from my sister's point of view (she was travelling with the British team), see her trip report.Hats off to Tilley Endurables11 Jul 2006I have worn a Tilley hat (a size 8⅛ T3) for 15 years or so, and it finally wore out after too many visits to the washing machine. I wanted to get a couple of new hats, so I got the catalog, and measured my head, and ordered two (a TH5 and an LTM6). I was somewhat suprised that the sizing guide ended up with me being a 7�. Of course, the hats showed up and were too small -- well, actually they fitted on my head, but were too tight (they are supposed to be held on by gravity and not by pressure on the forehead).I shipped them back, asking for a size 8 (which is what my old T3 had shrunk to). On a whim, I put the tattered remains of the T3 in the box, along with a note requesting replacement. I know that they say that their hats are warranteed for life, but I had no idea if it would actually work.Imagine my suprise, when, a week later, a box arrived with three size 8 hats: T3 (replacement for my 15 year old hat), and the correct sizes of LTM6 and TH5. These guys come highly recommended.Web Crawlers and Content Compression6 Jul 2006Since I managed to get content-compression working on my web server (which was way harder than it ought to have been), I have noticed that most of the web crawlers do not make use of it. However, the googlebot and Yahoo Slurp both do enable compression, so it is possible.I have started sending email to all the contact points that I can find when spiders reach my website. One implemented compression within hours, one discovered that they had a bug which prevented it from working, and a couple more are looking into implementing it. The rest have yet to reply. I have now built an automatic Hall of Shame page that lists the current sinners. What you don't see from this page is that many crawlers do support compression. The suprising thing is that some flavors of IE 6.0 don't appear to do compression. For all the news, please see the diary.Winterizing the pond....Visitor count:Last updated: April 18, 2001Philip GladstoneAPRSWXNET historyor see how it works.