Sun employee & fanatical motorcyclist Mike Belch's Weblog Biker Mike's Weblog

"Serendipity" came top of a recent survey of the United Kingdom's favourite words. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way."

The photo on the right of a dolphin in front of a wreck is a great example of serendipity. It was taken by my good biking friend Ralph Mortimore. Ralphy, as he is better known to his friends, is an accomplished and respected diving photographer. He took this picture entirely by accident one day when he was the first to arrive at the "Giannis D" wreck in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt and found a dolphin hanging around in the near-perfect clear water. It looks like the dolphin is superimposed, but it just sat there long enough in the water for Ralphy to get the shot of a lifetime. He didn't set out that morning to get such a great shot, he just happened by chance to be in the right place at the right time and something wonderful happened as a consequence. Serendipity!

Footnote: Like many people whose work is acclaimed by others, Ralphy doesn't consider this picture to be his finest work. Underwater photography is fiendishly difficult, so an accidental shot like this is worth far less to him than a deeply technical close up study, which can take him 30 minutes or more to set up. See more of Ralphy's work at Ralphy Images.

I like social networking. Some of the sites I don't get the point of, but others I find really useful. The two that I like the most are Facebook and last.fm.

Facebook allows me to keep tabs on close friends and colleagues. Interestingly I have contact with more Sun Microsystems colleagues on Facebook that I do in my day to day job — I really like being able to keep in touch with colleagues that I have worked with in the past. Facebook also reveals more about the person and their life than simply sitting together on a conference call or in a meeting room could ever do. By signing up to Facebook you are making a conscious decision to share more about your life with your colleagues and friends — but not necessarily at the cost of privacy as you can restrict access to your profile if you wish. If you know me and want to add me as a friend on Facebook, here is my profile.

last.fm allows me to share my love of music. It has two neat features. The first is automatic radio stations. Using the last.fm application I can type in the name of an artist and it will play a continuous stream of songs by that artist and others of a similar genre. The second feature is the user profile and charts. I can see, and share with others, all of the songs that I have listened to recently — either in the last few minutes or even past months. The application tracks what I play in iTunes or on my iPod and automatically generates charts of my top artists, songs and albums. It also gives me widgets (like any good Web 2.0 site should!) that I can embed elsewhere. See the last.fm widget which should appear on the right side of this page. This shows you what I'm listening to right now and lets you see my full profile.

Today is my daughter Sam's 16th birthday. Happy Birthday Sam. I just want you to know that your dad, who still thinks like a 19 year old a times, is shocked to suddenly discover that he has a daughter who is old enough to get married, smoke, or even go to war. I hope you do none of those things any time soon!

I have just rediscovered The Who after I watched the first programme in a new BBC TV documentary series The Seven Ages of Rock. It is hard to believe it has been so long since I listened to such classics as Won't Get Fooled Again or Baba O'Riley.

On the lunchtime news today I saw a cover version of a Who song that was a total revelation. The video below, currently one of the most popular on YouTube, is a cover of My Generation sung by a 40-strong band with a combined age of over 3000! The Zimmers were brought together by a BBC crew filming a programme about the plight of old people in Britain today (think of Grandpa Simpson stuck in his old people's home). I really love the end of the video where the instruments get trashed in true Who fashion. The song is going to be released as a charity single and the TV programme Power To The People: The Great Granny Chart Invasion will air on BBC TV on Monday May 28th.

My cool website of the day is geograph.org.uk which links user-contributed photographs to grid squares on the UK map. The site provides photos of geographical interest - both human and physical - that can be searched, browsed and displayed. Images can also be loaded into Google Earth. All images are released into the public domain using a Creative Commons licence meaning they can be used for other purposes.

I have contributed a few images and have had great fun looking at pictures of places I have lived or visited. I keep a digital camera in the panniers of my motorcycle so I will most likely post more images over the coming months as I travel around the country.

Over the past year I have been a contributor to a numer of Wikipedia articles. I like the idea of wikis and have helped drive adoption of a number of wiki based initiatives within Sun. However, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with Wikipedia. I am tired of the endless vandalism, the number of anonymous contributors and the infighting that goes on between contributors within articles leading to constant changes and reversions to other people's work.

I was interested today to receive a message, via my Wikipedia talk page, from another contributor who has got hacked off for similar reasons and is defecting to Citizendium. Having read their "Fundamental Policies" I like the idea of a wiki based encyclopedia that might just overcome some of the problems faced by Wikipedia. I have sent off an email to register as an author and am cautiously optimistic about the venture, but remain slightly sceptical about the project's abilities to stop infighting between opinionated contributors.

I will keep you posted in future blog entries.

I am a sock puppet. I didn't know I was until recently but now I know what a sock puppet is I am proud to be one. Sock puppet can have two meanings. One meaning is rather negative, it is applied to someone who masquerades as someone they are not, by having multiple identities to achieve dishonest results e.g. having two eBay accounts and using one to bid-up the price of an auction listed by the other account. However, the other meaning, while close to the former, is for a person who uses the Internet or another medium to publicise something without fully revealing who they are. Right here, right now you are reading the blog of a Sun employee and would use this to balance your opinion of anything positive that I write about Sun - and there is lots to write at the moment - but I could equally post something positive about Sun in another form such as a personal blog on blogspot.com or in a web based discussion forum and you wouldn't know that I was a Sun employee.

So why am I a sock puppet? I recently wrote a letter in response to an article in a UK newspaper. The article was about an incident that occurred at my daughter's school, some of which portrayed the school in a negative way. I wrote the letter which was published on the newspaper's website in praise of the school, its staff and its policies stating, quite correctly, that we had moved across the country five years ago to get our children into better schools. I stated very clearly in the letter that I was a parent of a child at the school. What I didn't state was that I am also on the governing body of the school, and am therefore responsible with my fellow governors for the policies on which the school is run, including the policy at the centre of the incident in question. I wrote the letter as a parent. That I am also a governor was irrelevant to me in the context of the letter that I wrote. So there you have it, I confess that I am now a sock puppet, albeit an unapologetic one.

There is an old saying which goes "It's not what you know that matters, it's who you know". I beg to differ. The real saying should be "It's not what you know, nor is it who you know, it's what you know about who you know that really matters". If you have information about the people you know and the things they get up to it puts you in a very powerful position. I am reminded of this because I have just discovered the wonderful world of web mining.

A couple of weeks ago I put a link to Site Meter on this blog (right side of this page under my Technorati profile) and on the Freewheelers blood bike website that I run. Site Meter puts a little icon on each web page. Every time someone accesses a page it pings Site Meter with a whole ream of information about the visitor, where he /she is located, OS, browser, screen resolution and all the pages on your site that are visited. Armed with this information you can tell a lot about how people use your website and how they find it. It is that last bit that really fascinates me: looking at how people find the site. In today's "referral" information - which lists the pages that people were on before they clicked on the link to my blog - I see a Google search result for the query "how many miles do you have to drive to recharge a flat car battery". In the case of my blog I recently posted about my experiences during a week on blood bike duty which included one time when I had a flat battery. It amazes me to think that Google would refer someone to my blog for an answer to that question.

Aside from idle curiosity, web mining can have serious uses. Once I had collected a reasonable amount of data on the Freewheelers webiste I looked at the Site Meter site and noticed that a lot of people were finding items on the humour page, which features a number of bike-related jokes, pictures and cartoons. I realised that people were looking at the humour page then going elsewhere. This means we were missing out on potential new riders or sponsors so I put a message at the top of the humour page saying "If you have found this page using Google or some other search engine then please take a look at the rest of the site to see the wonderful work done by Freewheelers EVS. If you like what we do then please support us and tell other people about us.". The result? More people who visit the humour page are now clicking through pages on the rest of the site. As a charity we depend entirely on people's generosity. We haven't had any more online PayPal donations as a result, but we have had an increase in the number of people contacting us to find out about our service.

Web mining is a fascinating topic. You can learn so much about how people use your website and tune it accordingly. For small sites like Freewheelers or my blog the amount of data is relatively small, but for an Amazon or eBay it is huge. For that kind of analysis you need really powerful computers with lots of storage - just like the ones that Sun sell!

A while back I won a competition with SN Brussels Airlines for a two day trip to Brussels. I originally offered the trip to my parents, but as my father is sick they were forced to give it up. So on Sunday my wife and I set off to Brussels.

My wife is not a frequent flyer so had no concept of Travelympics. However she was impressed when we arrived at Bristol Airport, parked in a specially reserved section, bypassed the checkin queues, went through the fast track security checks and walked into the airline lounge for our first gin & tonic of the day. I fear that she now has a false impression of business travel, thus reducing my future potential for sympathy at the end of a long and gruelling trip.

Our hotel was the excellent 5-star Le Plaza. I was especially pleased to discover that the short walk from the hotel to the Grand Place took us past my favourite bar - La Lunette - which has a good range of Belgian beers, all of which can be served in a huge one litre half-moon shaped glass called a "lunette".

Mixed weather meant we alternated between baking in the sunshine and dodging heavy rain showers, but nothing could dampen our visit to an excellent city. We pigged out for the whole time on beer, waffles, chocolates and some of the best food we have had in years!

Our trip home was uneventful with no lounge access unfortunately. However, arriving at Bristol airport is always a pleasure and I boosted Travelympics score by being first off the transfer bus into the passport queue, and having our bag arrive on the luggage belt just as we walked up to it. 30 minutes from aircraft touchdown to walking through the front door of our house really is a pleasure, but once again gives my wife a false impression of what travel is about.

Our heartfelt thanks to SN Brussels and the Hotel Le Plaza for an excellent holiday.

Technorati tags: Travel

A message to my daughters - 11 year old Katie and 15 year old Sam: "Stop surfing the web during lessons and go back to your school work!".

Katie told me yesterday that she had discovered my blog during a school lesson. Sam told me today that she showed my blog to a friend in her physics lesson who had commented on my blog photo's resemblance to UK B-list celebrity Tommy Walsh. I'm not sure if I should be insulted because personally I think Tommy is quite cool.

I have just returned from two business trips. One was a week in San Francisco, the other a week in Warsaw. In both cases my travel was made more bearable by competing in The Travelympics. "The what?" I hear you say.

My colleague John Prentice introduced me to Travelympics. Think of it like the Olympic decathalon where you compete over several events, except instead of running, shooting and throwing you do things like check-in, passport control, boarding and baggage claim. It is every bit as competitive as the real Olympics except it happens every week for the seasoned business traveller rather than every four years.

My two trips this month were very different. In the first I got a Travelympics gold medal. The second was almost did-not-finish.

My San Francisco trip went really well. I dropped off my rental car at London, having faced no traffic jams on the 135 mile journey from home (+5 points) and sat down on the shuttle bus to discover I was the only passenger and was to be taken directly to my departure terminal (+5 points). Walking across the terminal I got held up by a huge family group blocking the way with a trolley full of cases and boxes (-5 points). There was no queue at the checkin (+5 points) and I managed to secure an exit seat (+10 points). Having a frequent flyer gold card I get to use the Fast Track security lane (+5 points) and get access to Virgin Atlantic's excellent lounge at Heathrow and I managed to get a seat in my favourite area of the lounge by the windows (+2 points). Following a nice breakfast and a massage (+5 points) I walked down to the departure gate and, due to my gold status, get to walk to the very front of the boarding queue (+2 points). When I handed over my boarding pass the machine beeps as it passes through and the lady writes a new seat number on my boarding card - a free upgrade to Upper Class (+20 points). On the flight I get another massage (+2 points). The rest of the journey was uneventful other than I losing 10 points by picking the wrong passport queue in the immigration hall at San Francisco airport. This was however offset by a points gain due to Avis upgrading my rental car.

Contrast this with my trip to Poland. My taxi was late (-5 points). My flight was with KLM with whom I have no frequent flyer status so I was forced to join the normal, crowded check-in queues (-5 points). My check-in queue is held up for 15 minutes by an old couple one of whom is being denied boarding because her passport has expired. I chose not to jump lines so I waited for the whole time. In the meantime other people who were behind me in the queue had changed lines and checked in (-10 points). The airport terminal was crowded at 5:30am and is full of people going to sunny places on holiday. I was forced to join the end of a huge boarding queue (-5 points) and then get held up even further when the bus that takes us out to the aircraft (-5 points for not having a jetway) is full and I had to wait for the next one. We are then denied boarding for 20 minutes because the aircraft's external generator isn't working (-20 points). Eventually we boarded and I was delighted to see I had been given an exit seat without asking for it (+15 points). We landed late in Amsterdam due to the technical problems and restricted landing slots, so I was forced to run across the terminal to get to my connecting flight (-10 points). I made the Warsaw flight. Just. I was delighted to see that my colleague, who was joining me at Amsterdam for the Warsaw trip, had reserved me an aisle seat next to him (+10 points). However, there was no space in the overhead bins for my briefcase so I was forced to stow it several rows away (-5 points).

I won't go into the rest of the trip other than to say that on my flight from Amsterdam back to Bristol today I was the last to go through the boarding gate yet I was the first to board the aircraft as I chose the perfect place to stand on the transfer bus. I pulled off the same trick at Bristol so I was first into the passport control and first into the baggage reclaim hall where my bag was immediately opposite me on the belt. It made a 3:30am wake up call in the hotel this morning seem almost worth it!

So there you have it. Travelympics - the competitive pursuit of travelling in style, without interruption or hitch. It is a great way to celebrate those delightful times when things go right with business travel.

Jack is 400 years old today. The Union Jack that is. Or to give its correct name, the Union Flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Since 1606 us Brits have been proud to fly the Union Jack which is a combination of the flags of Saint George (for England), Saint Andrew (for Scotland) and Saint Patrick (for Ireland).

Much has been written about the flag over the years and the Internet now gives certain pedantic people the chance to shine by writing long pieces on subjects such as how to correctly draw the Union Jack. Any boy scout in the UK worth his woggle will tell you that to fly the Union Jack upside down is an internationally recognised distress signal. However, what distresses me now is that in politically correct Britain many people consider those who fly the Union Jack to be racist - as if the national flag is the preserve of the extreme right wing. There was a famous case in 1987 in Rochdale, a town in the North West of England, where a taxi company was asked to remove the Union Jack from its vehicles in case it offended the local Asian immigrant population. Ironically the taxi company owner was himself a first generation immigrant from Pakistan and was in fact proud to fly the flag of his new country, as were many of his drivers. The town council learned nothing from this and in 2004 the same situation came up again when taxi drivers were told to stop flying the cross of St George during a major football tournament. In another incident in nearby Burnley in 2002 a policeman was reported by a colleague and disciplined for displaying a small flag inside his patrol vehice.

I find it refreshing when I go to countries like Turkey, France and the USA (to pick three countries that I have visited recently) to see that they fly their flags with pride. Good for them.

I am proud to work for a multinational, mulitcultural company like Sun where neither race nor religion are a bar to progress. I am really happy to work in a team with colleagues from the USA, Australia and Germany. But let me stand up here and now and say that I am British and I am proud to fly the Union Jack flag on my blog today.

Happy Birthday Jack!

I used to work for Sun in the Education market. A large part of my job consisted of visiting schools and telling them what a wonderful place the Internet was. In the heady days of the mid 90's the Internet was indeed a truly wonderful thing that promised so much. We couldn't have imagined back then things like blogging, eBay, free email with 2GB storage.  Even Google was nothing but a dream.

Back then I used to say the following to school teachers, school board members and parents: "The greatest strength of the Internet is that anyone can publish information. The greatest weakness of the Internet is that anyone can publish information". In other words we needed to teach children how to be discerning in believing what they read, to consider the merit of each piece of information by trying to find out if the publisher is a credible source. Information retrieval skills were something that children would have to learn fast.

So 10 years later why haven't I learned for myself? A couple of years ago I scared myself rigid by reading every link that Google gave me on Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. I read it all and convinced myself that things were going to go horribly wrong with my father's treatment. I took at face value everything I read. Most of the stuff that scared me I only half understood because it wasn't aimed at me. It was information written by doctors for doctors and I am not a doctor and it scared me.

My father is now suffering from acute myeloid leukaemia. This time I am being much more selective in what I read. Not because I don't trust the sources, just that I don't trust myself. Lots of people have published information on Leukaemia, but not all of it is intended for my consumption. What it boils down to is a need to re-write what I originally said about the Internet, changing just one word.

So here you have it. Biker Mike's (most likely non-original) thought of the week: ""The greatest strength of the Internet is that anyone can publish information. The greatest weakness of the Internet is that anyone can read information".