Daily Archives: March 4, 2012

What all golf courses should be like

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What all golf courses should be like, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I grew up playing on links (i.e. seaside courses laid out in sand-dunes) and I still think that only links courses are ‘real’ golf courses. Today we came on a lovely links course which is one of Ireland’s best-kept secrets — the Narin and Portnoo club at Narin. Lovely, unpretentious and utterly charming.

What you learn if your formative years are spent on links courses is never to hit the ball high. Because most of the time you’re battling against serious wind, the name of the game is to keep the ball out of it.

Er, I can bore for Ireland on this topic. (Hmmm… I see that I already have — here.)

Larger image here.

Raspberry Pi today. Jam tomorrow

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Raspberry Pi project – a philanthropic effort to create the contemporary equivalent of the BBC Micro of yesteryear – has graduated from idealistic vapourware dreamed up in Cambridge to a finished, deliverable product manufactured in China. (In a nice touch, the Pi device comes in two flavours, Model A and Model B, just like the BBC machine, which was also designed in Cambridge.) Over the next few months, we’ll see container-loads of the little computer boards delivered to these shores. The time has come, therefore, to start thinking about how this astonishing breakthrough can be exploited in our schools.

Here are a few suggestions.

First, we need to jettison some baggage from the past. In particular, we have to accept that ICT has become a toxic brand in the context of British secondary schools…