Elba was a lot of fun; it’s very biased toward beaches, but there are plenty of these, they are easy to get to and, generally, free. For my money, the best of these ones that we went to were Aquavivata (or something like that) and Sansone (next to each other — I swam to the latter) and Capo Bianco. Both of these are withing spitting distance of Portoferraio. which is the biggest town. It turns out that Capo Bianco is part of a marine reserve, which explains, with no fishing; this probably explains why the place was so rich with life that otherwise would have ended up on pasta. But, with a pebble beach, a slow sloping seabed still only 1 or 2m in depth some 50m from shore and with many rocks, and a headland it’s ideal for swimming and snorkelling.

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to my Silly Ideas blog. Poking through the source files, it appears that I haven’t had a silly idea for a long time, which is a pity. I’ve decided, however, to create a new category on this blog and move stuff here; the wiki technology is just a little too long in the tooth now.

The last holiday that I went on produced a long stream of blog posts; this one, I suspect will result in only one or two, which reflects the different character of places. India is a place of conflicts, confusion and excitement; Elba, on the other hand, is a holiday resort, universal beautiful, relaxed; in short, wonderful for swimming, sitting on the beach and general relaxation, but not so wonderful for writing about on a blog.

Some advance on the knowledge blog front this week. Firstly, myself and Simon Cockell spent a short while setting up a development and testing environment and wrote our first wordpress plugin — “Peaches” based around the Hello Dolly plugin, but with the lyrics from the Stranglers song instead. We finished this yesterday just before automattic released Wordpress 3.0. Hopefully, it will be easy to upgrade. Rather more usefully, I got the very first version of a reference list plugin working. At the moment, it just transforms DOIs into hyperlinks.

For the third year in a row, I managed to the Northern Rock cyclone this weekend. It was a lovely occasion as before; the weather was cool in the morning with a brisk wind, but it warmed up a little and the wind dropped by the end of the day. The numbers have gone up slightly and it was good to see so many cyclists around.