We just spent a lovely few days in Shakespeare Country. We stayed at the Ambleside guest house and also managed to visit Warwick Castle while we were there.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a lovely small town and we enjoyed several walks through the town centre (it only took about 30 minutes to walk around it). I highly recommend the Bensons and Crabtree and Evelyn cafes there. We ate a lot and had quite a few excellent cream teas. For those who don’t know, English Cream Tea is usually served with scones and Clotted cream (an English specialty), butter and a selection of jams. Lovely stuff
We also went to see a production of The Canterbury Tales Part 2 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The performances were quite good, and I left wanting to see the first part but we had to leave the next day. We also spent a lot of time sitting idly by the river next to the theatre, watching the ducks and swans go by. It was a very relaxing experience. We tried to get a river cruise but nobody seemed to be doing any at the time. Perhaps it was too cold at the time.

Nevertheless, we had a great time and we will definitely just go there someday in the summer once again to sit by that lovely serene river and just relax …

As always, I’ve uploaded all the pictures to Flickr.

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.