Curry and a The Pub Crawl That Maths Planned

Posted on 2009/05/17 09:55:46 (May 2009).

[Tuesday 12th May]
The chap who was my first manager (I'm now moving onto my fourth!) when I started at the current company is still closely involved with the work of my (former!) team, and so makes regular visits to London. He was here this week, and as has become the tradition, at least one night during his stay, we go out for a curry with him. In the absence of any other ideas we fell back to the default venue - Masala Zone.

It was quite a large group this time, and I was sat at the opposite end of the table so we didn't really get a chance to talk - and as he'd only arrived this morning he was quite jetlagged and was keen to get back to his hotel straight after dinner. So instead we arranged to have lunch a bit later on in the week.

Some of the rest of us decided as the night was still young we'd like to have a couple of drinks, and I jumped on the opportunity to tick off a few more pubs I haven't been to yet in central London.

We started off at The Clachan, which I can't pretend I really liked all that much (and I'm not really sure why the usually very reliable pubs.com featured it) - it struck me as a pretty generic city centre pub with the usual irritating trappings (fruit machines, music, etc). From there we proceeded to The Guinea, which I'd been to before, but one of my colleagues hadn't. I was much happier here. Finally we rounded off the evening at The Punch Bowl, of Madonna and Guy Richie fame, which I rather liked - it is actually a genuine pub still, it didn't strike me as incredibly expensive or particularly snotty despite the rather well heeled clientele in there. In fact if anything those well to do patrons really added something to this pub - it was rather nice to be surrounded by glamorous and well dressed people for a change.

I was particularly pleased as this evening's pub selection was planned at least partly with the assistance of my current side project. Whilst I'm still not quite ready to officially "launch" it, I think you probably have a good idea by now of what it's all about. At the weekend I had implemented the algorithm to determine the great circle distance between two GPS coordinates, which had helped me this evening to ascertain that these three pubs, although in quite different districts of central London, were actually within a fairly short walk of each other. There are lots of pubs in London, and lots of web apps will already show you pubs near to where you're currently located. If you want to spend the evening hopping between a series of mediocre pubs with very short walks inbetween, then that's fine. If, like me, you don't mind (or even actively enjoy) a slightly longer stroll between pubs to get to somewhere you're actually going to like, then it seems like something else is probably called for.

There was something deeply satisfying about being able to apply sines, cosines and arc cosines to determine where to have a beer.

Ah, the Punch Bowl, that's a good pub. We used to go there when I worked on Carlos Place. Could never remember exactly where it was though...

Posted by RobertC at 2009/06/02 21:58:28.

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