Simon Butcher

With my birthday coming up in a few days, I've been struggling to find some time for myself. I keep inventing projects for myself, but never actually have the time to dig into them and make any satisfying progress.

One example is that I still haven't made any progress on my appalling level of French, and there's no hope in hell that I'll be running in the 20km of Brussels half-marathon this year.

I suppose I need to keep in mind what Ferris Bueller once said, “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Submarine cables have always fascinated me, initially from the sheer length of some of these cables, or from the sheer number of them, but also from the fact that the concept was commercially proven as long ago as 1850!

Of course, back then the cables were simple copper wires wrapped in gutta-percha (a kind of latex) and couldn't compete with today's fancy multi-strand fibre optic self-healing rings.

Curiously, PIPE have formally opened a blog that follows the installation of their new PPC-1 cable between Guam and Australia, which is set to be quite interesting.

This evening I had the privilege of being taken to Delirium, the amazing multimedia spectacular from Cirque du Soleil. Needless to say, I was completely blown away.

This production superbly combines dance, acrobatics, live and pre-produced music, along with live and pre-produced video into an incredible well paced audio-visual feast that couldn't give anyone a chance to get bored.