Friday, September 17, 2004
Such a good day.
I have:
A. Finally added some scans of some of my photographs to this site. Well, to Flickr's site actually, but Picasa wanted a download, which I wasn't doing. Flickr is pretty damn cool. Except for me using the 10Mb monthly limit in a few minutes. Serves me right for making such big scans (I didn't mean too, it's just that 100dpi seems so blurry). Anyway, a selection of pics can be found here (hope I've got the public access URL, if not yell), or from the cunning plug in the side bar (all I need now is an Amazon ad or two).
Apologies in advance for the poor quality scanning, but I only got better a long way into it, and for the blurry whitish patch on many of the images (usually at the right, or on the bottom). It is a fault of Boots' development process, and has become more apparent with scanning. I'm not best pleased about it, especially as it ruins some of the best shots. And developing at Boots isn't exactly cheap (though it is the cheapest on the High Street, including the "cheap" chains).
Before you ask, I can be sure that fault isn't at my end, as it occurs on films that were used in different cameras [one SLR and one very old, very cheap point and click camera]. The films themselves were from different brands and of different ages.
Oh, and if you want a free account, can you email me first, so I can invite you, and hopefully I get upgraded. Ta muchly if you do.
One quibble with Flickr - they use the alt descriptor, not the title descriptor inside the img tags. Which means the mouse-over comments don't appear in Mozilla (and presumably Netscape). Alt is what should be displayed when the image isn't displayed, for example "The image could not be displayed. An image of X was included here". Title displays when the cursor moves over an image (and it displays this in both Mozilla/Netscape and Internet Explorer). So when you want to add sarcastic comments to pictures, such as those featured on GfB, title is what you should be using. It's quite annoying when one has to right click and select "properties" to find out what is being said. Can you tell I'm a Mozilla-er?
B. I have had long enough staring out of the window at work (due to the stuff I'm supposed to be working on being in Hellaby. It's in Yorkshire apparently), that I've managed to figure out the flight routes and holding patterns into Heathrow. At one point they had three planes circling on the same route, all directly above each other, and all incredibly synchronised. And a very worrying distance between them. When planes are so big, the standard of 2,000 ft vertical clearance doesn't seem quite so big. Even more worrying was the straight flight path that clipped the top of the holding cylinder. I'm sure it can't have been that close.
C. I have been giving serious thought to the optimum structuring of elastic-band balls. Haphazard or organised core? Layering of types and sizes? Layering of tension? Is crocheting [hooking an errant loop round the back of the ball, rather than taking the band off and starting again] ever acceptable? Does it have to be spherical at every level? Of course I haven't actually done enough sampling to find an answer to any of these yet - I wasn't that board (and I hurt my hand yesterday).
D. Glad it wasn't me stories. That big yacht which sank in the Irish Sea. In the news coverage of it, they had a clip of an interview of one of the older members of the crew, in which he said the following:
"I filled the wheelhouse with petrol and threw a match in to it. I'll never do that again". What both the BBC and ITN didn't show was the comment after this, which was something along the lines of "because it knocked me backwards". Channel 4 did show it, and it casts rather a different light on the comment. The newspapers by and large ignore it, except the Telegraph has the sentence continuing in a comment about having half his eyebrows left. (Are they allowed to edit quotes?).
And as for the trawler that ignored them ...
D2. World's largest yacht hits rocks. Oh dear. Just as long as it wasn't that rock near Australia.
D3. Batman on Buckingham Palace. How dull. They could have at least let a corgi or two have a go. Makes it a bit more sporting than having a middle-aged man with a paunch being watched by a middle-aged man with a paunch, which is being held up by his gun.
D4. Men in t-shirts shock! In House of Commons. The best part of all of this was the various media organisations being indignant that they were contacted when the BBC had been told about it in advance. The BBC apparently treated it like most of the tip-offs they get, and put it in the "yeah right" pile. Whereas organisations like Sky and ITN were both claiming they would never have done such a thing and would have reported it immediately to anyone who might have needed to know. Yeah right. They would either have ignored it, or sent a camera crew out to scavenge information, and then sat on it until the time was right, and they'd secured enough syndication deals.
D5. Fears raise Dome security.
David Blunkett declared today that protecting the Millennium Dome was a "primary concern" of the government. Whilst there has been no official comment on the new measures, sources close to the government have confirmed that a special corps of Dome protection personnel is planned.
In an address to the Welsh police servicepersons’ conference, Mr Blunkett stated that "We must protect normal British life from the terrors of such attacks. The welfare of the public is our key priority. As such, it is vital we increase the safety of public institutions, including our most honoured and high profile ones. It is my intention to keep Britain safe for Britons. Our first step in this must be to ensure the survival of the Millennium Dome, the unassailed face of Britain".
Mr Blunkett has been under increasing pressure to act to protect keystone sites following a spate of high-profile security lapses. In a further blow, this weekend the News of the World is expected to reveal that one of its staff secured a wide-access job in Downing Street. This succession of embarrassments has lead to speculation that the Home Secretary is facing an internal campaign to oust him, following what was termed as "blundering" during the run-up to the European elections.
[Full story, free subscription may be necessary].
Something to make me smileVandal daubs DNA code in street. Of course the BBC get it wrong and call it DNA. It's a purine base. Just a base, none of this ribose malarkey. Muppets.
Remind me to move to East Anglia soon - other stories from that section:
- Amnesty for traffic cone thieves.
- Sugar beet harvest to crowd roads.
And I thought our local paper, featuring a sunflower story on its front page for about the 6th time since July, was bad. It's a weekly paper by the way.
About the pictures - I'll get round to sorting out a guide to them at some point, having never quite finished, nor published the details of the 27th June, and corresponding set.
Does anyone else get half-done blog entries for certain weekends, only to not have enough time during the week to type during the weekend, and then another entry generating weekend occurs. Somehow blogging has turned into homework (including the not doing it, and feeling guilty about it).
Anyhoo,
I have:
A. Finally added some scans of some of my photographs to this site. Well, to Flickr's site actually, but Picasa wanted a download, which I wasn't doing. Flickr is pretty damn cool. Except for me using the 10Mb monthly limit in a few minutes. Serves me right for making such big scans (I didn't mean too, it's just that 100dpi seems so blurry). Anyway, a selection of pics can be found here (hope I've got the public access URL, if not yell), or from the cunning plug in the side bar (all I need now is an Amazon ad or two).
Apologies in advance for the poor quality scanning, but I only got better a long way into it, and for the blurry whitish patch on many of the images (usually at the right, or on the bottom). It is a fault of Boots' development process, and has become more apparent with scanning. I'm not best pleased about it, especially as it ruins some of the best shots. And developing at Boots isn't exactly cheap (though it is the cheapest on the High Street, including the "cheap" chains).
Before you ask, I can be sure that fault isn't at my end, as it occurs on films that were used in different cameras [one SLR and one very old, very cheap point and click camera]. The films themselves were from different brands and of different ages.
Oh, and if you want a free account, can you email me first, so I can invite you, and hopefully I get upgraded. Ta muchly if you do.
One quibble with Flickr - they use the alt descriptor, not the title descriptor inside the img tags. Which means the mouse-over comments don't appear in Mozilla (and presumably Netscape). Alt is what should be displayed when the image isn't displayed, for example "The image could not be displayed. An image of X was included here". Title displays when the cursor moves over an image (and it displays this in both Mozilla/Netscape and Internet Explorer). So when you want to add sarcastic comments to pictures, such as those featured on GfB, title is what you should be using. It's quite annoying when one has to right click and select "properties" to find out what is being said. Can you tell I'm a Mozilla-er?
B. I have had long enough staring out of the window at work (due to the stuff I'm supposed to be working on being in Hellaby. It's in Yorkshire apparently), that I've managed to figure out the flight routes and holding patterns into Heathrow. At one point they had three planes circling on the same route, all directly above each other, and all incredibly synchronised. And a very worrying distance between them. When planes are so big, the standard of 2,000 ft vertical clearance doesn't seem quite so big. Even more worrying was the straight flight path that clipped the top of the holding cylinder. I'm sure it can't have been that close.
C. I have been giving serious thought to the optimum structuring of elastic-band balls. Haphazard or organised core? Layering of types and sizes? Layering of tension? Is crocheting [hooking an errant loop round the back of the ball, rather than taking the band off and starting again] ever acceptable? Does it have to be spherical at every level? Of course I haven't actually done enough sampling to find an answer to any of these yet - I wasn't that board (and I hurt my hand yesterday).
D. Glad it wasn't me stories. That big yacht which sank in the Irish Sea. In the news coverage of it, they had a clip of an interview of one of the older members of the crew, in which he said the following:
"I filled the wheelhouse with petrol and threw a match in to it. I'll never do that again". What both the BBC and ITN didn't show was the comment after this, which was something along the lines of "because it knocked me backwards". Channel 4 did show it, and it casts rather a different light on the comment. The newspapers by and large ignore it, except the Telegraph has the sentence continuing in a comment about having half his eyebrows left. (Are they allowed to edit quotes?).
And as for the trawler that ignored them ...
D2. World's largest yacht hits rocks. Oh dear. Just as long as it wasn't that rock near Australia.
D3. Batman on Buckingham Palace. How dull. They could have at least let a corgi or two have a go. Makes it a bit more sporting than having a middle-aged man with a paunch being watched by a middle-aged man with a paunch, which is being held up by his gun.
D4. Men in t-shirts shock! In House of Commons. The best part of all of this was the various media organisations being indignant that they were contacted when the BBC had been told about it in advance. The BBC apparently treated it like most of the tip-offs they get, and put it in the "yeah right" pile. Whereas organisations like Sky and ITN were both claiming they would never have done such a thing and would have reported it immediately to anyone who might have needed to know. Yeah right. They would either have ignored it, or sent a camera crew out to scavenge information, and then sat on it until the time was right, and they'd secured enough syndication deals.
D5. Fears raise Dome security.
David Blunkett declared today that protecting the Millennium Dome was a "primary concern" of the government. Whilst there has been no official comment on the new measures, sources close to the government have confirmed that a special corps of Dome protection personnel is planned.
In an address to the Welsh police servicepersons’ conference, Mr Blunkett stated that "We must protect normal British life from the terrors of such attacks. The welfare of the public is our key priority. As such, it is vital we increase the safety of public institutions, including our most honoured and high profile ones. It is my intention to keep Britain safe for Britons. Our first step in this must be to ensure the survival of the Millennium Dome, the unassailed face of Britain".
Mr Blunkett has been under increasing pressure to act to protect keystone sites following a spate of high-profile security lapses. In a further blow, this weekend the News of the World is expected to reveal that one of its staff secured a wide-access job in Downing Street. This succession of embarrassments has lead to speculation that the Home Secretary is facing an internal campaign to oust him, following what was termed as "blundering" during the run-up to the European elections.
[Full story, free subscription may be necessary].
Something to make me smileVandal daubs DNA code in street. Of course the BBC get it wrong and call it DNA. It's a purine base. Just a base, none of this ribose malarkey. Muppets.
Remind me to move to East Anglia soon - other stories from that section:
- Amnesty for traffic cone thieves.
- Sugar beet harvest to crowd roads.
And I thought our local paper, featuring a sunflower story on its front page for about the 6th time since July, was bad. It's a weekly paper by the way.
About the pictures - I'll get round to sorting out a guide to them at some point, having never quite finished, nor published the details of the 27th June, and corresponding set.
Does anyone else get half-done blog entries for certain weekends, only to not have enough time during the week to type during the weekend, and then another entry generating weekend occurs. Somehow blogging has turned into homework (including the not doing it, and feeling guilty about it).
Anyhoo,
Stuart of autoblography.co.uk said:
Flickr does indeed rock. If you invite 5 people then you get a Pro account where I think the upload limit is removed...and yes, Boots developing is awful!
I took a couple of glarey shots through some New York fire-escapes to see how they would come out, but Boots have some sort of light-balancing doohickey which frankly ruins everything. They came out almost black. I appreciate that they try to overcome a certain level of ineptitude in the average photographer, but editing their photos for them is a little over the line.
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Flickr does indeed rock. If you invite 5 people then you get a Pro account where I think the upload limit is removed...and yes, Boots developing is awful!
I took a couple of glarey shots through some New York fire-escapes to see how they would come out, but Boots have some sort of light-balancing doohickey which frankly ruins everything. They came out almost black. I appreciate that they try to overcome a certain level of ineptitude in the average photographer, but editing their photos for them is a little over the line.
# posted by 
: September 20, 2004 12:54 pm
: September 20, 2004 12:54 pm << Home
