Loony Dook in 3D

Having downloaded the 3D photo app for my phone, I thought I'd give it a try. Here's two pictures of this year's Loony Dook in 3D. Hope you've got a pair of Red/Cyan specs handy. Utterly pointless, but still...

Poor grasp of geography...

Spotted this van on my way to work this morning. Sorry for poor quality pic. I was very impressed by the company's grasp of geography.

It may not be clear from the photo, but this company has offices at 13 locations around Scotland, indicated on the map. Their base appears to be Coatbridge.

They also have offices at:

• Falkirk, which appears to be 50 miles South and slightly West of Coatbridge
• Irvine, which appears South East of Coatbridge and North East of Falkirk
  
• Leith, which is placed about 20 miles South and East of Edinburgh
• Selkirk, which appears to be just over the border in England

It must make it hard for them transporting goods between their stores...

Located where?

This sign is to be found in the gents' changing room in the leisure centre at the Hilton Craigendarroch Hotel, Ballater, Scotland:

Thankfully, when I found the spin dryer, it was located beside the urinals...

Desktop of the week

This photo was taken last Friday morning on Alvie estate, just south of Aviemore. The horse rider in the pink jacket is my daughter. And it makes a very nice desktop picture.

Fotobook gripe

I've been compiling a photo album of all the best of my digi-photos from 2007. I decided to use the Fotobook software to create the book (can be done offline, unlike Photobox who I have used before), which you then upload to their website and they print the book and post it to you.

The book hasn't arrived yet. I'll comment on the photo quality when it does.

But I am annoyed by their software. It ate all the free space on my hard disk. Before I started working on the book, there was 19Gb of free space on my 'C' drive. I saved the file to the desktop. As I added photos (about 280 of them) the thing grew to a whopping 1.8Gb. But still nowhere near enough to clog up the hard drive.

Last weekend, while saving a near-final version of the book, the computer gave me a 'stream writing error' warning. I had a look and discovered that the hard drive was full! A bit of snooping lead me to the discovery of over ten '.tmp' files, each well over 1Gb in size, buried away in a temp directory. The Fotobook software doesn't delete its temp files! And everytime you use it it creates a new file rather than over-writing a previous one.

That is really sloppy.

My online life

My wife complained at me the other day that I spend too much time on the computer. I suppose I do, but then I thought about it. What are my hobbies?

Go back a decade or two and these were my hobbies:

• Listening to music, making compilation tapes, etc.
• Playing guitar
• Photography
• Playing with computers
• Watching TV / movies
  
• Canoeing
• Reading news, etc.
  

Only one of those actually involved a computer. But what happened? Well, computers seem to have infiltrated most of my hobbies.

• OK, so I don't use a computer to listen to music, I use an iPod. But I have to use the computer to get the music onto the iPod. I use the computer to buy the music. I use the computer to make compilation CDs or 'iMixes'.
• Computers still aren't involved in playing guitar (except for the internet being a source of guitar TAB music), but I'm sure its only a matter of time.
• All my photography these days is digital. So I use a computer to look at, play with and print out my photos.
• Obviously, playing with computers still involves a computer.
• I now rent DVDs via the internet and increasingly more TV programmes are available online, its only a matter of time before computers and TV become fused. Indeed, have a look at the newly upgraded Apple TV system - able to download 'rental' movies directly to your TV, this is the future, and its a computer (again).
• You know, I can't think of any way a computer can become involved in canoeing...
• And, of course, the greatest source of news is online.
• Oh, and at work, I spend most of my time doing things on a computer. Even in the lab, everything is recorded and monitored using computers.
  

So there you have it, my life is increasingly online.

I wonder when we'll get to the stage that the computer is so ubiquitous that we won't actually use the word anymore?

Beautiful day

This photo (taken with my phone this morning, at Dalmeny Station, on the way to work) doesn't do justice to just what a glorious morning it was. Warm, sunny, slightly hazy - my favourite summer weather. Ahhhhh.

It's a beautiful day and the world is bright
'Cos you took me away from the longest night
What can I do but give all I have to you

Delirious? "Everything" from the album 'Glo' (2000)

Fathers' day

This is my Dad. OK, its not the greatest photo of him, but it had a date on the back of it, so I know that in this photo, my Dad was exactly the same age as I am now (36 years and 7 months). Which is kind of surreal. When my Dad was this age he had three kids who were 6, 4 and 1 and another baby on the way. I wouldn't be born for another 11 years!

But father's day this year comes with a mixed bag of emotions, because today is the third anniversary of the day he died.

Happy father's day.

Sadness

This is the saddest picture in the world for me. This is the only picture my Dad ever had of his own mother. The mother who died a few days after giving birth to my Dad, her first and only son, in February 1923. I'm crying just typing these words.

The night before he died, my Mum spotted my Dad looking at this picture (it hung on the wall of their living room) and asked him if he thought of her often. Dad's reply was simply 'Every day'.

Egghead?

We've been clearing out my Mum & Dad's house recently as it goes on the market today. Dad died a few years ago and Mum has now got to the stage where she can't live on her own anymore. But more on that in another post sometime.

In clearing out I came across Dad's scrapbook of newspaper clippings relating to all the times any members of my family have been in the news or on the TV. Here is my earliest magazine appearance from the Radio Times 18th January 1973, aged 2. There are loads of other clippings related to both 'Ask the Family' appearances (1968 and 1971), Dad's appearance on 'Brain of Britain' (TV version, 1969) and a few non-TV things. I may scan and post them for posterity sometime.

Desktop of the week

Isle of Arran with Seagul. Taken from the ferry to Ardrossan about 20 minutes after leaving the island on Friday 13th April.

Machrie Moor

For the first fifteen years of my life I spent part of my Easter and summer holidays in Arran - staying with my Mum's Aunt May (my maternal grandfather's elder sister). In all those holidays I got to know (and love) much of the north part of Arran; Lochranza, Catacol, Pirnmill, Sannox, Corrie and as far down the east coast as Brodick, Lamlash and Whiting Bay. After Aunt May died (in 1985) we never went back to Arran. I have always meant to go back, but never quite made it. Until last week.

We had three days in Arran last week, in glorious sunshine. Nearly 22 years since the last time I had been there I did a whistle-stop tour of many of the places I remember from my childhood. Few of them have changed.

But I also had the chance to go to a few places that I had never been to before. I don't know why, but I had never been to Machrie Moor before, despite being quite interested in stone circles and the like. So I went and was very impressed.

I did a tour of all the stone circles on Mull a few years ago, and they were interesting, but nothing like as good as Machrie. The sheer quantity of prehistoric stone circles at Machrie is astounding. And some of the larger stones are still standing after 5000+ years.

All this by means of introduction... here are three of my photos:
This photo doesn't convey the size of the stone. If I was standing next to it, I wouldn't be half the height of it.

There are five stone 'circles' in this field. And archaeologists have uncovered evidence of others and several timber circles which predate them.

Once again, this photo doesn't convey the size of these. Suffice it to say that they're big and impressive.

Desktop of the week

I took this picture last Saturday. It is a view of Arran from the North, across Ostal Bay on the Cowal Peninsula. The mountain just left of centre is 'The Sleeping Warrior', possibly my favourite Scottish mountain (to look at; I have never climbed it) - if you follow the profile of the mountain from left to right it looks like a man lying down. From Lochranza (not so much in this photo) you can clearly see his helmet, his nose, his chin and the three buttons on his jacket. It looks particularly stunning as a windows desktop. If you want a higher resolution version of it for your own desktop (assuming that the 1024 x 768 version isn't big enough for you), just ask.