Photography

This is a photo taken out of my window last night, as the sun disapeered behind a bank of clouds opposite me. Click the image for the full-size version (1947 x 1668).

Taken at about the same time as Bellsab took his sunset photo: Bellsab's Sunset Photo

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Licence

Ok, I've finally got round to dumping all my photos from my camera's memory card onto my PC. So, after a bit of cropping, and (very slight tweaking) here are the first 4 good(ish) photos out of the 46 I've dumped off my card. All were taken at various dates, some going back quite a while into the midst of our (wierd) summer.

Dancing Nats. Cool, but they can be really annoying.

A couple of days ago, it was raining really heavily. So, out came the trusty digital camera, and here are the best three shots of the night. (I took about 25. I'm glad that digital film is free!)

The really interesting thing about taking all the photos was holding the camera still whilst I was getting pelted with rain and wind. I had to tweak the shutter timings to try and get a good photo without the flash: the flash destroyed the image, the falling rain all reflected the light into the lense, and it ruined the photo. I've still got the images, if you want to see...

I'll post about my car in the not-too distant future (and why I was walking through the rain instead of driving...)

For the person found this blog through google with the Ubuntu terminal command:

cd / && sudo rm -rf

as your search term, DO NOT RUN IT! It will destroy your computer! In fact, don't run ANY terminal command with "rm" in unless you know exactly what its doing!

I decided it was about time I made another camera card-dump. I also picked a couple of pictures out of my archives and uploaded them. If you can guess the location of any of these, comment here or on the flikr photo page! (Virtual cookies for anyone whom gets it right!)
But no cheating, if you know me in person, and know where these are, don't say anything :)

All photos are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike licence. Click on the photos to go to the flikr page. Enjoy!

Steam Railway

Went to a steam railway somewhere in Wales for the day (April 2007), with my cousins. There was a marquee with a wooden floor there.. on which somebody had at some point stuck an Ubuntu sticker! They certainly get around :)

This is the bottom of a hose used to refill the steam engines with water. It dribbles a bit all the time, whilst the railway is active. Was a really sunny day, light enough that the shutter time was quick: 0.004 sec (1/250th of a second).

I then took a photo (second one) of the puddle where this water was going. Wind was blowing it about a bit, took a couple of shots to get a really nice one. Again, really sunny day helped, shutter time was 0.004 sec again

Welsh Ponds

My grandparents came and visited me last year. (I have photos of them, but I'm not putting them on the 'net.) We went and visited a fairly famous place in Wales. If you're welsh, I would be VERY surprised if you haven't visited here at least once. Not sure you'll work out where this is from this photo though. Didn't spend long there, just enough time to get this photo and have a bite to eat in the cafe.

Christmas 2007

I've not many photos of Christmas just gone, because as mentioned, I managed to leave my camera behind when I left Wales for my family home. Anyway, I have a certain urge that fills me every Christmas. never acted on it, never will, but I want to find and use a pair of wire-cutters every time I see garden decorations. Don't know why, but I do. This particular example has a very visible wire, and I saw it quite regularly over Christmas.

Night Shots

As you may have noticed, I quite like taking photos at night and in the rain. Well, both of these fill the "night" slot, and one of them also fills the "rain" slot. (It was more like torrential downpour, but there we go.. shame you can't see it on the photo.)

Cold night, dark, walking home. The water on the road is runoff from the (large) hill about half a mile down the road. Sorry about the blurryness of this photo (the larger version is even worse.) Shutter time on this one was 0.3 sec (3/10ths of a second)

And last of all, this one I took tonight (3rd of Feb). During the torrential rain that stopped me walking to Church this evening. My camera went a little odd on this one, and didn't take it in its full high-resolution, so there's not a bigger version, I'm afraid. Shutter time was 0.125 sec (1/8th of a second). I overrode the camera to shorten the shutter time, else it would have been too long, and I'd have ended up with a blurred mess.

Hope you liked all those. All comments & constructive critique would be appreciated :)

Bugs

Since my rant about the state of bugs in Ubuntu, I've been going over my bugs, one by one, poking them and re-triaging them. I did this to one bug for gweled, 110268. One of the people who had experienced this one tagged it "bitesize" (easy to fix) and "packaging". I reset it into "confirmed" state, assigned it to the MOTUs. (I tend to set them to "incomplete" whilst poking them to make sure they're still an issue - that way if there is no response and I randomly disappear, launchpad will automatically mark them for expiration). As a result of my poking it, Effie Jayx was asked to it, and the bug is no-more in Hardy. Nice :D

Thinking about it, I probably should have chucked that particular bug upstream earlier. The reporters had done all the work tracking down the bug... there we go, live and learn. I'm slowly poking all the bugs that haven't been fixed, that I've triaged, making sure they all go to the right places...

A failed walk

'How can a walk fail?' I hear you ask. Quite simple, I was attempting to find a few geocaches, in a long walk around my local area. Geocaches are basically small hidden caches, which you find with a hand-held GPS.

So, I parked up with my recently repaired car (long story), and set off. However, I managed to go the wrong way (yes, even with a gps with topographical maps of the area), so I didn't get anywhere close to finding any geocaches. I'll probably try a completly different route next time...

On the way though, I did manage to take a couple of nice photos, so here are the best of them. As usual, all photos are under the Creative Commons share-alike attribution licence, click on the photos to see a bigger version on flickr.

This one is looking through a wire fence, fairly close to where my next one was taken. Sorry the background is blurry, should have put it into macro mode. The hill was quite steep here and my footing was tenuous so I wanted to move on quickly...

Went past this wall whilst walking back to my car in the woods. Its falling to bits, but not being kept up, as it's been replaced by wire fences. There are quite a lot of crumbling dry-stone walls in this particular wood.

Weir

As usual, my water photography continues ;)
I took these two at a local park, which is very close to where I work. I go there to eat lunch sometimes, and there's a artificial pond created by this weir/dam.