"... they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes."
Make of that what you will.
Archive for 2007
Digitally-challenged
Anna had just one piece of homework during the recent junior-school half-term holiday... find some pictures of Autumn. What a great excuse for getting the kids outside in the fresh air, we thought, so off we went to the local woods for a "let's see who can take the best photo" competition. I took my Nikon D50, Ella took her Vivitar compact and I gave Anna my old Olympus C730-UZ.
Anna got used to the camera very quickly, this was the first time she had used one "for real", as she put it (she's taken the odd holiday snap with mine, that's all).
Well, we were in and out of the trees, crawling through the undergrowth, trudging through the mud, it was a great time. Anna rattled off shots here, there and everywhere, she really enjoyed herself.
Back at base, we took stock and prepared to send her pics to school, and that's when the experience started to turn sour...
First, we tried to send them by email to the address that had been given to us for this exercise, but they bounced back.
Next, we sent them on the smartmedia card that was in the camera when she took the pics. This was returned with the message that the school "couldn't use that type of card".
Next, we transferred them to an SD card, this was returned with the message that the school "can't read the pictures".
Getting a bit bothered by all the unnecessary hassle, I burned the pics onto a CD, that was returned this week with the message that the school "still couldn't read the pictures".
Now, I'm no expert, but I've yet to find a modern computer that won't read JPG files and finding one without a CD-ROM or better is practically unheard-of these days. It seems to me that the school is more digitally-challenged than I thought.
As you would expect, Anna is now completely disillusioned by the situation, she feels that it was a waste of time, and I can appreciate that feeling. It's not much of a morale-booster, is it?
So, to make up for the shortcomings of the school, I've put her pics in an album of their own. Who knows, maybe the school might figure out how to get to see them too!
Here's a taster of what's on offer...
Not bad for a first-timer, eh?
That’s a negative, Houston.
With a bit of snow, a cheap camera and any old version of Photoshop, even I can fake a lunar landing...
The White Stuff
We have Snow! Not quite in abundance, but hey, any snow's good. Maybe we'll have a proper winter after all. Excellent!
Proto-Daleks
Not a partridge in a pear tree
Tracks
OK, so it's no great shakes to some folk, but here it's quite unusual at this time of the year.
A composite map
Right, here's another map, built from the seven KML channels that are used in the individual Wainwright area maps posted in the "Been there, done that" sub-pages. Each channel can be toggled on or off by using the controls in the map's tools sidebar.
Hopefully, Mad Jim will get this to load! 😉
EDIT: I've moved this map to a new page, so that it doesn't delay the loading of the blog.
What a difference a day makes
This morning, during those periods of time when working "on auto-pilot", I devoted a fair amount of time to deciding what to do with the three free weekends between now and the end of the year, weekends that I had reserved so that I could go away winter-walking for at least one of them. This coming weekend there'll be an OM meet up at Langdale, I would have been up for it but I've already declined the invitations to it because Chris is on call-out so I'm on kids-duty. But hey, I thought, I've got three more chances later in the year.
So, this evening, Chris tells me that she's rearranged her night out with friends... it was to have been this coming weekend, but it's been postponed until the weekend after, so that's one of my weekends gone. Never mind, there are still two left.
Being an organised sort of bloke, I cranked up the lappy and made the appropriate edits to the M$ Outlook calendar, at which point I was told to enter the details of Chris's work's Christmas Party... yep, it coincides with one of the two remaining weekends.
Well, the choice was gone, I was down to just one weekend, so it was take it or leave it time. I declared that I would be going away for that one remaining weekend, hopefully to find some snow up in the Lake District. That satisfied feeling took over, at last there was a definite window of opportunity, a fixed date to plan for. In my mind I was already mulling over the map of the Coniston Fells and sharpening the axe and crampons. Wetherlam, Swirl How and Dow Crag would be mine.
Chris looked at the calendar intently, studying the entries for her call-out commitments. From her briefcase she pulled out her ace of trumps, and played it... a revised call-out rota... wtf???
The one remaining weekend was consumed by a previously non-existent week of out-of-hours service for her employer, which means that I'm back in the childcare hot-seat.
Chris can't figure out why I'm ranting at anything that moves, nor why I'm kicking things that don't.
