Thingomy.co.uk

I have gotten a temp job doing exactly what I was doing 2 years ago, for disability services — sitting in a dungeon at uni installing software onto computers, it should last a couple of weeks, and will be reasonably fun in the process.

This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.

Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.

It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.

project homepage

Photos:

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this — and a lot has been going on.

The first of the 2 camping trips was … interesting.

It was a little badly organised form the start — they decided on a venue 2 days before leaving, hired a minibus and arainged for another car to go and 5 people to go on a train. I was on the train, and I was told what time to be at the station. Only when I got to the station did I ifnd out that the venue (knockongoroch farm) was a little outside Aire — IE the middle of fricken nowhere.

We were to be picked up by said minibus at the station.

After changing trains in glasgow, we got to Aire station at about 2200, black dark, pouring with rain. We got a phone call:

“ah sorry guys you’ll have ot catch a taxi … the car broke down, and the minibus is upside down in a river”

10 minutes later realisation set in that this infact was not a prank, and it was actually real.

We found a taxi rank, and persuided a taxi driver it was worthwhile. £40 he said, fair enough, it’s a bit of a tight situation we’re in, and there are 5 of us.

We drove for a long time, then pulled up at the end of a road “It’s a bit rough, so I won’t go up, but it’s a couple of hundred yards up there round the corner” he said.

So (2300 now BTW) we walked round the corner and found a bunch of houses, no camp site, so we scratched out heads for a bit, called the folks at the camp who told us to look for a wooden bridge… the hell? We also heard from the folks in the car, they were in a tow truck heading * towards * the camp site — nutters.

We eventually went ot a house, and knocked on the door, a very nice lady came to the door and siad “knockenwhere? … oh there… you’re a long way from there… … that’s about 16 miles…” she game us tea, and offered for us to camp in the garden over night. slight problem, we had a 3 man tent, and 5 people.

As near as I could work out, the back wheel of the minibus had missed a bridge after a corner, and went over sideways, noone was significantly hurt, unless you consider a £750 insurance excess hurt.

The people in the car spent 6 hours in the middle of the night walking in the “200 yard” road to the camp site, with no torch. They arrived at 5AM.

From there it improves very little, but that’s most of the noteworthy stuff. I had always used the polacy of having a plan B, but will be taking it more seriusly form now on.

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The second camping trip was much more boring, involving lots of water, and a fire that wouldn’t burn.

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Beltane happened eventually It was very wet — we lost significant quantities of kit to water damage, all of mine was ok, but it wasn’t good.

The rain caused significant issues with actually filming too, rain spots, foged and rained up glasses/viewfinders were a running theme, many shots were lost due to this.

Due to the above distractions a lack of time practicing before hand and some bad decisions, my results were moderate at best, 24ish “good” images, only one of which I’m really proud of. see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingomy/sets/72157604867745859/

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I’ve been suckered into shooting some marathon/walk thing up the west highland way — it also involves the middle of nowhere, running theem here eh? It should be good, but if I do the bit I think I will be doing, it’s going to involve a 13 mile walk with camera gear, and camping gear for 2 nights, I’m not sure whether I’m up to it, but I’m willing to give it a stab.

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Final point, and the reaosn I started this somewhat long post — I assembled a panoramic from NZ.

It’s taken from the top of Sky Tower Auckland:

This along with some other stuff I;ve done recently has shown me that I have lost all of my photoshop abilites.

A couple of years ago I switched from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop, on the understanding that Photoshop was better, in doing this switch, I lost all of my PSP abilities, and never actually gained any with Photoshop. I havent used any of these skills since then so have been lacking in practice.

I am now unable to do simple tasks like correct white balance, or deforming a selection. That is without a vast quantity of arsing around, googling, frustrating experiments, and very sub standard results. The worst bit is, I normally can’t remember which tools exist for a given job, and even then I don’t understand why it didn’t do what I wanted it to do the first time, and when it does work it seem to be a complete unexplainable accedent; so I’m not even learning while working.

The panoramic above was built using 84 images of 2.5MP each. I was only able to get the software I use (Hugin) to do part of the job, so it’s really rough, with hard image borders everywhere. with any kind of luck I can perfect the technequedo some more interesting stuff with it in future.

Same story as last week — dissapear tonihgt, get back sunday. It’s with the photographers this time, so it will be somewhat more organised.

Thank you for the emails I got about last weeks trip, ful update on the utterly spectacular story later.

Side note, geeks only: I was amused ot find the following 404 page on the dilbert website:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2008458440417.gif

I will be camping somewhere this weekend — I leave in 1 hour.

I don’t know if I’ll have mobile reception, and definatly will not have internet.

I expect ot be back to civilisation on sunday evening.

I’m getting a little behind on things with the Blog as i have much do do currently.

I took a quick trip to Germany to see CeBit 2008 this is a large electronics Expo, handling everything from hardware, software, photocopiers, software, security systems, online services, basic components etc.

I spent 2 and a half days there.

the intel stand was insane — it was a building to it’s self, and they had some really impressive lights, mac2000s to be precise

TMobile wasn’t much better, it’s difficult to see just how big this really is, the puprple screens are full colour, ever changing visualisations of music from a live singer who is behind me. the screens loop al the way round the front part of the stand.

The following is a very odd contraption that seemed to be linked to an exercise bike with utterings of oxygen flow control and olfactory sense triggering. the contraption it’s self was more interesting — it was a pair of projectors, an arbitrarily curved screen, a bunch of software to seamlessly connect the images from the projectors, and a Canon 350d being used to automatically calibrate them:

Some really sodding scary survielence kit — with the stuff below (and a few added extras) it’s possible to wire a buildings cctv, a map of the building, and a bunch of computers together to give a location and biometric face recognition of every person in the building in real time, open doors automatically, detect mood from expressions, etc. The other wibbly toy is a scanning laser range finder, which is an idea I had years ago.

A company that had developed some safety equipment for use in mechanical systems, designed ot provide interlocks/warnings if straying outside a set of parameters had spent a huge deal of time developing a demo that involved a real (presumably off the shelf) model digger, with a joypad controling it. The joypad had 2 2d analog sticks, but the complete muppets had gotten the control system wrong. They had gone to all the trouble of developing the system, but were using a nonstandard control layout, I was most disappointed.

The photography hall was good — sigma was there in force, with one of every lens currenlty in production form them, including the slightly obscene 200-500 f2.8 (with 2x tc) that’s a 400d mounted on it. I had a go on that one.

There was also a bloke taking portrates with an almost as obscene medium format job, and the largest umbrella i’ve ever seen. I took the opportunity to practice my flash stealing techniques.

some other random stuff seen there — the last one is of to billboards, they have wheels, and move around randomly, I’m sure someone abducted R2D2.

A slight excursion was had to Hamburg for a day, this was the results. it was a good chance to practice using my new 16-80 lens:

Please note that until I return to the big smoke, my mobile will be very unreliable due to poor coverage, and other network issues up here. Feel free to contact me with it, but don’t be surprised if it fails. Email works, and so does my home landline.

Some people really do have way too much time on their hands:

http://www.recedinghairline.co.uk/files/c1c3be2fda2b218e858029a4bde7e96c-397.html

Aside from amazement that anyone has the time to even learn that stuff, it all looks reasonably sound except for a couple of points:

1) Interpuncts — the point (no pun intended) in principle may be fine, but I don’t see any issue with using a decimal instead, as you are literally saying “17 and 99/100″ this can be correctly represented as 17.99 — preceding it with a £-sign gives it a unit. This allows the rules of SI units to be used with currency. Now what really irritates me is people putting the pound sign after the value. I just shot myself in the foot.

2) More fundamentally, these rules that are being discussed came from somewhere, and in most cases (as with most of the modern English dictionary) it was extracted from common use and formalised. If everyone makes these mistakes, maybe it’s the rules, not everyone, that’s wrong.

In general however, this is an impressively set together post.

It has come to my attention that the feared US air securty TSA folks operate a lower standard of ID check that the lowley Northlink ferries traveling to a small island in the middle of the north sea — by boat.

Northlink now require photo ID, this is a little twitchy, as there is really very little you can do to a boat… i supose you could hijack it, steam it down to london (where you would arrive after about 3 days, having asked nicelly at some port half way to borrow some fuel) then ramraid a giant ferris wheel, but really?

On the other hand in america you can hapilly fly without any photo ID at all, as can be seen in this artical:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/03/13/how-to-fly-without-id-and-skip-lines/

Well, BT are of illigitimate parentage.

Long story short, the flat had internet, but they decided to randomly issue a disconnection notice to the isp due to some account changes.

This apparently takes ti$calli 2 site vistits and 4 weeks to resolve — also illigitamate.

So we have no internet — asside from the borrowed wireless that we currently have…

In other matters, we have resolved the furniture, and the heating at least sort of. It now looks like a real flat. People are more than welcome to come visit. I’m assuming that there is a desire amoung some edinburgers to socialise in the near future owing to the recent terminus of the examination period?

I am planning to go to Shetland at some point soon for a visit, does anyone have any requests or sugestions over dates? The trip will include time outwith the period 1st-14th april, and will likelly be about 10 days. I’m thinking tat I will add an excusion to aberdeenshire to the trip.

I now have a flat — there are some issues that have not yet been sorted out — like the minor detail of furniture … and heating… but I’m working on that.

On other matters — does anyone want a brand new netgear b/g wifi adsl modem router, it’s going for £30, I need to know before Saturday though. the model is DG834G v3.

Oh, and i’m going to germany this weekend to CeBit, more details when i get back.

Well I arrived.

The flight was about normal for an intercontinental, I did however see some really cool scenery vaugly in the himalas reageon.

The day before I flew from hong kong I noticed that there was a slight descrpancy in some of the paperwork, suffice to say the traval agent screwed up and forgot to issue a paper ticket for the flight. It was an utter fluke that I spotted the issue, and i would certainly not be here if I hadent. The phone bill over that one will be interesting…

ooh — i have a new camera:) if you want more detail, bring ear plugs, and say the word camera within 30 feet of me … put the earplugs in when you get bored.

So anywy, more later.