Kirrus’ Blog

Strange things you find in London

You find the strangest things in London. Took this whilst on holiday, wandering over Vauxhall Bridge.

Heavy Rain

Dad has a water-barrel system setup. The other night, it chucked it down with rain and as luck would have it, both I and my brother were at dad’s flat. Enough water came down that the overflow on the second barrel couldn’t cope, so dumped water out the side.

Photo taken with flash

The perspex panes in the top are to let light through – there is two fish, a couple of mussels, and a few water snails in the green barrel. The fish like eating the mosquitoes who think that the barrel is a brilliant place to keep their larvae . Click on the image for the full-size version

Taken with the help of my brother, and a torch

Birdy

I was at the datacentre last weekend. Managed to take this photo. Silly pigeon was getting stuck inside the bush…

Why should you not

leave your bike alone in London, just outside the British Museam…

When you come back, it'll be in peices

Snow

A while back, we had a tonn of snow in the UK. Remember that? Well, whilst the Ubuntu-UK lot are off enjoying the release parties here, I’m stuck at home. So I decided to finally upload at least one of the photos I’ve taken of late. In fact, these the best of the few photos I’ve taken. Somehow, taking photos in London doesn’t seem as fun, or rewarding, as taking them in the middle of nowhere, in Wales.

So, for your pleasure, here they are:

The road I used to live on, Ealing.

The main road in West Ealing.

Day 15 – Photo-Journey

To the Ubuntu-UK Planet folks: This post has nothing to do with Ubuntu! Someone once mentioned that it was nice having photos come up on the planet, so I’ve directed this post there. If you don’t want me to send these posts, mail me. If you don’t get the “Day 15″ thing, read this.

As my brother mentioned, today I headed back to London, ready to go to church tomorrow. I decided to take photos of my journey, in the middle of it.

I got to Victoria, and then I need to make my way across London to Paddington Station. Circle Line (My normal method) was closed, so I travelled across on the Victoria and Bakerloo lines.  By the time I got to victoria, I was feeling realy rough, and almost ready to throw up. I probably have a bug

Here begins the photos:

Regents Park tube station

Apparently, we should “Trust our senses”. Almost feels like a war-time poster (one on the right). Anti-terror gone mad. (Remember those classics, “Your country needs YOU!” and “Loose lips sink ships”?)

Lunch-keeping water.

Water bought at Victoria station, helped me keep my lunch where it belongs, as did:

Yum

Well, its an interesting way to keep your lunch, but it works, thankfully. Now I just hope that this bug is defeated by the end of Monday – ready for work on Tuesday!

I did see one interesting advert. Seems Mr Obama (President Elect of the United States of America) is on adverts on trains in London, UK. Strange!

Still, I was very happy when I saw my employer’s logo – journey almost over!

As usual, click on any image to see it in a higher resolution. If you want me to post any on flikr (in full resolution from the camera) let me know.

Irony

Now, this is what I call irony.

Currently, I’m going past this poster every time I go through a certain underground station.

(Cookie for the first person who guesses which station *).

As you can see, its an advert for the John Twelve Hawks book “The Dark River”, which apart from being a good read, contains a insightful set of images about our current existence in a surveillance state.

Almost directly opposite this poster, almost staring at it, is this delightful example of exactly that surveillance state:

In other news, I still think that Daviey (of  Ubuntu-UK Podcast, amongst other achievements, fame) sounds almost like one of the London Victoria Tube station announcers. Something in the inflection of the voice…

Work is going well. I’m quite tired and haven’t had much time spare to do much I like. I’m coming to realise that I can’t afford to run a car, and live close to work. Great. Sell the car, or put up with 2 to 2 and a half hour commute. Wonderful.

Lazyweb, whats your advice?

* Note, cookie is entirely virtual and is a figment of our collective imaginations.
As long as you don't actually want to look at it, feel it or eat it, its exists and can be won...

Photos

Yay! I’ve finally finished tinkering with my photos. Unfortunately, because my camera decided to take a number of them in low resolution, I wasn’t able to make them all post worthy, so they’ve been consigned to a digital blackhole. (Some of these are on the borderline…)

I went wandering before I left Wales. This is one of the photos I took then. Click on it to see the flickr page (where you can view a bigger version by clicking “all sizes” and then “Origional”)

The Ubuntu Hardy Release party. Andrew Oakly had this brilliant idea to make name tags for us all. Shame they were a little small… And mine kept falling off. Oh well, still a good idea

The train, after coming home from the release party. Sorry about the rubbish quality, this was the best of the lot, and my camera for some reason decided to take a number of really low resolution shots. That’s the second time its done that, and I still don’t know why it does it…

Empty street. Again, my camera being stupid. You can, if you look carefully, see the jpeg compression it used to store the image. I’d love to be able to justify buying an SLR!

Constructive critique highly appreciated

Bugs, a failed walk, and photos

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

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.

6 Random Photos

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 flickr 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 flickr 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