a view through my own eyes

Over the last few years in the nearby seaside towns of Whitstable and Herne Bay there has been much consternation over proposals to build a windfarm. It was said that it would be noisy, an eyesore and would damage the environment and that the locals did not want it in their backyard.

The windfarm has been built and is operational situated out at sea a couple of miles or so and is to be honest hardly an eyesore.

However at the planning stage, there were protests, fact finding missions and downright consternation. Apparently the local council planning meetings were quite lively.

Wandering through the supermarket this evening, I noticed that the local paper has on the front page “Windfarm War”.

Apparently the locals of Whitstable round to Herne Bay are now fighting as to which town has proprietry rights to claim the windfarm as their own.

Its a tourist attraction you see.

From both seaside towns you can go on a sea tour round the windfarm, the old forts and then on up the coast for a bit.

Big business you see.

Anyway above is a picture (click to enlarge as usual) of the windfarm from Tankerton slopes, taken on Monday evening. Excuse the blurryness of the image: 1. it was taken at 300mm zoom, 2. it was gloomy, 3. it was a tad windy and my long lens doesn’t have an image stabiliser.

1. As the sun sets and the sky is clear on one side and cloudy on the other, it can indeed look magnificent. However auto white balance is not a good idea as it can get confused and can get indecisive about it being sunny/cloudy/shady, particularly when the user changes a. direction and/or b. location.
2. Experiment with the light metering, for similar reasons to no 1. (see above), if anything getting a sane fix and setting that to be used permanently could be the best plan.

Taking a look at yesterdays shots and those of this evening, its evident that I haven’t sussed the most efficient way to deal with large areas of contrast due to shadow/direct light sources and whilst the camera is doing best efforts it does need my intervention otherwise I may as well have stuck with Aunty Marge mode (auto).

Recent evidence has come to light clearly showing that the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathederal are moving with the times. The cathederal gravediggers association are delighted in the recent investment in their new equipment.

It has been a hectic and yet relaxing weekend.

Have spent a bit of time playing with the “blokey cam” around the cathederal today, some of the better images are here for now.

I haven’t yet decided on the best way to present them on the web as there are a multitude of options:

• Include them within this blog by mucking around with the pictures by hand
• Use Gallery and have that manage the pictures
• Use Picassa
• Just dump them in a directory

Well I don’t want to include them in the blog, pictures destined here are for amusement (dodgy parking) or something that relates in particular to what I am posting about (ie the eye scans etc).

I do feel that something more structured is going to be needed, its finding what feels to me like the right tool to do the job, as just dumping them on the web in a /images directory leaves things a bit random (though there is a /images directory – take a look if you like).

So far I have played with Picassa (see link above), which seems quite good and will generate albums off of selections of pictures, resize pictures on the fly and generate the webpages with thumbnails, all that is left to do is to upload the pictures.

Picassa does not that I have noticed do comments that are uploaded with the pictures (you can create labels for groups which are uploaded ie Janes Party but not captions for indivual pictures) so thats about the only dissapointment.

Gallery is something that I still need to play with, its installed on the site but I haven’t done anything with it yet, so thats a job for tomorrow.

The car insurance of a week ago turned out to be trivial.

The company we were already with gave me a reasonable quote, and in the letter stated that unless I indicated otherwise then they would issue a direct debit instruction to my bank, the insurance would be paid and things would be dealt with automagically. They were even good enough to send me the certificate with the renewel reminder.

Sorted.

So I thought.

Friday I get an email from the insurers: “your bank has declined the payment please contact us”.

Odd thought I. Now I know that I never have a clue as to what is in my bank account, but mrspao assures me that there is more than enough for the insurance.

So I scratched my head and thought about it. Then I recalled that I had broken yet another bank card (I average one a year at the moment) and had a new one issued, consequently the issue number and security number had changed.

So I phone the insurance company first thing Saturday morning, do the shoe size, birthday, name of first pet bit to prove I am who I say I am. At which point I am advised that renewels are overloaded with calls at the moment and would I like to phone back another day. Apparently a lot of staff have leave due to the bank holiday weeked.

I point out that yes thats fine as long as I do have car insurance. They confirm that I am insured and not to worry and if anything happens it can be sorted out.

Well nothing has happened in all the years I have been driving, so fingers crossed…

I know there are going to be multiple entries on this theme – sad really.

I was using Dreamweaver a short while ago, not being too sure about something I decided to do something novel:

Use the online help.

The help stuff came up using the Windows Help viewer which was pretty much as expected. What I didn’t expect was to find that the font size was really small, it was readable but not comfortably so.

I scratched my head, looked through the options to find nothing of any use relating to adjusting the settings of font size in the Windows Help viewer, so as usual Google became my friend.st

Clearly I am not the first person to be caught out on this as Adobe have put up a TechNote on just this.

To save you from following the link, to change the font size in Windows Help, start Internet Explorer and use the View -> font size option and set it to something sane like medium, which is the default.

Mine was set to smaller I admit as I was looking at a site with HUGE fonts the other day.

..hissed mrspao a short while ago, whilst giving me the evil stare.

Sometimes I wonder whether mrspao should become a schoolteacher.

There is more than ample slight tension in one half of the house at present.

Readers of mrspaos blog will know that I bought her a handspun/died shawl kit for her birthday, well earlier this week mrspao spent a couple of evenings winding the yarn into balls, then she photocopied and laminated the instructions so as “to keep them safe”, this was all in anticipation of the the shawl being her “holiday project”.

Wednesday evening disaster struck.

There was a lack of 10mm wooden needles in the house! Of course it was my mistake not knowing that there were none of the aforementioned items and not ordering them in advance. So mrspao ordered off the internet.

Yesterday she received an email saying that the items had been despatched.

Today mrspao is somewhat anxious and consequently I and the cats are having to tiptoe round the house so that mrspao can get her fix.

After yesterday evening and this morning (thus far – no needles yet) I think I may be safer returning to work.

Today is the first day of 10 days annual leave.

Factor in the bank holiday and the weekends and its seventeen days away from the desk!

We don’t really have anything planned, a few jobs round the house and garden (like find it and reclaim it), a few days out and to just generally relax.

Its also a fine time for me to play with “blokey cam” and was bought (I am told) last weekend to deliberately coincide with this time.

Got to sort a bag out yet though otherwise mrspao won’t let me take it out of the house as the weather is a bit umm variable at the moment.

Yesterday evening straight after work we headed to Bluewater – the bag purchased the day before for “blokey cam” was just not right and mrspao felt a calling to examine their yarn supplies.

Things got off to a traumatic start just as we hit the Faversham roundabout, there was nervous twitching, impatience, cold sweat trickling down the spine and a nervous anxiety; all in all the situation was looking disastrous. Why?

mrspao had left her knitting at home.

Well one bag was returned, the new bag was pretty much perfect except it wasn’t waterproof – so now I have no bag and internet shopping will occur.

mrspao located some merino 4ply and was indeed muchly happy.

Then I spotted the oasis – Yo Sushi! So we stopped and ate, its a good job that I had eaten at KFC an hour earlier because the bill would have been astronomical. It was not a time to see if I could consume my own bodyweight in sushi.

A few weeks ago mrspao suggested that she gets me a DSLR for my birthday as she was so enjoying her “girly cam” and figured that I should have a nice camera as well that was a bit more well blokey and a good hobby that she approves of me getting into.

So since then I have been having a nose round and am now convinced that Nikon and Canon as the market leaders have rigged things deliberately to ensure that comparisons are difficult to perform in an unbiased way.

My reasoning behind this is based on one factor alone: cost.

In price order DSLRs go as follows (note that this ignoring any newly announced models and just going on availability for the last six months and using prices from a well known UK camera dealer for body only – so no lenses, finally note that these prices are as found on many high streets in the UK – shopping around can make a reasonable difference).

Nikon D50: £329
Canon EOS 350D: £439
Nikon D70S: £549
Canon EOS 30D: £849
Nikon D200: £1149

As you can see price wise there are no direct comparisons.

So when scouting round the internet and various photographic magazines you see articles entitled “30D vs D200 – we rate the best camera” or “D50 against 350D: which is the best”, you always (yes I mean always) find that the winner is always the most expensive and consequently better specced of the two. Therefore it is not hard to find out which reviewers are partisan to a particular system. At the end of the day the lenses and accessories between Nikon and Canon (or Pentax, Sony, Olympus etc) are not interchangeable and so you are buying into a manufacturers system and there you will remain as you invest in lenses/flashes/chargers etc.

The only people its a no brainer for are those who have already invested in a system, as Canon fit lenses from a few years back will fit modern DSLRs and likewise with Nikon. Doing an upgrade is fairly trivial – its either direct replacement models or go up a tier (ie 350D -> 30D etc).

For the person just dipping their toes into the field it can be a nightmare, there are two main choices (yes there are others but they are the two big boys in the field) and you ask anyone who has invested in a system and to be frank it can get quite religious. My personal feeling is to go for the best body with a kit lens that you can afford. The kit lens is thrown in at minimal extra cost for a reason – its cheap, its cheerfull BUT it is enough to get you going and can be replaced at a later date, with a better lens at a varable cost dependant on what you want.

Lenses I am told do not have to be hideously expensive, other manufacturers such as Tamron and Sigma make lenses with mounts for most brands and are according to reviews on the internet and in magazines quite acceptable (in most cases) and not necessarily as expensive. Though once you start factoring in image stabilisers (gyroscopes that float the optical elements inside the lens) and high speed frictionless motors (that allow you to overide autofocus by simply twisting the focussing ring without disengaging the autofocus) then the prices can and do seriously creep up.

As for me, well a decision has been reached after consultation with SWMBO, independant (by SWMBO and I) non comparative review digestion, advice from a couple of friends who are camera nuts and finally a purchase has been made. Will keep stumn for now though. Lets just say that I am muchly happy with my “blokey cam”.

Thankyou mrspao.

I have made a few observations about my body recently, the main one of which is that my age is increasing my metabolic rate appears to be decreasing and consequently to be blunt I am getting porky.

Fifteen years ago I could eat/drink pretty much anything at anytime (chilli con carne and a beer at 7am for example) and sleep for around five hours a day/night/whatever (I worked shifts and so didn’t have a body clock as such) and I would pretty much have plenty of get up and go.

Nowadays that is patently not the case. I can if I push myself a bit manage on six hours sleep a night but then to do that I have to be doing something mentally stimulating in the evening so that I want to stay awake. Otherwise I go to bed around 10:30 and read for a bit, the alarm goes around 6am which I am happy with as it takes an age for me to wake up (unless I am excited and want to do something – sadly work does not quite cut it ).

So my metabolic rate appears to have slowed a tad and so weight is being gained, a reorganised diet (yes I am trying) and some more exercise (well walking more) should over time make a difference.

Now so far this post has been somewhat self indulgent, probably more so than normal, but coming up is the worrying bit.

I like curry, I really like curry, anything a bit on the spicy side from the Asian direction and pretty much I am keen to give it a go. For years a student three quarters of the meals I cooked/ate would be well spiced.

However for the last few months everytime I eat anything on the spicy side, it goes through my body rather rapidly. Initially I put it down to the odd meal that had maybe not been prepared in a manner that befits both the meal and I as the consumer, but now I am certain that is not the case. Perhaps I should experiment a bit, go for the milder food of consumption (kormas etc) and see what happens.

In the meantime I feel a bit at a loss, so many aspects of being with friends went round the: haven’t seen you for a while/its my birthday/new job/soddit/etc etc – LETS HAVE A CURRY! basis that it is worrying. How much of my social life is now going to vanish? Will I be ostracised by my friends? Will I have any friends after this admission? Will they rally round and support me in a time of need?

At least I am safe with Chinese food – so far, pizza seems fine as does morrocon and most importantly sushi is safe.

Maybe its a bloke thing, but “shit day at work?”, “yeah lets have a pizza”; just does not feel right.

Sadly the Sportsman is not open in the evening.