Statistics...

• Rover 25 iS 16v 1.6 litres
• Owned 7 Years 5 Months 12 Days
• 130,442 miles (less the 9 or so it started with)
• Cost new £9,390
• Cost for part exchange £350(!)
• Excellent Car, liked it a lot!

UML Overload...

Recently attended a course on UML, Objected Orientated Design and Design Patterns given by John Meaney, a very nice and very knowledgeable techie guy who also happens to be a rather successful science fiction author.

So, the course was excellent and I learnt a lot, especially as the implementation is always much harder than the dry descriptions of the diagrams in text books makes out. But anyway, I think last night I dreamed of UML, which I think is taking things just a little to far...

Steve McQueen...

There is a song by the fantastic Elbow that goes:

So I'm there
Charging around with a juggernaut brow
Overdraft, speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch
Of a song that I know
And the world moves in slow-mo

And it captures beautifully the way that music can spark a memory. Like it did today when I listened for the first time in years to Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout. It took me straight back to the very early nineties when I first got hold of the album, a time when although as Paddy himself sings 'some things hurt more much more than cars and girls', sometimes it doesn't feel like it. The music reminded me how I felt then: not the details but the generality of the time. And it is really quite scary to think that it was nearly eighteen years ago. I still feel very young, but sometimes the figures don't reflect that...

Heated Seats...

After seven and a half years and 130,000 miles of trusty service, my good old Rover 25 1.6 iS is being retired, to be replaced with a Golf, with heated seats (and wing mirrors), climate control, leather seats... it's fantastic!

After all these years and miles, I get a grand total of £350 for it, but it has done me well...

Now where is this shiny new one...!

Word of the Week...

A very fine word... and must use behemothian more often (check the Oxford English Dictionary): if only as it confuses the spell checker.

RSS Feeds...

...are great: like them a lot. And interestingly, they can be found here:

C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

Which means they can be synchronised between two computers with the rather nice Sync Toy v1.4 (though don't use v2.0 for reasons I can't remember). Must get round to setting it up one day...

Models...

Nice article about 'The computer model that once explained the British economy'. It's not a computer model really, more a collection of pipes and coloured water. But it worked, and shows (in a good engineering fashion) how models and simulations don't always have to involve a computer...

Summer...

Should be spent sitting outside bars, drinking cold beer and talking to girls. Not a bad start for a Sunday afternoon...

Pen...

Using a mouse is so old school these days...

Age...

Is a funny thing. Some numbers are more comfortable than others. This one feels just a little too big...!

35mm...

I saw these a few years ago, and had forgotten about them, until W found them on the Internet again yesterday.

Now I have my EOS 40D, I have most definitely moved to digital, but there is still a place in my heart (and more importantly my cupboards) for good old 35mm slides. And this is a fantastic way to display them.

To be fair, I haven't really had a good enough wall to put them on before now, but they are great, and maybe I shall have to look at them again...

London...

Once a year, it is great to go down to London for a weekend and sample some of what it has to offer. This year, the weekend consisted of the Tower of London (fantastic history lesson); Les Miserables at the Queen's Theatre (excellent show, superbly staged); the welcome chance to catch up with some friends; and the really superb Wildlife Photographer of the year exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

We caught this at the same time last year and it is full of absolutely superb photographs from around the world. There are some really talented entrants who have spent days and weeks getting these photos in adverse conditions. But there are also fantastic photos from the UK, for me a highlight being of a bird nesting in a traffic light in Glasgow. There is also the really annoying younger age groups where ten year olds get fantastic photos of game on safari with their E0S-1D cameras, but I shall skip over this...

The inner geek in me is also delighted that most photos have the camera, lens and settings stated next to the photo, which helps to explain how the photo was obtained. But most importantly, there is a little paragraph explaining the situation in which the photo was taken. I really enjoy looking at photographs, but to me, the context in which the photo was taken is also important and can add greatly to the enjoyment of the photo: a picture of a beautiful mountain landscape is one thing, but if it is also explained that it was at the end of a tiring 3 day walk, then that adds context as to what you see.

Anyway, for me the best context was for this photo by Paul Nicklen of a seal underwater with a penguin in it's mouth. The context reads:

'From the first time I got in the water with this massive female leopard seal in Antarctica, it seemed to attempt to communicate with me. Every day, it would offer me penguins, dead and alive, like this chinstrap. When I kept refusing to eat the offerings, it looked agitated before going to get me another penguin.’

It is a weird and wonderful world out there...