Finished work, pinternet, sleepy & walk

Yesterday I final-chee finished the work I was given to do over Christmas, although I'm still waiting for a couple of people to get back to me about a change of address and I may need to chase them up if I don't hear back from them.

The rest of yesterday I was feeling too sleepy to do any Javascript learning so I mainly went on photography websites, catching up on what I'd missed since Sunday, and also watched most of Waynes World with Ben & Yumpt, and episode 1 of Arrested Development with Yumpt. I ate a boost while I watched Waynes World - delee!!

Today I went out on a walk with rad & Moohar this morning along a muddy canal bank which was quite sloped towards the canal and thin and slippy, but I didnae fall in. When we finished, we went into the farmhouse where we parked as Rad knew the people there and they gave us a cup o' coffee and some Christmas cake, so that was nice.

When we got home we ate lunch, and then after lunch we watched the rest of Waynes World. After that me, Yumpt & Ben went on a walk to the postbox because Moohar had said that Ben had to get some excercise. Since I am skill I wore my dressing gown, although my hands got dead clod because the dressing gown doesn't have any pockets.

Then me and Yumpt watched a couple more episodes of Arrested Development while Ben & Moohar put mattresses down the stairs and slid down them.

After dinner I just sorted & edited the photos I took this morning, then went to bed.

Breakfast: Coco Pops; cup o' tea.
Morning snack: Christmas cake; coffee.
Lunch: Ham sandwich; lamb & Moroccan spices flavoured crisps; Clementine; banana; Montana chocolate biscuit; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Some dried Filipino fruits; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Burger in a bun with lettuce, cheese, tomato, tom ketch. Pudding was creamy fruit yoghurt & a chocolate covered crinkle crunch. Coffee.

Popa Chimbo

Lately I have been mostly working, I even worked most of Christmas today.

For Christmas I got:
pants & a dressing gown from Moohar
Money & an ear/nose hair trimmer from rad
Wierd Al - Straight Outta Lynwood & some happy hippos from Shaz
A box of chocolate biscuits from Ben
Money from grandad
Freezepop - futurefuturefutureperfect from Yumpt

For my Birthday I got:
Money from Moohar
some electronics bits to make a sound flash trigger from rad
2 x The Go! Team albums from yumpt
Pog soccer game that I already had from Shaz
Skips Milkcaps & Happy Hippos from Ben
Money from grandad

My Russian hats arrived, so Ben wore one and I wore the rabbit fur one with my East German coat to church on Sunday, and people said my hat was dead good.

Also, I bought a zigview S2, which arrived next day, unfortunately I bought the C version, which I think is meant for fullframe cameras when I should've bought the B version for 1.5x crop cameras. You can zoom in on the C version so that the screen is filled with the image, but the quality isn't very good, which makes focusing hard. I don't think the quality of image on the B version is that great either, but should be better than the zoomed image on the C version. I think I will try and get a B version when one comes up on ebay at a reasonable price, and hopefully I should then be able to sell the C version for around the same I paid for it.

One of the interesting features of the zigview S2 is that it should be able to trigger the camera shutter when something changes on the screen e.g. if an insect flies in front of the camera. I need to buy a Nikon 10 pin shutter trigger lead for it, but if it works well hopefully should be able to get some photos of insects in flight, which would be nice.

On my birthday me & ben did a plasticine animation which was quite skill & fun. On Christmas day I had to get up early and went to the early Christmas service rad was doing at 8.30am at Kibworth. Yumpt, Ben & Sarah (who came home on Chimbo eve) were too lazy to get up so they went to a later service at a church in town.

Today (Boxing day) I went on a walk with rad & Moohar near great Bowden, and near the village there was loads of people having a boxing day walk with their dogs, but when we got away from the village and into the fields we were the only ones. A horse tried to eat us which was annoying.

When we got back home I went on the pinternet and then we ate lunch. After lunch I did some work, then played magnetic darts (that Ben got for chimbo) then watched Shrek 3, had dinner, then finished watching Shrek 3.

Food
Breakfast: Blueberry wheats; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese on toast & cheese on seedy bagel; clementine; grapes; swiss roll; caramel rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Turkey, mayonnaise, iceberg lettuce & tomato sandwich; flavoured rice. Pudding was Christmas pud with custard & cream. Cup o' tea. Chocolate biscuit.

Processing photos

Well, not done a lot since my last post. I did a bit more javascript work, although haven't done any for the last couple of days. I processed the photos from the walk I did with rad the other day and also the folder that was already in the 'Needs sorting' folder. I found that the other folder was from when me & rad went on a walk near East Carlton on 29th Nov, and when I got home from that walk the gps hadn't recorded a tracklog.

Well, I processed the photos from both walks over the weekend, and today I renamed them and also managed to geo-code the East Carlton pics using Robo-geo and google earth. Luckily I could remember they way we walked, took photos with identifiable objects at reasonably regular intervals and also the paths are quite clear on google earth, so I think I was able to geo-code them pretty accurately.

I also filed away all my swaps of pogs that I hadn't filed yet, this took quite a long time as I had to make some more pogtainers out of toilet rolls, tissue paper, cardboard boxes and sellotape.

I went on the pinternet quite a bit today and yesterday as well, catching up on some photography websites.

Hopefully I will have time to carry on learning javascript tomorrow, although I might get given some work work to do.

Food
Breakfast: Chocolate oat crunch cereal (cannae remember what its called); cup o' tea.
Morning snack: Nice; choc chip cookie; coffee.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; about 3 cocktail tomatoes; small banana; pear; clementine; caramel rocky (yum!!!); cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Nice; choc chip cookie; coffee.
Dinner: Bacon quiche; peas with butter; potato. Pudding was mincemeat sponge with custard and a small bit of whipped cream. Coffee.

work, javascript & pogs

Had a bit more work to do over the last week, so did that. Also started reading about AJAX with PHP, but it seemed a bit advanced for me so I decided to re-learn javascript since I only learnt a little bit of it before, and that was probably in 1999 and I haven't really used much since then. So I have been learning a bit of basic javascript, which hopefully should be useful, especially when I start to learn the less absolute basic stuff.

Also, been sorting pogs, scanning them and filing them, nearly done now. I also got my fixed e-sata drive back from the seller quite a while ago now, and copied my pictures on to it. I hooked it up again yesterday to copy across some more pictures, but it wouldn't let me and said it was write protected! I did some internet searching and it seems that this is a problem with Vista (maybe just Vista x64) when using e-sata drives. The problem stems from a user not inherting modify/write permissions even when they are an administrator.

A few people had posted on forums about this problem, but either hadn't had any replies or were given useless advice such as to tick 'modify' for 'users' in the security tab on the drive properties. You can't modify the file permissions when they are write protected! Luckily, one of the posters had said that their drive worked fine when connected via USB, just didn't work properly when connected via e-sata. So I connected the drive via USB, and modifying the permissions worked okay. Then re-connected via e-sata and it worked fine.

So I've finally got the drive working okay. I don't think I'll buy any more new drives from ebay sellers, although the technical support for the first drive they sent that failed was fine, I had to take it to the post office and pay for the postage to send it back, whereas with a well known company like Dabs.com I think they arrange for their own courier to pick up faulty products, so is cheaper and easier if the product is faulty. I don't know if a lot of external hard drives are fault or if I'm just unlucky - out of the 4 I've purchased 2 have developed faults straight after being first used, and another has developed a fault over time. Only the Maxtor drive has worked since being bought, although that has still got corrupted and had to be reformatted a few times.

Today I went out on a short walk with rad this morning, we went over the other side of Harborough behind the housing estate near the Industrial estate, so that was nice since I haven't been over there before. The housing estate was very like where we live, except quite a lot bigger. The ground was still quite frosty, which was lucky because it would have been really muddy otherwise. The field we walked up had ice all up the tractor track we were walking up so you had to be careful not to slip over. It was quite cold, but the weather was nice. Near the end of the walk we got chased by some bulls. It seems that lots of farmers breed cattle that chase you round here.

On the walk I used my LowePro Slingshot 300aw bag for the first time, and it worked reasonably well. It pulls up to your front to let you access the camera very easily, but when you push it back to your back it messes up your coat a bit. Not much of a problem though. I found that even though it's quite easy and quick to get your camera out the bag, it's still not quick enough when walking with someone else and they can have walked quite far ahead of you by the time you have put the camera back in the bag and straightened your coat out. I think it would probably be best to hold the camera in your hand and then put it in the bag when you need to use your hands for something else like blowing your nose or going over a stile.

I got quite hot on the walk, and taking your coat off would be quite hard with the slingshot. I think you'd need to take the slingshot off and put it on the ground, then take your coat off. On my old bag it had plastic clips for holding a tripod, and I always used the top clip for holding my coat when I wasn't wearing it. The slingshot doesn't have this feature, so there would be no where to put your coat and you'd just have to carry it in your hands. Luckily it does have a couple of plastic bands called sliplock bands or something similar, designed for you to clip special Lowepro sliplock cases to. I have just run a spare clippy thing I had through one of these and it seems like it will now hold my coat okay. The slingshot won't hold a tripod or monopod like my old bag could. I guess I could sew some bits on the side of the bag to hold a 'pod, but I don't really want to damage the bag and its possible resale value when I haven't used it much and decided how useful it is. My old bag would dig into my back a bit, so hopefully the slingshot won't do that. It didn't today, but I had a jumper and thick coat on, so my old bag wouldn't have either.

When I got home I copied across the gpx file (yes it did work) and the pics I took. I also found there were already some pics on my comp and I had somehow forgotten to process and these pics hadn't been deleted from the camera's memory card either. After that ate lunch.

After lunch I sorted pogs, got Ben home from school, sorted more pogs and then had dinner. After dinner I sorted pogs and scanned some in. Then I spent the rest of the evening typing this rather long blog.


Food
Breakfast: Marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 3x small sausage rolls; cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; 2 x clementines; orange penguin style biscuit; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Choc chip cookie; custard cream; coffee.
Dinner: Breaded fish with vinegar, salt & black pepper; peas with butter; mashed potatoes; mushrooms. Pudding was angel cake. Coffee.

Michael Buerkin'

Saturday I worked from 9am-12am trying to get my work work finished, I didnae though. I did finish listening to the Lynyrd Skynyrd discography though, lots of songs are on multiple albums so I heard lots of them up to 8 times.

On Sunday I just relaxed. Ben completed Mario Galaxy, so now he has to complete it again as luigi. I also got eveneux's christmas lists and went on spleenbay to try & get their presence.

On the day of the Moon I finished off my work (didnae have much left) and the auctions for Moohar's & Ben's presents finished so I had to bid on them & pay for them. I also set up an account with amazon.co.jp, I wanted to get the Animal Forest (Crossing) film on DVD, but it came to like £25 inc. P&P and they wouldn't let me buy from an Amazon marketplace seller so I didn't get it. The rest of the day I spent processing panos, I did one from the church where I only had my monopod and used ISO1600, which I think came out quite well. The only problem is the windows are all blown out (apart from the stainglass one which I made sure I took an underexposed shot of).

Today I just edited a pano and also went back to one I was working on yesterday and edited that a bit. Also got a headache, and my mouth has been hurting all day and its painful to eat food, all because I bit my cheek while eating breakfast a few days ago. In the evening I scanned some pogs.

Food
Breakfast: Nesquik cereal; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with mustard sandwich; apple; clementine; shortcake with jam in the middle; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Shepherds pie; green beans; carrots; gravy. Pudding was lemon pud with custard. Coffee.

Walk, work & annoying

Actually got up early enough this morning to have breakfast with Ben so that was good. After Ben went to school I tried re-stitching the high res pano at took near the top of Devils Dyke ages ago, to see if it would still have visible differences in exposure between the different images. It took ages to stitch & blend, so I just went on the pinternet while it was doing that.

After about an hour and a half Moohar came back from her job (I Tom-Hink she went shopping as well) so me & farthner went on a walk, starting out from East Carlton Country Park and then towards somewhere like Billesden? I looked on google earth but all the village names seem to have disappeared for some cheese-un. We got home pobasquish about 1.15pm.

When we got home I checked my work email & I had got an email with a few days worth of work, so that was good in that I can get some money but bad in that it means I have to do work instead of getting other stuff done. Then I ate lunch.

After lunch I tried to upload the gpx tracklog file for the morning's walk from my gps to my PC, but it wasn't there. I decided to just get on with my work work and that I'd look into why it was empty later. I did work for a while, then had to go and get Ben, then did more work, then had dinner.

After dinner I did the washing up as usual, then I did some more work. After a while I checked my gps, and it seems somehow it had managed to turn off the tracklog feature. Extremely annoying! I turned it on again and hopefully it won't forget. Copied the pics from my camera to my PC, wrote this and then carried on working until about 10.30pm when I went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Nesquik cereal; cup o' tea.
After walk snack: 2x Malted Milks; plain chocolate digestive; coffee.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; cheese on toast; 2x clementines; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Hot Cross Bun with butter; coffee.
Dinner: Battered fish with vinegar & black pepper; potatoes; peas with butter. Pudding was chocolate cereal cake. Coffee.
Supper: Clementine

Panos, pogs & Soviets

Over the spleenkend I bid & searched for some soviet stuff on spleenbay, played on Mario galaxy a bit more, bought some more Belgian pogs on spleenbay and sorted pogs.

On Monday I filed pogs (my order of 500 Ultra Pro pog packets arrived on Saturday) and processed 3 panos from my walk from Devils Dyke to Brighton which I did ages ago.

Today I processed some more panos from the walk from Devils Dyke to Brighton.

It rained all day, so I got wet when I had to get Ben home from school.

Also, one of the flash radio triggers I bought off spleenbay broke even though I only used it once, a wire had broke inside so I soldered that back. I've also got a gokos flash thing off spleenbay that lets me use PC cords with my sunpak 383, so I can now trigger that using the radio trigger.

I won an auction for a Soviet coat, so that was good, although expensive, item was $26, but shipping about $56, so £41 overall. US post has got really expensive since UPS increased their prices. Still, prices for postage for Soviet items from Ukraine sellers are nearly as bad.

Food
Breakfast: Nesquik cereal; grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Beetroot sandwich; ½ Cheddar cheese with Mediterranean style salad sandwich; delee cranberry (or sumat similar) sponge cake (like a muffin); apple; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Plain chocolate digestive; coffee.
Dinner: Kebab with chilli sauce; potatoes. Pudding was another delee cranberry sponge cake Tom Hing. Coffee.
Supper: Hot chocolate milk; Plain chocolate digestive.

Cold Ashby

This morning me and rad went on a walk near Cold Ashby, which was appropriately named as it was very cold. We were originally going to go on a walk somewhere else, but the road was closed. It was nice weather today, whereas the rest of the week has been rainy & cloudy. The ground was still wet and muddy on most of the walk. After the walk we stopped off at the Battle of Naseby viewpoint for a few minutes to have a look.

When we got home we had lunch. At the end of lunch when granny was getting up, Moohar said to granny "Do you want to put your tissue in the bin before you leave?" and Granny said "Do I want to get in the bin before I leave?!?" and she said that Moohar was very cheeky for asking her if she wanted to go in the bin. I just laughed and then granny said "thank you david for supporting me". Then Moohar pretended to cry and granny said "really, laughing at me". It was totally funny, especially why would Moohar ask her if she wanted to get in the bin? When I told Yumpt when he got home he said that it was like what would happen in a dream.

After lunch I cleaned my monitor with a wet wipe and re-calibrated it using the Spyder2. Then I went on Mario Galaxy, and I managed to get the last green Luma and also enough stars to fly to the center of the galaxy. At 3pm I had to go and pick up Ben from school, and after we got home I went on Mario galaxy again, trying to get the stars from the green luma Trial galaxy. After that I went to the center of the galaxy, and me and Ben took swap goes to beat Bowser and I think Ben beat him on his 2nd go. Yumpt came home just as the credits were starting, when they had finished and I had saved we put Guitar Hero 3 on which Yumpt got today and we all had a go on that, and Ben was even raddisher than me!!

After that it was dinner time so we ate dinner then I had to do the washing up as usual. After dinner just went on photo websites then went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese on toast; Peppered ham with mustard sandwich; 2x cherry tomatoes; pear; satsuma; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish with malt vinegar & black pepper; peas; potatoes. For pudding we had sultana cake with custard.

SNoow

Got up, had a wash etc. then woke up Ben to have breakfast with him. After breakfast went on Wii fitness.

Went on my comp for a bit, working on a pano from Seaford Head. Went to Church, granny wanted to go so we were late since she gets up quite late. It was raining so I drove to the Church and then Me, Yumpt and Ben went into church while Moohar drove the car to the Sainsbury's car park to park. After Church Moohar said me, yumpt and Ben could run away so we did, it was still raining so I pulled my coat over my head like Ben does with his jumper for the chicken dance. Quite a few people saw me so that was skilk 103.2. When we got home we had to wait for age-cheese since we don't have a key.

After church, did more pano editing, then ate dinner. After dinner did more pano editing, then ate tea. After tea did more pano editing and finished the Seaford head ones. It started snowing, which was skilk 103.2. Then Yumpt asked me to put some different songs on my ipod that he's borrowing to listen to when he walks to/from work. So I started itunes, but then it had to determine gapless playback information for all the songs in the itunes library (27938) so it made my PC totally slow while it was doing that.

So I couldn't do any proper work so I just copied across the pics from my D200 that I took recently and found that I had left it in JPEG mode from when I tried making a timelapse, also I had left the ISO set at 200 from the walk I did with rad the other day. I don't think I took any pics after that walk that mattered about the ISO being 200 though. Annoying about not shooting RAW, although hopefully not too much of a problem. I organised the pics into relevant folders, but couldn't do much processing (mainly exposure blending a couple of panos) because itunes is making my PC too slow.

Also, I am currently using Everest Ultimate edition (demo) to monitor my CPU temperature and for quite a while it said the temperature was 81-82, which had me worried (it's normally between 35-45 and the CPU was hardly being used at all), but now it says 1 so I think Everest must just be broke. Glad I didn't pay any money for a rubbish program, although would be useful it worked since then I could overclock and check it doesn't make things too hot.

Unfortunate-la-piece-of-cheese, although its still snowing it looks like the snow on the ground is thinner and sad bad rad de pad dad said that on the weather it said that most or all of the snow will be gone by tomorrow morning. Typical Bipical!

Also today, as per normal I went on the pinternet loads, mainly just photography websites while waiting for PTGUI to stitch, Pano2QTVR to process panos, & Photoshop to load/save.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Curry with rice. Orangeade. Pudding was a slice of cheapo shockolate chicken swiss roll and also some raspberry ripple ice cream. Coffee.
Tea: 2x Cheese on toast; mince pie; satsuma; cup o' tea.
Supper: Mince pie; hot chocolate.

Poggin', photos & panos

I haven't done my blog in a while, so here's an update on what I've been doin lately:

Friday
The weather was nice so I went on the same walk I went on (the Friday before?) nearly to Foxton Locks, and took some photos of the Autumn trees there that I had previously posted to the Photography critique group on Flickr. I tried to use the advice I had been given on the group to improve the photos i.e. shooting lower and getting nearer. I took some photos with both my 18-70mm and 10-17mm fisheye lenses. When I got back home and looked at the photos I think I got too low with the 18-70mm lens, and obviously while I got closer with the fisheye lens it looked further away due to the large FoV.

A large amount of pogs arrived in the post. Ben came home from his week away on a school trip, so he helped me sort some of the new pogs when he got in.

Saturday & Sunday
Finished sorting the pogs into piles of each type (not into number order though). There was over 1000 pogs, which is why it took so long. Also, I cannae remember when I did it, but I added more detailed descriptions to my photoshelter photos, just getting info off wikipedia etc. about the subject of the photo.

Monday
Processed the pictures I took on Friday and also a few other pics I had taken recently. Uploaded a couple of the new Autumn trees photos I took on Friday to the thread on Flickr to show the results.

Tuesday
Processed the first pano from Portsmouth, it was quite a lot of work fixing stitching errors, levelling the pano and patching the nadir. Obviously my skills in using a monopod for panos aren't that great. By lunch I had got quite a bad headache so I went to bed after lunch. Got up at 3pm to get Ben from school, then by the time we got back home my headache had gone so we did more pog scanning/sorting.
While not doing other stuff I looked at high speed photos and how to take them - quite interesting. It seems the best way to do it is to make the high speed flash trigger yourself, which again looks quite interesting although complicated since I can't remember any electronics stuff. I went on maplin.co.uk and added some bits to a basket. Hopefully it will save the basket until I actually want to order. I think I will need to get a book or sumat on basic electronics to learn the basics before I try to make a flash trigger.
There was also a Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 VR lens going for about £300 on ebay, which is very cheap. Luckily(?) I managed to resist from bidding and I will try to do macros cheaper with reversed lens / diopter lenses / extension tubes.

Wednesday
Processed the 2nd pano from Portsmouth, which again had quite a few errors & problems, not as bad as the 1st one though. Did some research on extension tubes and it seems that Kenko are the best as they allow AF (with non AF-S lenses) and adjustment of aperture on G type lenses (which all of mine apart from the 50/1.4 are).
My e-Sata hard drive that I bought off ebay recently doesn't work so I took that to the post office to send it back.

Thursday (today)
In the morning it was frosty so I went out in the garden and to the piece of grass across the road to try and get some frosty macro photos.
Processed 2 panos from Portsmouth, started on a third one but it's really messed up with loads of rope all over a ship that doesn't match up, and the ship is spread over 3 shots.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Smoked ham with mustard sandwich; 2 x apples; banana; kitkat; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Plain chocolate digestive; ginger biscuit; coffee.
Dinner: Chicken pie; green beans; potatoes. Pudding was flapjack. Coffee.

Processing photos

The last couple of days I finished processed the photos I took on walks last week and also processed about 3 panos.

Today I went on a walk with dad in the morning, the weather was very flat grey overcast, cold, dark and windy so I tried not to take any photos since processing the photos takes quite a lot of time and its a waste if the photos come out rubbish anyway. I did take one photo, although I haven't put it on my comp to process it yet.

In the afternoon I filed some pogs, and then about 5pm it was dark so I started scanning pogs. Then we had dinner, after dinner I scanned more pogs, then watched Autumn watch, and then scanned more pogs again.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Pilgrims Extra Mature Cheddar cheese sandwich; prawn cocktail flavour crisps; pear; banana; sultana & raisin cake; twix finger; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Green beans from the garden; pasta; cheese sauce; peas; fried black forest ham (like bacon); chicken nuggets; ground black pepper. Pudding was 2 mince pies that Moohar had just cooked.

Walking & processing photos

Time to update my blog!

The past week I have been going on a few walks and processing some of the photos that I took, also sorting pogs, scanning pogs and filing pogs.

I also worked a bit on my pog website, but I don't know enough PHP to make the menu work, as the menu is meant to be dynamically created by the script reading the directories of the website, then turning these into a menu with the same structure as the directories, and directories with the actual pog scans in should be links to change some variables and so change the text and images displayed in the main content of the page. I will have to read up on the basics of PHP and progress from there until I am able to do this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I still have about 500 or so images from recent walks and probably about 70 or sumat panos to Ben loves Po-cess pit, so it will pobasquish be a while until I can learn PHP unless I just get bored of Intel Pentium Processor-ing photos & panos.

On Friday evening I was checking me spleen-mail and I got an email from Photoshelter to say I had been accepted?!? I checked into their website and all my pics had been accepted. I can only guess that they are receiving so many submissions (they had a note on their website to say that as it comes up to launch date they won't be able to send messages about acceptions and rejections for images because they have so many to try and go through in time for launch date) that they just looked at them very quickly and approved them. While I am extremely happy to have such an unexpected surprise as being accepted and all the images being accepted, whether anyone will actually purchase one of my images after the service launches is another thing. I still need to log in again and set prices for licensing of the images and stuff like that.

Yesterday I submitted some of my photos from a walk to Foxton I did during the week to Digital Photo Forum, Digital Photography Blog, Deviant Art and the Photography Critique group on Flickr to try and get some feedback on how I can improve my photography and PP, so far I got comments from all apart from Deviant art (surprise, surprise). I would say the feedback on Flickr was the most useful, then Digital Photo Forum, and then Digital Photography blog. Feedback from all of them was useful, the comments on Digital Photography blog didn't give any suggestions for improvement, but its still useful to know whether people like a photo and why.

Today Ben went off on his school trip to Norfolk for a week, so me and Yumpt had to stay home instead of going to Choich and take him and his bags up to school for 12pm.

For the rest of the day I just processed pictures from a walk me & rad did last week and also played on Wii sports a bit with Yumpt and beat him at everything (boxing, golf, bowling).

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; Cup o' tea.
Morning snack: Malt loaf with butter; coffee.
Dinner: Chicken & Vegetable cup o' soup; toast; cob with butter; salad; bacon quiche. Coffee.
Afternoon snack: Toffee Muffin; cup o' tea.
Tea: Cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; apple; scone with squirty cream & strawberries; cup o' tea.

Poggin'

Spent all of yesterday sorting, scanning and filing pogs. In the afternoon eveneux went to grandad's for the bonfire night, so I was left at home looking after granny.

Today, I filed pogs, and eveneux got back from grandad's about 11am (the clocks went back last night so would have been about 12pm yesterday). Unfortunately, I didn't order enough folders for all my pogs so I had to order some more. I ordered 20, which should be quite a few more than I need, but since you have to pay about £15 for postage however many you order, the cost per folder is cheaper the more you order. Total cost was about £53 for 20.

I have also just about run out of the Ultra Pro pog pages, so I ordered another 100 of those from the same ebay seller I bought them from before, total cost about £16.

Being a pog maniac is expensive! My credit card bill came in & it was over £1000 and dead long with nearly all paypal transactions!

Jimminy villnar!

Spent the last couple of days processing panos, got a few done. Never did get that phonecall from work - they emailed me to say they could probably do it without me, so I stayed in for ages for no reason. Not that it actually matters since I probably would have stayed in processing panos anyway, and if I had gone out I may have ended up with even more photos to process.

Today, I spent this morning preparing some images for upload to Photoshelter, a stock website. It took a long time to get the images ready, I had to tag them, convert to uncompressed TIFF (Minimum file size is 10MB?!?), and convert to Adobe RGB 1998 colorspace. And of course I first to had to find images that I thought were good and showed a different range of things. I chose 3 landscapes (1 of which was a pano I had to redo because DXO had given it a watercolor style), 2 bugs and 2 flowers.

All that was probably a waste of time since its unlikely I'll get accepted - my images probably aren't good enough and also they say that you shouldn't do any sharpening or much PP - but quite a few of the images I submitted were from my FZ5 which automatically sharpens the photos and saves as JPEG, also the images have a bit of noise. Having no sharpening as well is quite strange - the D200 produces quite soft images without sharpening, and I would've thought that sharpening for the screen is the minimum sharpening an image would ever need.

In the afternoon and evening I filled up my folders with the pages full of pogs, although it seems I didn't buy enough folders doh! I'll have to buy some more but its annoying because postage is £10 even if you only order a few, so it works out cheaper to buy lots at once.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: ½ Plain chocolate digestive biscuit; coffee.
Lunch: Peppered ham with mustard and salad sandwich; Pilgrims choice Mature everyday cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; clementine; grannies cake; cup o' tea.

Panos

Managed to process about 5 panos yesterday! But only managed 2 today :(.

Work are now going to send me the thing to check on Wednesday, which meant I could go out today while it was nice weather. So I just went on a short walk with Ben.

That's all!

Food
Breakfast: Jordan's Country crisp; cup o' tea.
Tenses: Hot Chocolate; choc chip cookie.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; McCoy's roast ham & mustard flava crisps; some grapes (a couple were mouldy); clementine (or sumat similar); yummy swiss roll with vanilla cream stoef inside; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; home grown green beans; carrots; jimminy vilnar gravy; potatoes. Pudding was stuff that they put in urinals but it was nae from a urinal, it was from Geri Halliwell minus the spice if she came from the same place as Uncle John. Coffee

Rutland

This morning went on my comp and finished off a pano and sorted out a few photos I'd taken recently.

After lunch we went to Rutland Water, which was very nice, although it's quite a long way away. It was nice and peaceful watching the birds, but they were too far away for me to photograph. I bought a season ticket and Moohar said we might go again next Wednesday as Ben is on half term next week. When we were driving home there was a really nice red sunset, it would have been nice to stop somewhere and take some photos, but you don't see the places to stop until you've gone past them.

When we got home it was dinner time. After dinner I watched some line rider videos.

Food
Breakfast: Toasted teacake with butter; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; some Flame Grilled Beef McCoy's crisps; some Barbeque Chicken McCoy's crisps; grapes; granny cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Sausages; mash; baked beans; tom ketch. Pudding was 2x apple pies with custard. Coffee.

Even nicer day but stuck inside

Well, today the weather is even nicer, although cold, but there is very little wind and sunny with blue sky and the odd cloud. Unfortunately work still haven't contacted me yet so I have to stay in until they do and I get the job done. Probably it will be nice weather tomorrow as well and they will contact me at 4.50pm, then it will rain or just be cloudy all weekend.

Anyway, today the rest of my pog folders eventually arrived, I only had to chase the courier 3 days in a row to get them to deliver them! At least the driver didn't nick them.

I spent the morning finishing off the pano I was working on yesterday, whilst going on the pinternet a bit. After lunch I deleted lots of the converted TIFF files and then did a backup. Then I started work on another pano, but even though I used a tripod it seems the images don't match up, so after working quite a bit on it I decided to try generating both exposures of the pno at the same time in PTGUI using it's HDR function. I downloaded the latest version (7.3) and funnily this didn't ask whether the photos were taken on a tripod or not, that option seemed to have been removed.

The first PSD I generated using the HDR function had a slanting sea (it looked okay in the preview) so I added horizontal contol points on the sea and generated again. Unfortunately, PTGUI somehow forgot that it was meant to be in HDR mode, so the resulting new PSD was rubbish. So I set it up for HDR mode again and generated another PSD. Each time it takes ages to generate the PSD. Version 7.3 is meant to be faster than older versions, but it seems the same as 7.1, if anything a bit slower. Just went on the internet while PTGUI was working.

After dinner started editing the new file, and found that I could use just the 0ev exposure, thus avoiding the problems of blending exposures with moving people. There were also a few stitching errors that would have made exposure blending difficult. Finished that, then converted the last pano pics from Brighton 05-08-07 to TIFFs. They had lens flare all over them and the sky was very wierd and blue when corrected for white balance. I think I will edit the pano tomorrow but will just leave it if its too hard to fix.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese with Italian style salad sandwich; apple; satsuma; slice of cherry madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2.5x Sausage rolls; potatoes; baked beans. Pudding was strawberries & kiwi fruit with squirty cream. Coffee; Ginger Biscuit; 3x pieces Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate.

Nice day but stuck inside

Well, its actual-a-squish a nice day today but as unluck would have it I have to stay in today, tomorrow and Friday as work asked me to make sure I'm around to check some email links work okay or sumat when they send them to me.

Edited a pano and went on the pinternet all day.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Beef, cocktail tomatoes, Italian style salad and mustard sandwich; apple; satsuma; slice of cherry madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pepperoni Deep pan pizza; salad; chips. Pudding was Fruit (Christmas) cake.

Headache

Woke up with a bit of a headache, so just went on the pinternet in the morning and did some easy work work. I looked on the google and flickr to see if there's anything interesting to photograph in market harborough and it seems there isn't.

By lunch my headache had got quite a bit worse, after lunch I just went on the pinternet a bit more awaiting an email back from work with more details about something they wanted me to do. I had a look at what makes a good photo and it seems it involves one or more of the following:

• An interesting subject - don't have any of those round here that I or any Flickr users know of
• Good light e.g. sunset - tends to always be overcast plain grey cloud or rain round here
• A model - don't have any of those aqnd my brothers don't like having their photo taken, although we did have fun messing around in the garden last night.

So in other words, there's not much chance of me being able to take any decent photos. Hopefully one day the weather will be nice and we'll be able to go to rutland then maybe I can get some nice waterscape/wildlife pics.

By about 3pm my headache was too bad so I went to bed. I got up about 6pm for dinner and after dinner I felt quite a bit better.

Spent the evening going through my pogs I received recently to check they were all there (some were missing) and leaving feedback for them.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea; 2x paracetamol.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on toast; apple; slice of cherry cake; cup o' tea; 2x paracetamol.
Afternoon snack: cup o' tea; 3x paracetamol.
Dinner: Shepherds pie; grated cheese; carrots; home grown green beans. Pudding was chocolate whip with strawberries.
Supper: Cold chocolate flavoured milk

Civ2

Today did a little bit of work work and played on Civ2. I launched my spaceship in 1989 and it arrived at Alpha Centauri in 1998. I was known by my people as Frederick the Fork beard. I just had a few cities but made them all be totally good.

In the evening me, yumpt and ben tried to take photos of each other jumping and yumpt always had a dead gokos face.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken, mayonaise and iceberg lettuce sandwich; ham & mustard flavoured mccoys crisps; banana; iced lemon madeira cake; pink & white; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta; cheese sauce; mixed vegetables; bacon; black pepper. Pudding was fruit cake with squirty cream. Coffee.

Yesterday & today

Went out on a walk with dad yesterday, then in the afternoon processed the pics I took. One pic looked like it had dust on it, but it wasn't very obvious and the rest looked okay so looks like I have sorted the dust problem for the moment.

Today, I went on Wii Fitness for about ½hr until about 9am, then I did some work work for about ½hr. After that I cleaned up stuff from my desktop and backed up my pictures. I finished off a pano that I didn't finish processing on Wednesday, while moving videos to DVDR and browsing the pinternet. My hard drive is getting filled up quickly, so I think I am going to need another one soon, I'm watching a couple on ebay.

After lunch I went on the pinternet a bit and copied some more videos to DVD. I started work on processing another pano and then about 2.30pm mum cut my hair for me. About 3.00pm I carried on with the pano, and after doing a bit of work realised I'd forgot to level the pano, Doh! So I had to level the pano and start again.

Food

Golden Grahams - Yes they still exist!!! From Netto!!! Cup o' tea.

10am snack: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.

Lunch: Ham with red onion chutney and iceberg lettuce sandwich; prawn cocktail crisps; satsuma; flapjack.

Headache

In the morning I started work on processing a pano, but after a while I had got a headache and the weather didn't look like it was going to rain (but it was still cloudy) so I went to Alliance & Leicester to pay in my expenses and Portman-Nationwide merger cheques.

By lunch I had got a really bad headache so after lunch I went to bed.

I got up again probably about 2.45pm and started working on the pano again. There weren't many stitching errors, but it took all the rest of the day to finish editing it because there was lots of moving cars/people and I also had to -1.7ev, 0ev and +1ev panos to make the final pano, which involved a lot of work with the layer masks.

Luckily I didn't have any work work to do.

Food
Breakfast: Cinnamon Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; apple; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Egg fried rice; fried vegetables; ham quiche. Pudding was jamaica ginger cake with golden syrup and custard. Coffee.
Supper: Cold chocolate flavoured milk; small bit of flapjack; plain chocolate digestive.

2 panos

Processed 2 panos from Brighton today and also did a bit of work work. That's about it!

Food
Breakfast: Cinnamon Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese sandwich with sweet & crunchy salad; apple; banana; chocolate teacake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Roast beef; gravy; mustard; home grown green beans; carrots; potatoes; parnsips; yorkshire pudding. Pudding was ice cream with strawberry sauce. Coffee.

Mainly going on strobist

Got up, had breakfast wth Ben and went on wii fitness. Went on strobist for quite a while, just reading the old articles, then had to go to Church.

Got back home and went on strobist and ebay again. Ate dinner, then went on strobist again. After a while of going on strobist I went on sxc for a bit, then I took a couple of stock photos, then remembered that I had a million panos to process and started process a pano of St. Peter's church in Brighton.

Just processed that 1 pano, which had about a million stitching errors and bought some stuff on ebay for the rest of the day.

Breakfast: Strawberry Crisp; cup o' tea.
10 o'clock snack: Coffee; choc chip cookie; custard cream.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; rice; 2x chicken nuggets. Pudding was ice cream with strawberry sauce. Apple; 2x 2 cream crackers sandwiched together with butter & cheddar cheese; Coffee.
Tea: Ham with mustard and salad sandwich; slice of bread maker bread with strawberry jam on; small slice of all butter madeira cake; cup o' tea.

Dust bunny

Well, I was hoping to go to Rutland Water today, but the weather has been rubbish and cloudy so we didn't go.

I spent the morning finishing off processing the pictures from yesterday. All of them have a nasty 'dust bunny' on them, so after lunch I spent quite a while with first a rocket blower, and then an arctic butterfly trying to get rid of the offending dust spot from the camera's sensor. I think I've got rid of it now, but it's hard to tell. If the weather was like yesterday I'd shoot the blue sky again and if the dust was still there it'd show up clearly. It's the first time I've noticed dust bunnies in the pictures, and the first time I've cleaned the sensor since I bought the camera in January. I'm just praying that the dust is gone and I won't have to clean the sensor again for a long time since it could be quite expensive if something goes wrong while cleaning.

Also, another problem with yesterday's photos is that they don't seem to have geo-coded correctly. I messed around with this for quite a bit, but couldn't work out what the problem is. The camera was about 12s out of synch with the gps, so I added a 12s offset, but the co-ordinates were still off. It seems like both robogeo and GPicSync just geocode to the nearest trackpoint, rather than working out where the image should be geocoded between 2 trackpoints. Bit annoying, but at least it still gives the general location, ±15m or so.

After that, sorted out my icecube dropping into a glass of water pics and submitted a couple to sxc. Then went on the pinternet, mainly deviantart and backed up my pictures.

In the evening I just went on strobist and ebay.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese on toast; peppered ham with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; satsuma; slice of all butter madeira cake; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 3x cumberland sausages; potatoes; baked beans; tinned plum tomato. Pudding was sumat I can't remember jimmy. Piece of Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate; coffee.

Nice day again

Got up had a shower etc, and had breakfast with Ben, then went on wii fitness with Ben. Ben went to school and I did punch bag training (on the wii obv.) but I couldnae even get to 40!

After that, checked my ebay, work email and deviantart. Then went on a nice walk with rad, it was a clear blue sky and nice and sunny with very little wind.

Went on the pinternet for a bit, looking at week in pictures stuff on MSN, then had lunch. After lunch went on the pinternet for quite a long time, just on photography websites while DXO converted my raw files to jpegs. After that sorted through the photos.

Had dinner, and then carried on sorting / processing photos from the walk today. Also went on the pinternet quite a bit.

Food
Breakfast: Grapfruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham sandwich; prawn cocktail flavour crisps; satsuma; apple; slice of all butter madeira cake; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish with vinegar & black pepper; mashed potato; peas. Pudding was bread pudding, which I used up the last of the spleen-vap on. Coffee. Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Playing with camera & flash

Got up quite late, about 8am so I missed Ben as he went off to school before I had finished in the bathroom. Had breakfast, went on my comp and checked my emails, ebay, deviantart, and read strobist for a bit.

Went on a walk about 10am, just up to East Farnham and then back the same way. The sun was shining quite warm but the air was cold and it was quite windy. After a while I got too hot in my thick coat though.

A few days ago when I came back from a trip with dad I got my backpack out the boot of the car, but the backpack wasn't done up so my D200 fell on the floor. It had a 67-77mm step up ring on the front because I had been using it earlier with my 77mm B+W polariser, but had taken the polariser off because the sun had gone in, but left the ring on. When the D200 fell on the floor it damaged the 67-77mm ring so I couldn't screw the 77mm filter into it anymore. So today I used my FZ5 as my main camera since I can still use the polariser on that with a 55-77mm step up ring. I've ordered a new 67-77mm ring on ebay, but it will take quite a while to arrive since its from the US and also there's a postal strike in UK at the moment.

Anyway, the walk was nice, some of the trees are in Autumn colours, some have lost their leaves, and lots are still green. Hopefully we will get a nice display of Autumn colours before the wind blows all the leaves off the trees. Hopefully we'll get more sunny weather like today as well.

When I got home I copied all the pics to my PC and processed the ones from the D200 (nearly all of which were from yesterday). I went on strobist a bit more as well. Then I had lunch with granny as moohar and farthner had gone out for lunch.

After lunch I had to do a bit of work work, then I sorted out the photos and went on strobist a bit more. I tried taking photos of water droplets splashing into a cup but I think the dropper I have makes too small drops. Then it was dinner.

After dinner me, ben and yumpt made some phrases with his total film film quote magnets, which are famous film quotes, with one word on each magnet, so you can just put the words in whatever order you like to make up your own phrases. They give you quite a lot of them so you can make lots of stupid phrases as well as the proper ones if you want. Then I did the washing up, after that I tried taking photos of an ice cube dropping into a glass, which I did for the rest of the evening.

I used the D200 with on camera flash set to commander mode, power --, and an SB-800 near the glass in remote mode, set to TTL. First I tried taking photos with the glass in front of the bathroom window, and the window open as much as possible. Unfortunately, the window still was quite a lot in the shots. After doing this for ages I tried taking shots outdoors. That was better in the background was cleaner and black, but I couldn't see whether the focus was correct or not, I have to manual focus the lens since I am using the 18-70mm with an M-CON35 as the lens doesn't focus close enough normally.

I did have a break from doing this for a bit, and went on wii fitness and golf target practice with ben. I also put my ghillie suit on and stood on the stairs when granny came out the living room to go to the loo, but she didn't see me. Then I crouched down in the downstairs hall and Ben sat on me so granny could see when she came out of the loo. Whn she came out she just said how Ben had one sock on and one sock off and that his feet must be chilly. Moohar asked her if she thought ben's seat was wierd, and she said it looked like a dog, so I said woof and I think she realised that it was a person, so I got up slowly and she wasn't scared which was good.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; 2x cocktail tomatoes; satsuma; plum; slice of all butter madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken nuggets; macaroni cheese with black pepper on top; broccoli; corn on the cob. Pudding was a slice of swiss roll and I also had a breakaway. Coffee. Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Yesterday
Made up some ikea shelves to put all my pog stuff on instead of it being all over my floor. Unfortunately we only had 2 spare big shelves, and while we had quite a few smaller shelves, we only seem to have enough of the steel bits for 4 shelves (so I put up 2 big shelves and 2 small shelves). Putting up the shelves took quite a while since I had to drill holes in one of the shelf supports. Then I spent most of the rest of the day tidying my room and putting the pogs stuff away.

My photography backdrop stand arrived by DHL, so I unpacked that and put it up. One of the screws was totally hard to undo and also it didn't come with any instructions. Also, some paint on one the joins broke off. Eventually I managed to put it together. Probably still quite good for £50, since a lot of other sellers would charge about £40 just for the postage.

I also put my ghillie suit on and showed moohar and farthner.

When Ben came home from school I tried taking photos of some flies and Ben helped me take some photos of flowers.

I went on strobist a bit, and in the evening I tried adding a rim light to some boxes in my room, which didn't work very well because the light from the flash spilled out too much. Also, the flash from the camera did flash even though it was set to -- which is meant to be off. Using an SB800 as master, and pointing the head into the air solved this problem, although I don't know if this would work outside since the infra red light probably just bounced off the ceiling. You can get an IR filter for the D200's built in flash so that only the IR signal gets out, I don't think you can get one for SB800, and I don't know if you can buy it in UK anyway.

Then I went to bed

Food
Can't remember what I ate yesterday.

Had a lie in until 7.30am. Had a shower etc, and ate breakfast. Checked my email and ebay then did more pog filing.

I had to take lots of pogs out I had already filed and put them in a different type of plastic pocket. This is because the ones I had already filed were using the pockets designed for 35mm slides, and so are quite large and can accommodate slammers or multiple caps in one hole. The other sheets I have (Ultra Pro platinum for pogs), that I ordered 500 of from the US are much tighter, so pogs don't fall out, but this means you can only fit 1 pog in each hole and slammers don't fit in at all. So I had to remove the sets of pogs that didn't contain more than 1 variation of each cap from the 35mm slide pockets and put them in the ultra pro pog pockets. Then I put slammers and sets with variations of each cap in the 35mm slide pockets. Doing this took all day.

Also, the Ultra Pro pog pockets are designed for US style 3 ring binders, which I didn't realise when I bought them. So I have loads of UK lever arch files and ring binders that I can't use. I went down town the other day to try and buy some 3 ring binders but they didn't have any in WHSmith, Partners or Wilkos. I checked on the pinternet and there don't seem to be many UK companies who sell them, postage would be too expensive to buy from the US. I found a ringbinder manufacturer in the UK who does reasonable prices for 2 and 4 ring binders (about £2.50 each + VAT + £10P&P). This is cheaper than any other 3 ring binder in UK I have found on the internet. I have emailed them for a quote for thirty 3 ring binders, hopefully cost will be similar to their 4 and 2 ring versions.

No pogs arrived today, but my ghillie suit did.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: Coffee; ginger biscuit; choc chip cookie; 2x paracetamol.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with old sweet and crunchy salad sandwich; satsuma; apple; grapes; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Coffee; custard cream; ginger biscuit; choc chip cookie.
Dinner: Pepperoni Pizza; deep fried potatoes; peas. Pudding was strawberry cheesecake - only been waiting about 3 months since rad said we would have cheesecake for pudding till we actually had it! Coffee.

Poggin' & workin'

Got up, had a shower etc. Ate breakfast with Ben. Went on Wii Fitness, I got age 20 but then it fell off and I was actually 21. Then Ben went to school so I started scanning in a pog book. After doing that for a bit I had a phonecall from work and had to do a bit of work work.

Then Clare & Brian went out, I probably went on the pinternet for a bit and also filed a few pogs. Some new pogs came in the post so I sorted them out in as much as making sure what was meant to be there was, then left feedback for them on ebay.

Then I had lunch with granny.

After that I did some work work. Then I went on the pinternet for a bit and Brian & Clare came back about 2.50pm.

When Ben came back from school he sorted my new pogs for me and I had to do more work work. Then we ate dinner. After dinner I did washing up as normal. Then I did a bit more work work and after that scanned pogs, then finished scanning the pog book in.

After that I just went on photography websites then went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Toast sandwich with Grapefruit marmalade; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; grapes; plum; pear; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; carrots; potatoes; green beans; vegetable gravy. Pudding was peach slices with yoghurt. Coffee. A piece of Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate.

Lester

Got up, had a shower etc. Ate breakfast with Ben and went on Wii fitness. Even though I didn't get the ball on the green 3 times in the golf thing I had to do, I still got a Wii fitness age of 21! (20 is the highest). After that I went on my comp, checked my email & work email, checked ebay and checked deviant art. Then I made granny some toast & a coffee for breakfast. Some batman pogs & my new SB-800 flash were delivered. After that I went down town.

The weather had been really nice all morning, with a nice blue sky, but the time I went out about 10am the sky got covered with grey clouds. First I went to the market (which only opens Tue, Fri & Sat), to see if they sold any good black material for a photography backdrop, which it didn't look they did. Then I walked to the train station and got a train to Leicester which thankfully wasn't cancelled and I also managed to get a seat by the window.

The train was quite nice and modern, reasonably clean, only about three carriages long again though. I got a nice seat by the window and it was nice looking out to the right (east I guess) at all the fields, although I always feel very sleepy on trains. When I got to Leicester I went the same way as I did when I went there before with Jine, then after a bit I stopped and turned my gps on, and waited for a couple of minutes while it locked onto some satellites.

When I wanted to go to Leicester before with Jine but the train was cancelled I had used Garmin Mapsource on my PC to add Waypoints for Brittannia and Jessops Camera World to the map, then uploaded them to my gps. So I used the gps to find where Brittannina was, which worked well apart from that the arrow on the gps map doesn't actually point the way that you are walking, so you have to walk and see what way the arrow moves to make sure you are walking in the right direction.

After changing my address with Britannia I went to Leicester Market and bought some black fabric for a fiver. It's quite thin, but is made of cotton so I don't think it will reflect. I might need to fold it up on itself a few times to get a decent thickness. Then I used the gps again to get to Jessops Camera World. I walked past quite a lot of shops, and there was a sports mania style shop with 25% off all stock today. I didn't go in though since I don't need anything and I might've bought some cool trainers or sumat when I already have lots of shoes. Then I walked through part of the University campus, which was wierd since there's just loads of young people everywhere. Then I carried on past some more shops until I got to Jessops camera world. I had a look round there, but there wasn't much to see. They had a Lowepro Slingshot 300aw camera bag, but it was £100! I just took a catalogue and then went back to the station.

On the way back to the station I went over the canal and someone with a skateboard was standing on the bridge watching some ducks having a fight in the canal below. Then I walked through another part of the university campus and there were quite a few people with radios on selling stuff, and the fire brigade were doing a chip pan fire demonstration, and loads of students were hanging around so I guess it must be freshers week. I carried on through the university campus which comes out back at the shops, then carried back on to the station.

Then I got the 13.05pm train back to Market Harborough, which I only had to wait about 10 mins for. I looked out a window on my right again, this time the west side I think, which wasn't as interesting as the view on the way up.

When I got back to Market Harborough I went to superdrug to buy some new razors for my gillette fusion, but looking through the door it looked like it only did women's stuff, so I walked up the street a bit to see if there was a boots. I didn't find one, but there was a chemist and after a while of looking around I managed to find the razors, it was £9 for 4!!!! I bought them anyway since I couldn't be bothered to check if they're cheaper elsewhere and then maybe find out they weren't and have to go back and get them there anyway.

Then I walked home. When I got home some more pogs had been delivered. I ate lunch. I didn't open the pogs as by the time I had finished lunch it was 2.30pm so I thought I might as well wait for Ben to get home since he likes opening and sorting pogs. So I just went on the pinternet for about an hour and a bit until he got home.

When Ben got home I had to do a bit of work work while he sorted out the new pogs, then I helped him, I got the new pog & new pog slammer that I was missing! After a bit of doing this it was dinner time, and then after dinner just did more pog sorting and scanned a few in.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp & cheerios; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Seriously strong Cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; Ham with mustard and salad sandwich; grapes; 2x cups o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; mixed veg; potatoes; gravy. For pudding I had 2 pancakes with lemon juice & sugar. Coffee.

Pogs & work

Sorted out pogs again and also did a bit of work work. Bought some more pogs on ebay and some arrived as well - a few from UK and some from Australia.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with mustard & salad sandwich; cherry tomato; apple; victoria layer cake with jam; caramel rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 1 ½ beef burgers in 1 ½ buns with salad and tomato ketchup. Pudding was chocolate custard with banana and crumbled choc chip cookie & custard cream on top. Coffee.

Poggin' again

Got up, had a shower etc. Went on pinternet (dpreview forums) for a bit, then went to Church (Silly Moohar made me drive us in my car). I shook the minister's hand after the service and my hand had eyewater in it, so he got some eyewater on his hand. He probably just thought I had sweaty hands (which I do). Me & yumpt managed to run away without getting talked to so that was luck-slush.

When we got home I just went on photo websites again, then it was dinner. After dinner I sorted out pogs. Then it was tea. After tea I sorted out pogs, and when it got dark (about 8pm) I started scanning some pogs in.

Here's the list of stuff I've bought off ebay lately (click to view). Pogragan who I bought loads of stuff off is the annoying bloke who outbid me for an empty packet of POG juice and over 100 Hawaian pogs from 1993. I guess he will try and sell it for loads in his shop or maybe he collects pogs himself.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
After Church snack: Toast with Blackberry jam; coffee.
Dinner: Chinese flavoured chicken, rice; bean sprouts; water chestnuts. Pudding was ice cream with strawberry sauce.
Tea: Cheddar Cheese with salad sandwich; Barbeque flavoured crisps; Satsuma; Victoria layer cake with jam; cup o' tea.

Poggin'

Lately just been sorting out pogs, buying pogs on ebay and re-scanning pogs at higher resolution.

Today me and yumpt went to Leicester except we didn't. We just waited around for a while at the station but then the train didnae come and they all got cancelled so we had to get a refund for the tickets and then walk home.

In the afternoon me and yumpt went on a walk with rad. When we stopped an old woman walking down the street asked rad if he was a taxi. After that we saw a tractor ploughing a field

and there was a rabbit head on the floor. Later there was a farmer rounding up his sheep and we had to climb over all fences to keep the sheep together and through the sheep who had done loads of poo all over the floor. After that we walked through a field and when we got near the gate some bulls chased us. Luck-slush we managed to get over the gate before they could get us.
Then we walked down a track and there were loads of people on quad bikes. Later they drove past us. Then the rest of the walk was normal.


When we got home just went on the pinternet and sorted Pogs.

Is a bit annoying how Northern Rock nearly went bust (don't mind that) but Alliance & Pester also lost loads of share value and same thing could happen to them, who is who I have most of my savings with. Luck-sluck FCS covers part of the money and the government said they'd guarantee savers money as well, so I cannae be bovvered to move the money from them (though they are a rubbish annoying bank).

Have been listening to Harborough FM lately which plays good music but is totally amateurish and the dj's, news readers etc. are rubbish and it keeps having the same news (like a shop opened) all day which is annoying.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes with Cheerios; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: Coffee; choc chip cookie.
Lunch: 2 x Cheese on toasts; Satsuma; Half a blueberry muffin; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Toad in the hole; potatoes; carrots; broccoli; gravy; mustard. For pudding I had the last blueberry muffin. Coffee.

Sleep Chee

Well, quite a boring day today.


First I backed up my pictures and needs sorting folders, which took totally age-cheese and I couldn't do anything apart from go on the pinternet while the backup was running because it made my PC too slow.


After that I tried to install Windows XP so I could get pteditor to work, but it just said detecting hardware then had a black screen. After trying a few times & waiting for age cheese in case it was actually detecting hardware while it had the black screen I gave up. I then downloaded VMWare workstation, and again didn't really have anything I could do apart from go on the internet while it downloaded.


When it finished downloading I installed it and then installed Windows XP on the virtual machine. This process took quite a long time. Then eventually I got it all set up and PTEDITOR ACTUALLY WORKED!!!

I also had to do a few hours work work during the day as well.

Then I spent age cheese rubbishly editing the nadir of the pano.

Now it's 9.20pm and I'm fed up of working on something that just looks rubbish anyway and I think I'll just go to bed.

Food
Breakfast: 2 x Orange Marmalade toast sandwiches; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: Chocolate coated digestive; coffee.
Lunch: Ham with 4 leaf salad sandwich; Half an apple; Mandarin; Flapjack; Breakaway; Cup o' tea.
Dinner: Peas; battered fish portion with lemon juice and black pepper; potatoes. Pudding was fruit flan with extra strawberries & chocolate mousse. Coffee.
Supper: Strawberry flavoured milk; flapjack.

Sorting photos

Didnae do much today, as per usual. Sorted and edited photos. Went on a walk to Lubenham, then up to the canal. I was taking a pano on the small bridge and then talked to a bloke for a bit who was saying how he had an old Pentax manual focus camera and lenses. Then carried on along the canal back to Market Harborough, I went off to the right after a bit down a path but then the path led back to where I originally joined the canal path. So I just went back down the path towards Lubenham rather than going down the canal again. By the time I got home my feet were caned and I was dead sweaty and thirsty.

After that, just spent the rest of the day sorting & editing photos.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Roast Beef & mustard sandwich; cheese slice sandwich; nectarine; malt loaf with butter; rock cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Corned beef with cheese fritters, potatoes, baked beans. Pudding was Apple & blackberry crumble with cream. Coffee.

Pogs

Just been buying Pogs on ebay and going on the internet lately. Also did a bit of work work. I only had 2 hours sleep last night (4.30am-6.30am, although I went to bed about 10.30pm) but I still don't feel that sleepy for some reason.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Bernard Mathews Golden roasted turkey slice with mayonaise & sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; cheese slice sandwich; rock cake; cup o' tea; satsuma.
Dinner: Pepperoni pizza; chips; salad. Pudding was Sainsbury's medium poshness ice cream, which is pretty good. Also had a strawberry. Coffee and Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Pinternet

Spent the last couple of days going on ebay looking for pogs and camera stuff and also camera websites. I did a bit of work work as well.

Shaz came to visit yesterday and went back today. Also Jine went to Mansfield for the spleenkend today. When he gets back he has to start his new job on Monday fixing computers and doing telesales at a bloke's house. He said he should get paid £900 per month for the first couple of months and then more after that so it sounds like quite a gokos job.

Ben has a couple of friends now who live nearby and always come round to play on the gamecube. They don't play on the wii because they already have one.

Food
Breakfast: Choco rice; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese slice (not actually very much cheese in it) sandwich; blackcurrant jam toast sandwich; banana; double take; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Burger in bun with cheese slice, Tom ketch and lettuce. Yoghurt for pudding. Coffee.

Food

Breakfast: Choco rice; cup o' tea; Orange marmalade toast sandwich.

Ben bees pointless

Got up about 8.30am, didn't have a shower. Ben got up so we had breakfast then went on wii fitness. After that I got Silly Moohar to cut my hair. Then I had a shower, and after that me, silly farthner and Yumpt McPumpt went to see the car boot sale that's on the first Saturday of every month in the pub nearby. They only sold totally raddish stuff like 70s radios, old board games and books, and cuddly toys. We stayed there for about 1minute then went home.


After that I went on the pinternet for a bit and edited some photos. Then it was lunch. after lunch I edited more photos. Then went out for a walk but I forgot my camera doh! When we came back Ben was watching a youtube video of someone completing Donkey Kong 64 - the were 14 parts split into a further 3 10min parts each, and the bit he was watching was just the person taking each Kong into a place to learn a new move. Yumpt said he wasn't allowed to watch it any more.

Then me, ben & yumpt went on line rider and looked at / edited skill photos of ourselves. Then I properly edited some photos then ate dinner.

After dinner I watched the 1st episode of MacGyver with Jine which was ulti, 8/10. Then I sorted photos and found out that my camera and gps were about 2 mins apart so when I was geocoding photos using gps tracklogs the lat & lon was quite a bit out. I changed the time on the FZ5 camera to be nearer the gps time, but it doesn't display seconds when chaning the time on the camera, so I don't know how accurate it will be. I also added a -120 offset to robogeo and re-geocoded some of the photos from the last few days. Ripped a couple of cds as well.


Food
Breakfast: Choco rice; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar Cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; peppered ham sandwich; orange marmalade toast sandwich; caramel rocky; victoria plum; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; green beans; potatoes; carrots; gravy; white wine. Pudding was strawberries with strawberry flavoured whip. Coffee; Cappuchino Choco biscuit.
Supper: Hot chocolate with mini marshmallows & squirty cream.

Internet final-chee

Finally got the internet yesterday. It was meant to be ready when we moved in, but when the person organising it called up Tiscali to check the progress a couple of days before we moved in, Tiscali didn't have any record of it so they had to start again. After that there were a lot more delays, which Tiscali said were due to BT not releasing the line.

So while we didn't have the internet I just sorted photos, went on walks and took more photos, started learning Japanese, played on Shenmue, unpacked and helped Jon & Ben unpack, and beed bored. Since we got the internet yesterday I have mainly been doing work stuff. Before yesterday I had to use dial-up to connect in. Luckily I wasn't given any urgent big jobs while we only had dial-up.

When I checked the internet yesterday I also found out that Nikon has announced the long awaited D3, D300 and big telephotos with VR. Also Canon announced the long awaited 1Ds MkIII and the D40. I guess it's kind of good that I missed the announcements since I probably would have wasted more time on the internet reading about them than I did yesterday.

I still have about 1,000,000 hotmail messages to check and also haven't checked Deviantart yet. I did get up to date on Andy Rouse's Blog, Moose Peterson's blog, DPReview News, and Luminous Landscape though.

Brighton not London

Was going to go to London today, but the sky is all overcast. I checked weather.co.uk and the BBC website, and they both say cloudy with sunny spells in London. I checked some London webcams though and it looks the same as it is here.

Ate breakfast, went on the pinternet for a bit, then watched the Simpsons Movie with Jine.

Did packing & intermittent going on the pinternet for the rest of the day.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Morning snack: Hob nob cream biscuit; nice biscuit; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham sandwich; cheddar cheese sandwich; mint club; banana; satsuma; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Flavoured rice; chicken; chicken nuggets. Lilt to drink. Pudding was apple crumble with ice cream. Coffee.
Supper: Cold chocolate milk.

Sunday
Went to Brighton on Sunday to take some photos before we move. A gay bloke got really annoyed at me because he thought I was taking a photo of him (I was actually taking a photo of a church), then later a girl asked if I could take a photo of her & her friend on the beach and email it to her. The beach (and Brighton in general) was totally busy, which I thought was a bit wierd since it was a Sunday.

I wanted to try and take a photo of the West Pier at sunset from the Palace Pier, but the security guard said you weren't allowed to take tripods onto the Palace Pier. I asked him why and he said it was private property so they can say what they want. Luck-slush I had already been on the Palace Pier earlier with my tripod and taken some panos without anyone saying anything.

So for the sunset, I had to walk further along the beach towards the West Pier. I did get some sunset photos, but unfortunately the Sun set behind some buildings, rather than over the sea like I wanted it to. Pobasquish I would have needed to take the photos earlier in the year to get that.

After that I went back to the train station, but the trains to Bedford don't seem to stop at Hassocks, so I had to wait another hour until the next train to Victoria (I must have just missed the 9pm one). So I went to Budgens and bought some Lilt, then went to the train station car park and drank some of the Lilt. Then about 9.45pm I went to get on the train, but it was already full so I had to stand near the doors. By the time it left at 10pm loads more people had got on and it was totally packed. I got off at Hassocks then had to walk home.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish portion with vinegar & black pepper; potatoes; peas. For pudding I had a gooseberry yoghurt. Coffee.

Stooef

Yesterday I did some work work in the morning and helping Ben packing. In the afternoon we went to the Wildfowl & Wetlands Centre in Arundel. At ISO 100, 200/s shutter speed and f/5-f/5.6 with SB800 on full power at 50mm with the Flash Extender, a lot of pictures were still too dark. I didn't try any with the 70-300 & 2xTC & flash, but without the flash the images were really blurry in P mode. I think really I need to try using ISO 400 and also get a more powerful flash.

Today we went to Highdown gardens in Worthing, which were free to get into, which was good. The gardens were quite nice, but nowhere near as gokos as gardens you have to pay to get into. In the afternoon I sorted out change of addresses with as many companies as I could, & helped Ben do some more packing.

After Dinner I helped Ben do some packing, planned a trip to London for me & jine on Monday and tidied/packed some more stuff in my room.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam Toast Sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken slices, mayo, and sweet & crisp salad sandwich; cheddar cheese with sweet & crisp salad sandwich; swiss roll; breakaway; satsuma.
Dinner: Pepperoni & onion pizza; cheese & tomato pizza; salad. For pudding we had posh chocolate cake and I also had a satsuma. Coffee.

Seaford head

Got up about 8am, had a shower etc. and went to Seaford head at 9am with Joan Yumpt Cheese and dad. Did a nice walk along the cliff tops there then came back home and had lunch.

After lunch I checked and read my million emails. Then we ate dinner, I did some washing up and then went on the pinternet. I helped Jon and ben do a bit more packing, then I started sorting out my photos into folders. When that's done I'll do a backup and go to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with sweet and crisp salad sandwich; breaded ham sandwich; iced lemon madeira cake; banana; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Spag Bol. Chocoate cereal cake for puffing. Coffee.

Portsmouth

Yesterday I went on a walk with dad, there was a part with loads of ferns and a path cut through them, but then the path suddenly stopped so we just had to battle our way through them until we got to the woods at the bottom. I got green stains on my t-shirt from them and also some spikes from brambles got stuck in my trousers which was annoying. It was a good walk though.

Today me and jine went to Portsmouth. Dad gave me some tourist guide/map things but I forgot to take them. Luck-sluch dad gave us a lift to the station, the train left hassocks at 11.04am. Some of the places on the way there the train stops at had skill names I made jokes about:

Where are fish born? Fishbourne!
Where are nuts born? Nutbourne!
What do chavs call a place where there are lots of war medals? Warblington!

In Portsmouth when we got there we looked around the historic dockyard for a place that sold reasonably priced food. We couldn't find any, but did some a couple of big old ships and a more modern navy ship. After that we followed some sign posts towards the town. There were loads of anchors everywhere. When we got to the town we went in Gregs but it was too expensive. So we carried on walking until we found a tesco and then bought some food from there.

Then we walked back to a nice park we had walked through on the way into the town and ate lunch on on a bench under the shade of a tree. There was a little girl there who had a backpack the same as Dora the explorer's backback - how ultimate is that?

After lunch we followed the signs to the old town and the sea. I don't think we saw any of the old town but we found a big patch of grass with lots of people sunbathing and at the other end was a massive war memorial. Then over the other side from that which was the sea, which had come totally far in and loads of people were sunbathing on a small bit of beach.

We walked along the seafront to go back to the train station, but there weren't any sign posts so it was totally hard to find and we got lost in gunwharf quay. Eventually we did find the station, but we were 2 minutes late for the 5.04pm train so we had to wait another hour for the 6.04pm train. We just sat down near the waterfront and I ate some crisps, then we walked round some buildings, went back to the spinica tower to see how much it cost (£6) and came back to the station.

Also, on the way back from the beach we saw that there were 10 minute ferries to the Isle of wight. There weren't any prices anywhere, but it was like £15 or sumat for a ferry plus ice skating deal so it's pobasquish about a tenner, which is nae too badkos.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken, bacon and lettuce sandwich; Sweet Thai Chilli Walkers sensations crisps; Custard filled doughnut; Tropical fruit juice.
Evening snack: Thai Chilli Walkers sensations crisps; Custard filled doughnut; Lemon Fanta.

Heroes 3

Haven't been able to do my blog lately as I've been playing HOMM3 with Jine in the evening (when I normally do my blog). I did want to play HOMM2, but it wouldnae install. HOMM3 installed okay, it crashes every so often which is annoy-cheese, but it autosaves regularly and we always save at the end of each go so is alright.

I have quite a bad cold (snotty and tiredness rather than coughy) so have been getting up quite late, having a shower etc. and then going to bed again. Also I went on a couple of walks with dad.

Have done a bit of work work, but not much - on Thursday I couldn't connect to my work PC even though it was switched on, and on Friday I could connect but adminspare3 was logged in so I couldn't login as it would throw them out. Then they switched the PC off on Friday at 5pm so I couldn't login on Fri evening or over the spleenkend.

Working

Woke up about 8am, had a shower etc. Ben's friends came over to play with him. Did work work until lunch at 12.30pm.

After lunch I geocoded some photos. Then ate dinner, after that I did the washing up and did some more work work. Then I sorted through old school stuff to see what I wanted to keep (but I only had about 3 bits of paper amongst all the stuff and silly sara had about 2 boxes. Watched Top Gear race to the magnetic north pole, then the 1st 2 episodes of heroes, then a short rubbish program about the making of heroes.

Now it's about 11pm and I'll got to bed in a sec.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich, cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cathedral City Extra Mature cheese with salad sandwich, cherry tomatoes, apple, grape, satsuma, small sultana sponge cake, small coffee cake with coffee icing on top, cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Warm Chelsea Bun & a cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2 x Lincolnshire Sausage rolls, potatoes, baked beans. Pudding was a snowball, and I also had a happy hippo. Coffee.
Supper: Hot chocolate, Maryland choc chip & nuts cookie, malted milk biscuit.

Boring

Woke up at 4.30am, still couldn't get back to sleep by 5.30am so I got up. Had a shower etc. and then went on a walk at 6.30am to try and find some butterflies to photograph. Before I went out I checked in the back garden in case there were any interesting bugs there that would save me having to go on a possibly point cheese walk.

I went down to the fields below Willow way. My efforts weren't very successful initially, and I saw a soldier beetle and ladybird but no butterflies. I was looking in a long grass field since other people often post pictures of them asleep on pieces of long grass or other similar plants.

Later I found a bumble bee asleep on a small ox-eye type daisy. I didn't take my tripod, and so needed to use some fill flash to lighten up the dark bits. Unfortunately, although I packed my flash I must've taken the batteries out of the flash case and also the spare batteries that should've been in my bag weren't there. I also couldnae be bovvered to use my D200 as it would mean having to put my camera bag down on the wet ground to get all the stuff out. When we move I Tom Hink I might get a LowePro Slingshot, hopefully should make adding filters etc. to my cameras much easier.

After that I found a butterfly which flew around a bit, I followed it and waited till it landed, then tried to take it's photo but my camera couldnae focus close enough so I added the MCON-35, which meant I had to get quite near (35cm) to the butterfly for the camera to be able to focus. I frightened the butterfly a few times, but just followed it to where it landed and then was able to get quite a few shots.

After that I carried on walking , saw some rabbits and also I stood still for a bit to look round, and then a collared dove flew from just by my foot - somehow I didnae notice it when it was on the ground. A bit further on I saw a gatekeeper butterfly that I took some photos of. Then near the houses I saw some grasshoppers, and they actually hopped from one blade of grass to another. Got some photos of one of them as well.Then there was a bloke walking a dog so I walked the rest of the way home. People had nice flowers in their gardens but I didnae see any bugs. When I got home I went into the back garden, and there were bugs now. I took photos of some flies and also another gatekeeper butterfly and a speckled wood butterfly.

After that I came in and looked at the pics on my PC. They were okay unzoomed, but at 100% they were quite blurry. Pobasquish because I took all the photos handheld instead of with a tripod.

I ate a bit more food and did some work work for a couple of hours then at 12pm mem, mum, dad, Ben and Manveer went to have lunch on the beach. We went to Portslade but it was totally cold and windy and also clouds kept going over and blocking the sun. After that Dad dropped off some old stuff we didnae want at Emmaus Second hand superstore, then we went home.

When we got home I did a bit more work work and just went on the pinternet and beed bored. I also tried taking close-up photos of a wasp I killed.

I took 3 close up photos & tried to stitch them - PTGUI said it couldnae find any control points and autopano SIFT plugin didnae work so I downloaded autopano pro, saved as a .pts file then stitched in PTGUI. Had to do quite a bit of PP in PS as well.

I also found that when using robogeo to geotag images through google earth it was always putting the co-ordinates up and to the right a bit of where the crosshair is. This doesn't matter if you geotag when zoomed in close, but if you're zoomed out it can create quite a large error. I checked the robogeo webpage to see if there was an update to fix this, but apparently the problem is with google earth. There isn't a newer version of google earth than the one I had, but on the robogeo website it said you should use version 4.0 or below of google earth, so I managed to find a 4.0.something version of google earth, uninstalled the newer version and installed the older version. Is annoying since I've already geotagged loads of photos using google earth (and quite a few of them I tagged zoomed out, so may have large errors) but at least now I hopefully can geotag the rest of my photos accurately.

When sorting and tagging some recent photos, I also had a pic of me eating a happy hippo, deleeeeeeeeee!

After dinner I did washing up cleared the table, went on my comp for a bit, played excite truck against Ben, watched The Queens guards and Coast.

Now it's about 11pm and I'll go to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast sandwich, cup o' tea.
10am snack: Banana, Pop tart, cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with mustard and salad sandwich, Cheese with ham and salad sandwich, rich fruit cake, small sultana sponge cake with icing and half a glace cherry on top, twix finger, satsuma.
Dinner: Cheese & Tomato pizza, Ham & Pepperoni pizza, salad, chips. Pudding was 2 x tesco american style chocolate brownie cookies - delee! Coffee.

Packing

Haven't had time to do my blog lately as have been packing everything apart from the stuff I will need in the next 2 ½ weeks until we move. Took age cheese to pack eveneux and also was annoying because I have had to put cds and dvds etc. randomly in boxes to make use of all the space in boxes, which messes it up since before all my dvds, cds etc were in alphabetical order but now they're just random.

Now have loads more space in my room and have taken down most of the shelves. Quite skill really since I have taken all my cds and some other stuff down from the loft, so actually have more in my room than I did before. Suzanne has been on holiday since Friday, so not had much work to do which is gokos. Just have a couple of reasonably urgent things to do, then quite a few longer term projects. Can't really do much at the Tom Moment though 'cause ML was using my office PC earlier and now it's been switched off!?!

Ann and Peter Wilson are staying over in Ben's room tonight, and Jon went up to Jason Kilby's wedding on Friday, and should be back on Wednesday. Me & rad might go a walk tomorrow if the weather's okay, I just checked weather.co.uk and it might be.

We had dad's church leaving do on Sunday afternoon, and I got thanked for doing the notices and chairs and got a £25 WHSmith voucher, so that was very kind of the church. Also mum got some M&S vouchers and Dad got a painting of Jack & Jill which is gokos. Not sure if it is as gokos as 'Tom Bombadil - The Martian Orchestra' though.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam Toast Sandwich, cup o' tea, Special gingerbread Shaz got from the Lake District.
Lunch: Bits of pizza, sausage rolls, a piece of quiche and a vegetable roll, 2 x small cakes (leftovers from yesterday).
Dinner: Minced beef & dumplings, gravy, mixed veg, potatoes. Pudding was left over rich fruit cake from yesterday.