Last Saturday me and swb decided to go for a quick ride out to the Rheidol reservoir and back (route). The water was flowing over the top with an incredible force, making bubbles travel under water for many metres and jets of water to bounce back up behind the sheet of water.
The Rheidol in January 2006
The Rheidol 4 months later in May.
In other news, I have now completed my university exams and have two months of relative freedom, I say “relative” because I still have to work 18 hours a week, until August when I shall start working full time.
I’m always happy to be able to combine two of my interests, photography and music. Last night I had that opportunity at the rugby club in Aberystwyth where there was a gig with 5 bands playing and I managed to get photos of the last four. Who were (in order of appearance)…
I don’t know the name of the first guy, but I believe he is from The Fenks. The was also a light show put on by Marco Matosic (I don’t know if he has a web address, leave a comment if you know) the lighting made for some interesting effects in some photographs and made some pretty bad as the light level changed rapidly and unexpectedly meaning that the auto focusing didn’t really work and the exposure was quite hit and miss, of the 168 photos I have put only 9 online. I’m hoping with a little work in The Gimp a few more will be ok.
Gig photo gallery
I have written a Python script to download a webcam image at a configurable interval. I am currently testing it with the BBC’s three Aberystwyth webcams. Although it should work with almost any webcam. I will use these images to make time-lapse style video.
The script uses the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers in the GET request to ensure the same image is not downloaded twice. The script is capable of regularly downloading images from several webcams. I will be using either ffmpeg or mencoder (from the mplayer project) to create the videos.
Thanks to Matthew Russell (aka horizon5) for help with threading. Thanks also to Gary Steele for his page on creating videos from a series of images.
For those who want to run it themselves, I’ll put it online in a few days to download once I know it works properly and the code is tidied up a little.
On Monday I started at my new job, it is for a growing telecoms company called PanTelecom. I got the job within a few days of giving my details to a programme called STEP (Shell Technology Enterprise Programme) which advertises itself as “a UK-wide programme offering undergraduates project-based work within small to medium sized businesses”.
My project is to make a new version of an existing one of their products with a web based front-end. I’m doing this using Microsoft SQL Server and IIS. I haven’t used either of these products before most of my knowledge being Linux based and as such I’m more used to Apache and MySQL. However the concepts are not vastly different and I feel it is going well already. I think tomorrow I will be starting writing some of the front-end in ASP, which I have used only briefly many years ago.
This morning I took some photos of poppies in my garden. Two struck me as being worth putting online. One where a bee is just buzzing into a shot of a poppy with the stamens fallen off and collected in a cup made by the red and dark purple petals. The other of another poppy has a bee collecting pollen climbing amongst the splayed out and ragged petals next to a larger more mature seedhead.
On the 7th of July 2004. I visited Munich’s Olympiazentrum. At the site is a 200 metre high tower from which I took this photo of the BMW building just accross the road. It is quite an impressive building with the BMW logo emblazened on the roof. Now thanks to Google Maps you can see the tower and the BMW building. Isn’t that exciting? 
Maybe I’ll find some more exciting things on European Goodle Maps to add here in the near future, until then here are some to get you started.
Yesterday, as it was the longest day of the year, my parents decided we should drive out to an area just north of Lincoln known as ‘Burton Cliffs’. These are pretty much the only bits of hill around Lincoln, the name cliff is quite misleading, but given the competition it’s understandable.
We all took photographs of the sunset, the ones that immediately struck me as fairly good I have uploaded to my Lincolnshire Gallery on Ivixor.net. My current favourite is this one
Today I wandered a long way through Lincoln in order to have a look at the three places I was thinking of yesterday. The two roundabouts would be too difficult unfortunatly, one is too big to frame well and the other has no good vantage point unobscured by trees. So I’ve decided I’ll do one from the footbridge over Melville Street this will allow me to see the cars going up and down Broadgate in the foreground and Lincoln cathedral will be lit up off in the background. I took a daytime shot today in order to help visualise it.
During my walk I took a few other photos which I’ve added to my Lincolnshire gallery on Ivixor.Net.
