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Ghost Town

Pictures, Travel No Responses »
Feb 212010

On the way to visit Beth’s parents, the last township we pass through is Atlee, Alberta. As you can see from the wikipedia entry, it officially has a population of 28, but I’m guessing that is a bit optimistic. This is a video we shot a couple of years ago – we drive through Atlee about a forty seconds in, and then cross the track bed of the old railroad before continuing on towards the ranch.

Canadian Gravel from Richard Peat on Vimeo.


As you can see, there really isn’t much there. There is even less now.

A few weeks back, Beth’s parents headed off for some winter sun in Hawaii, and when they returned, the one remaining building, the old schoolhouse was gone, burnt to the ground, apparently by the local authority because the building was considered dangerous.

As anyone who looks at my Flickr photostream will know, I have taken lots of pictures of the building over the years – despite being pretty exposed and windy up on the prairie, and getting increasingly dilapidated, it has withstood the worst that Alberta could throw at it. The dilapidation, combined with the prominent location (you could quite literally see the building from miles away down the road) and the fantastic skies out there made for some fantastic pictures.

Perhaps because Atlee is a bit out of the way, it has survived where many other of the one room schoolhouses have now gone. Whilst I’ve seen a lot of signs marking the locations of the old schoolhouses on our travels around the province, this is perhaps the only one I’ve seen that was still standing in situ – indeed when you looked inside it was very much as if the teacher and children had just moved out – the blackboard was still on the wall, and the frame for the swings in the grounds still stood, along with the outhouse. True, it’s location probably isn’t suitable for any kind of tourist spot, but as a piece of Alberta history, it was probably one of the last relics of how the people of the prairie used to live.

In it’s heyday, Atlee was one of a number of townships, regularly spaced along the railroad line – next along is Buffalo, then Cavendish (note the alphabetic naming too). The local farmers would bring their produce to the railroad line where it would be shipped, and the township had a school for the local children. As the roads and transport has improved, the need for frequent townships grew less. So Beth went to school at the one room schoolhouse in Buffalo – that building too has long since gone, moved to provide extra classroom space elsewhere. Grain and produce can now be shipped by truck, so the railroad line has gone. People can drive to the post office, so Beth’s parents go to Jenner for to collect the mail, and their postal address is Jenner. The only place the Atlee name is still used is by the oil companies, and for a communications mast that stands nearby, and now the last building is gone.

Certainly it is going to be strange next time we head out that way, not having the old schoolhouse marking the way. Atlee really is now just a dot on the map…

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Posted by Richard at 9:12 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

It's a Boy! (Maybe)

General, Pictures No Responses »
Feb 032010

Scan 2.1Today I had the day off as it was time for the second ultra-sound scan for Baby 2.0 down at Frimley Park Hospital. Whilst we usually try to get appointments at either the beginning or the end of the day, this time the only slots available were late morning, and knowing the usual timekeeping, I figured that we wouldn’t be done by lunchtime.

My guess proved to be well founded. Unfortunately like pretty well every hospital they schedule appointment slots for the time they would take if everything goes according to plan, unfortunately this morning they had had some sort of crisis, and by the time we got there were running almost an hour late. Bearing in mind that we also tend to come early because of the twenty minute adventure of finding a space in the car park made doubly annoying this time thanks to the piles of snow in the car park that fairly obviously hadn’t been taken account of when the barriers counted vehicles in and out.

Anyway, when we got in, thankfully this time the ultra-sound operator didn’t have to chase the baby around to get the required measurements, indeed it was exactly the opposite in that the baby was quite comfortably in one position and really didn’t seem to want to move. However the operator got a good look and was actually able to stop and show us the heart beating away, and we saw bits of rib cage, and arm and leg bones. After trying various ways of having Beth positioned, he resorted to poking in order to get the baby to move, and finally got the last measurements. The still baby also gave him a good clear view (if you know what I mean) to identify that our midwife at Finchampstead still has the touch, as she said from listening to the heartbeat weeks ago that it was a boy, and the operator here also said that it looked like a boy – of course they are never totally sure, so we’re going with probably a boy, and keeping a girls name or two in reserve just in case!

As Beth hasn’t developed Gestational Diabetes this time around, this will probably be the last scan – although there is another diabetes test in a few weeks to confirm. Whilst it’s nice to get all the extra scans, as Beth says, she gets mighty bored sitting in the waiting room at the hospital. ETA for the new baby is still some time in early June.

Now does anyone want any girls clothes…

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Posted by Richard at 7:17 pm Tagged with: ,

Baby 2.0

General, Pictures 1 Response »
Dec 072009

First thing this morning, pretty well fresh off the plane from Canada, Beth had an appointment at the hospital. This is a picture of the reason – Beth is pregnant, with the baby due sometime in late May or early June next year.

Anyway, all three of us took a trip down to Frimley Park Hospital, which is where Beth has opted to go once again, and we sat and waited. Lucy is not surprisingly at her age, not really clued up as to what was going on. She had some fun playing with the toys in the waiting area, however moments before being called in for the scan she decided she was hungry and was signing both “milk” and “more”. Whilst the dimmed lights and images on the screen distracted her for a bit, her thoughts turned pretty quickly back to food.

Her new brother or sister seems to have already developed the same skill at dodging the scan operator as Lucy in that the operator had to chase around a bit to get the measurements, and the pictures she managed to get are not the clearest. In the pictures the baby is positioned with the head to the left, and on the third image you can just about see an arm in front of the face. As with Lucy, the subsequent scans should be clearer, again as with Lucy we’re expecting quite a few scans as having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes last time it is thought quite likely Beth will develop the condition again.

Following on from the scan, Beth also had a blood test, and then from there is was time to make the next scan appointment for twenty weeks (we have a consultant visit for the diabetes test later this month).

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Posted by Richard at 3:24 pm Tagged with: ,

Lucy's First Birthday

MobLog, Pictures No Responses »
Nov 052009

So today Lucy reached the milestone of her first birthday. She has definitely developed her own little personality over that year, and is pretty clear what she does and doesn’t like (although that does seem to change from day to day). For example yesterday she seemed to have decided that she didn’t like peas – so any bits of pasta that had attached peas were carefully removed from her tray, and individual peas either tossed overboard, or put back into the bowl!

Tonight though we had chicken which went down well, in her case accompanied by crackers since we were having peas again. Then followed birthday cake and ice cream.

She had never had cake before, and her last encounter with ice cream was back in the summer when she didn’t like the cold, so she was a little careful trying them initially, but I think we can safely say she liked it as she munched through everything.

I’ve been playing around with Animoto recently – an online tool for putting pictures together into slideshows, so I’ve put the pictures from Lucy’s dinner together on that. If you want a more conventional view, the original pictures are over on Flickr.

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Posted by Richard at 12:12 am Tagged with: ,

A Very Different Whitehouse

Pictures, Politics No Responses »
Apr 302009

Hat tip to the Flickr Blog for highlighting the White House Photostream, which does seem to show a pretty candid behind the scenes view of the Obama White House.

I’m quite sure all the pictures have been suitably cleared, but it does seem that the photostream gives you a lot of behind the scenes views, so you get to see Obama picking his Oval Office chair, the new family dog being shown around, Obama watching his daughter play basketball, Obama and Biden practising putting, and even Obama watching the Super Bowl along with some of the more classic working in the Oval office type shots.

You also get to take a look at some of the iconic locations that are so well known, like the situation room, scenes on Air Force One reminiscent of the West Wing, the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room.

There are numerous great shots – currently getting on for three hundred, just from the first one hundred days in office. Rather than list any more, I’ll just let them speak for themselves with the slideshow.

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Posted by Richard at 10:23 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

Earth Hour – A Global Stunt?

Current Affairs, Pictures, Politics No Responses »
Mar 312009

Check out this page of pictures from this years Earth Hour, where households and businesses are encouraged to turn off non-essential lights and electrical appliances. Of course as in previous years, my biggest issue with the whole thing is it gets turned into one giant publicity stunt by numerous cities and businesses around the world, quite simply because at the end of the hour, they turn all those non-essential lights back on again.

Take a look through the pictures and consider how much energy is being wasted floodlighting buildings like the Houses of Parliament, the Sydney Opera House, or the CN Tower in Toronto for the 364 days, 23 hours a year that Earth Hour isn’t taking place.

Professor Ian James, our Diocesan Environment Advisor makes the point well with regards to churches, and it can equally apply to other buildings – indeed I used this article to back my argument that we shouldn’t floodlight St James’ as part of the upcoming conservation work:

Floodlighting a large empty building consumes as much electricity as lighting several houses. That electricity is a scarce resource and generating it puts carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are causing climate change. The message could be that the church is more concerned to glorify itself than to worry about its effect on its neighbours, that Christians don’t care very much about the unnecessary pollution of our world and the frivolous consumption of scarce resources.

Apart from the carbon dioxide pollution, ‘light pollution’ has now reached such levels that few people living in Southern Britain have ever the seen the night sky properly and certainly have never seen the Milky Way. I wonder which is the greater witness to God: a neo-Gothic Victorian pile lit up like a Disneyland extravaganza, or the awesome majesty of the night sky on a truly dark night, with its millions of stars blazing bravely in the blackness of space?

Are any of those buildings any the less usable with the floodlighting turned off? You can see the inside lights on the Opera House are still on, in Westminster the street lights are still on, and with the floodlighting gone it’s pretty obvious nobody is in the Houses of Parliament. In the various cityscapes warning lights for aircraft remain on, and indeed in many of them the ambient light from the essential lights continues to provide some visibility of the buildings anyway.

Also, with the reduction in consumption, which power stations do you think are being shut off? I can tell you it isn’t the big, polluting coal stations as they are slow to react, so are generally used as baseload for the grid – instead they dial down the fast response stations that they can easily control, things like the hyrdo-electric and pumped storage stations that in the UK get used to cope with peaks and troughs in demand.

So was I cheering Earth Hour? Not particularly. True it reduces electricity consumption, but it doesn’t reduce emissions as it’s often the flexible, clean generating plant that gets shut down first. I’m also not going to be cheering when it is so obviously a publicity stunt on the part of big organisations. It’s all very well shutting off your floodlights for an hour, but if you’re really serious about not wasting energy they should be turned off, and stay off. The same is true at home, did you sit in darkness for an hour and then just turn everything back on again – or did it make you think, and only use the lights and appliances you need rather than leaving them plugged in, turned on and wasting energy?

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Posted by Richard at 1:58 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

Christmas Pictures

Pictures No Responses »
Dec 282008

I’ve uploaded a few pictures of our family Christmas get together to Flickr, including quite a few pictures that will probably leave Lucy with a Christmas tree phobia for life… Unfortunately the sleeping bag is a little big for her now, and will be way too small come next year…

Also as a special treat for those amongst you who have only ever seen her asleep (at least one friend of Beth’s jokingly says that they doubt that Lucy really exists because she’s always asleep) a bit of movie footage of an awake and moving Lucy!

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Posted by Richard at 6:06 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Delivering Lucy

General, MobLog, Pictures 4 Responses »
Nov 072008

So this last week has been pretty monumental. Apparently some bloke was elected president across the pond, but the big news is our baby Lucy was born on Tuesday.

As some of you may know, Beth was diagnosed with gestational diabetes part way through the pregnancy. Basically what this means is that thanks to the hormones produced during the pregnancy her system is less sensitive to insulin, so as with a normal diabetic she needed to supplement her insulin levels by injection. Another side effect is that the birth weight is generally larger, especially if the condition has not been diagnosed, plus there is an increased risk of the baby being still born. As a result, the hospital recommended that labour be induced at around thirty-eight weeks, rather than allowing the baby to go full term.

As a result, we were booked in and dutifully turned up at the delivery suite at the hospital at 8am on Monday morning, and were put in the largest of the delivery rooms with instructions that it would probably be a long wait.

It has to be said, in terms of business, the delivery suite was pretty quiet, by Monday afternoon were were the only people in there (although they made up for that over the next couple of days with every room filled), and with us there wasn’t much happening. Beth was treated with prostaglandin shortly after we arrived and not much happened. We walked numerous circuits around the hospital corridors, but the baby resolutely stayed put. So we read the paper, Beth did the crossword and generally sat around and tried to pass the time. As a result of the failure of the first go they tried again at 3pm, and again not really much happened – Beth had some mild contractions, but by about 6pm they decided to transfer her over to the part of the maternity ward reserved for mothers before birth and sent me home, with instructions to come back for 8am the next morning when they would have another go.

In actual fact I didn’t have to wait that long. Having had something to eat, and phoned around various people with updates I got a call from Beth. Having just got settled in the ward her waters had broken and she’d been rushed back to the delivery suite. As a result I jumped into the car and headed back to the hospital.

I got back just before 10pm to find Beth pretty zonked out from gas and air, and apparently things moving pretty quickly. The midwife thought it would still take a goodly amount of time, so at about midnight we had a visit from the anaesthetist who administered an epidural to allow Beth to get some rest, and they set up a bed in the corner of the room for me to sleep on whilst they monitored during the night.

The overnight monitoring found that Beth dilated pretty well up until the check at 4am. By 8am she was still dilated the same amount and the doctors were called in. The problem appeared to be that because of the positioning of the baby it was being pushed into Beth’s pelvis. They said that we could continue with normal labour if we wanted – but added that we could very well be in exactly the same position in a few hours time. The other option was an emergency c-section. Since Beth was pretty tired at this point we opted for the c-section, and went into theatre about 9:30am, with Lucy being born at 9:41am.

Not surprisingly, us as parents didn’t see much of what was going on. I was sat up by Beth’s head, along with the anaesthetist, and they set up a screen so that Beth and myself can’t see the operation in progress. It takes them all of about a minute to get to the baby (the start time of the operation was officially 9:40am, and you could hear Lucy crying before she was even taken out. After that Lucy got handed over to a paediatrician to check she was okay, whilst the surgeon removes the placenta and closes up the incision. After the paediatrician has done his initial checks Lucy was brought around for Beth to see, and all the rest of the checks, the weighing of the baby and dressing are all done where Beth can see, in part as a distraction from what is going on over on the other side of the screen.

From there we went through and spent a bit of time in the recovery bay along with a mixture of other patients from the other operating theatres, and from there we were taken straight through to the maternity ward. Beth and Lucy spent a couple of nights there, and came home yesterday.

All in all we had a great experience with the hospital and the five midwives we went through during the over twenty-four hours we were going through the system. Perhaps the only complaint we’d have is the sauna like heat throughout the building. People may point at lots of other ways that the NHS is losing money, but if Frimley Park is typical, one major way is straight out of the window. In our room in the delivery suite the main radiator was going full pelt all day, with no way to turn it off, and as a result the staff keep both windows in the room permanently open to keep the temperature at something reasonable. It is the same story in the maternity ward where again they had windows open to keep the place at a reasonably constant temperature. Only the private rooms actually seem to have some ability to control the temperature, and there are some radiators around the place with valves, but not all.

Anyway, mother and baby are now home and doing well, and we’d like to thank everybody for all the good wishes and gifts – indeed the first piece of post addressed to Lucy was sitting on the step when we got home yesterday. We’ve had various people ask if we have things we particularly need, so there are a couple of wish lists going for Lucy. One is at Amazon, and is mainly toys and books, the other is at Mothercare and is generally more practical items, so if you’re stuck for something to get feel free to take a look at those. Once again, we’d like to thank everybody for all the good wishes, offers of help, and gifts, hopefully we’ll find time to get around to thanking everybody personally once things have settled down a bit around here! In the mean time, not surprisingly we have an ever growing collection of pictures of Lucy, which you can see over on our photo pages.

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Posted by Richard at 4:16 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Waiting Around

Pictures 3 Responses »
Oct 202008

One of the worst parts of any hospital visit is the interminable waiting, and we had a pretty good example of it today when we went down to Frimley Park for Beth’s next ante-natal appointment.

They did seem pretty flustered when we arrived for our 2:45pm appointment, certainly like they had staff off. Unfortunately we had a list of people we needed to see including diabetic nurses, midwives, consultants, plus another scan, all of which had to occur in the right order, as a result we spent most of the afternoon sitting in the waiting area. Even then we weren’t done, the postscript was that once we’d finished at the clinic, we had a twenty minute wait at the pharmacy before we finally left the building at about 5:30pm.

Anyway, in terms of a news update, everything seems to be going okay. Beth has one more appointment next week, before they try to induce the baby in the week after. From what we can gather whilst they might succeed at the first attempt, they might need to try multiple times to induce the baby, so it might well be that we’ll have several days of sitting around in a different part of the hospital. Whichever way, we’re on the home stretch now with only a couple more weeks before the birth.

The picture here is the scan picture we got today. Since the baby is now pretty big, the operator can’t now get a clear picture of the whole baby, so this one is probably a lot less clear than some of the others, but the baby is lying across the picture with the head on the right. You can see a nose, and then the hand is held up in front of the face. Suffice to say in a couple of weeks we hope we’ll have some much better pictures to look at.

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Posted by Richard at 10:58 pm Tagged with: , ,

Wokingham Heritage Weekend

Church, Pictures No Responses »
Sep 142008

This weekend was the annual Heritage Open Days weekend when historic buildings across the country, sometimes buildings that rarely allow public access, open their doors to the public. Locally this was organised under the banner of the Wokingham Heritage Weekend, and as our contribution we opened the church to visitors and as we do in July, allowed people to climb the tower.

It has to be said that during the week, the weather wasn’t looking particularly promising, and whilst it didn’t rain yesterday, it was overcast for a lot of the day, however this afternoon was fantastic, not too hot, but a nice clear day, so people got great views from the top.

We were open between two o’clock and five o’clock and had a steady stream of people from opening, with it being busiest between three o’clock and four o’clock. Like all the events in the weekend we weren’t making any charge, however that didn’t mean that we didn’t have a prominent big sign asking for a donation to the conservation fund, and the majority of the visitors were happy to contribute, many gift aiding their contribution as well. We also laid on cream teas, which were also very popular – one husband who had hoped for a piece of the cake baked by his wife was sadly disappointed as by the end of the afternoon there was no food left at all! Hopefully we will have made a few hundred more towards the half a million pounds needed for our conservation work.

I took a few pictures of the afternoon, which can be seen in our photo galleries. The different time of year giving a lower sun allowed me to take some nice shots playing with sunlight – this shot of the inside of the building and this silhouette of the parapet being ones I thought came out well.

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Posted by Richard at 8:40 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Hotline

Computers, General, Pictures, Web/Internet No Responses »
Aug 292008

Just thought I’d share a picture of a couple of little “den warmingâ€? presents to celebrate having a working setup in our new den, and give a quick update as to why it’s been a bit quiet around here recently. With regards to the den, it’s a great little space to work in – cosy without feeling too crammed. We’ve got the basic stuff we need all set up and running, although we haven’t quite finished the job of clearing out the front bedroom, largely because the routine trip to the hospital threw us a bit of a distraction.

On Tuesday we had the glucose test for gestational diabetes. We’d actually been given the test largely because we were on the observation list anyway, and the consultant suggested Beth take the test – the implication was that had we not been on the observation list anyway we wouldn’t have had this test. To cut a long story (and a lot of waiting around at the hospital) short the test didn’t come up totally clear. The result is a glucose level where between 7.7 and 11 puts you onto an extra observation list, and higher than 11 means more significant treatment is needed. Beth’s result came out at 8 – borderline, so a more stringent watch on what Beth is eating, and regular blood sugar checks. As one of the results of gestational diabetes is an increase in birth weight of the baby it also means that we get much more regular scans of the baby – once every four weeks, whereas by this point most other potential parents wouldn’t get another scan.

Anyway, I’ve digressed slightly – back to the “den warmingâ€? presents – the Dalek wall clock is a cheesy but pretty self-explanatory addition, although it does light up when you turn off the lights. The phone however is one of the Firebox.com Retro Telephones, which is precisely what it looks like a refurbished GPO issued original phone complete with bell ringer, and pulse dialling. It was a slight bit of a gamble as since we have a network cable into the den rather than a phone extension we’re using a little Vonage box to get a phone connection. The amazing thing is that the cutting edge VOIP box, in this case a D-Link VTA, is quite happily taking the old style pulse dialling without any problem. From a quick trawl around the internet it seems that it’s not consistent across all the VOIP adapters, and is dependant on the chip set being used, in this case the Texas Instruments TNETV1015. The phones come in hotline red like this one, and also in black, a snazzy/hideous (delete as applicable) target colour scheme, or for the pink lovers around, a tasteful two tone pink. Being pulse dialling you are going to have problems doing anything that involves pressing numbers on the keypad, but as a little bit of history that is still usable it is a great addition to the desk.

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Posted by Richard at 8:39 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Shedwatch

MobLog, Pictures No Responses »
Aug 132008

Our “garden shed for purposes ancillary to dwelling� is now going up, despite the pretty lousy weather. Beth is taking pictures of the operation as it progresses, a slideshow of which you can see below.
 


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

So far the only small issue has been over the routing of the power cable. The original idea was to take the power from somewhere around the back of the house, but after taking a look the electrician decided that the only way he could do it is from a connection into the main fuse box. The problem being that the fuse box is in the porch at the front of the house, and this is going in around the back. As a result we now have a big black mains cable running across the front of the house, through the garage and along the right hand fence. The electrician is coming back on Friday to finish off and re-route slightly so as to try and hide the cable, although ultimately we can’t avoid having the cable visible somewhere without massively expensive digging up of the gardens both front and back, and the drive.

The other first impression is quite how big it looks – as always there is a big difference between how something looks on plans, and how it looks in reality!

Anyway, the guys doing all the building, who supplied the kit, and who even helped out with all the planning application work we needed are Alternative Space, and what is going in is one of their new EcoDen rooms that effectively come as a modular flat pack, so in theory can be self-built if you don’t want them to do it for you.

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Posted by Richard at 7:57 pm Tagged with: ,

Surprise Landings

MobLog, Pictures No Responses »
Aug 062008

So there we were, sitting watching the TV, when I hear a weird noise from outside. Stepping out into the garden, this is what we saw, a Virgin hot air balloon coming down rather quickly. These pictures show the view as it went over and came to rest on the garrison sports field, amazingly coming down in the relatively small space between the tree lined road and the rugby posts. Considering that a few metres short on the other side of the road he would have been coming down onto the Penrose Park housing estate, and the rest of the sports field has regularly spaced rugby posts along it’s length, it was a pretty impressive bit of piloting.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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Posted by Richard at 11:30 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

Another 24 Hours of Flickr

Computers, Pictures, Web/Internet No Responses »
Jul 312008

You might remember last year I participated in a project being run by Flickr, the site that hosts my pictures online, where they attempted to capture the flavour of a day around the world. On that particular day, 5th May, 2007, we were attending a wedding, and my picture of the bride and groom was picked for the book.

This time around, the chosen day is the 8th of August – 8.8.8 – hence the project group is called Flickr 888. The basic rules of the project are the same, grab your cameras and take as many pictures as you like on the day, and then submit one to the group.

Points to note are that rather than a book, they are partnering with MOO to produce a set of postcards. That does mean that there is a minimum resolution for pictures of 1795×1287 – so no iPhone pictures folks. :(

Whilst I suspect my chances of making the final cut this time around is unlikely – next Friday is a normal day at work for me – I’ll still be taking my camera along and seeing what I can photograph.

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Posted by Richard at 11:08 pm Tagged with: , ,

Patronal Festival Weekend

Church, Music, Pictures No Responses »
Jul 272008

Along with our annual trip to see the Tappers, this weekend was also pretty busy as it was our patronal festival weekend at St James. As part of this on Saturday we had an evening from The Madding Crowd, a group of performers from Winchester, and then today we had the annual opening of the Church Tower, and a mini fete up at the Church.

The Madding Crowd primarily perform a selection of music originally written for the parish bands who in days gone by would have provided the musical accompaniment for church services in the days before the pipe organ. They augment the performance with readings and dances from the same period, drawing heavily on the work of Thomas Hardy, indeed drawing their name from his fourth novel. It was a great evening, and showed up some music that perhaps we could use in the Church choir – and some of the dramatic interludes showed up that very little has changed in the Church over the past hundred years – people still moan about the Rector, and choir practice hasn’t changed much at all, even if the instruments and the clothes have!

The main village fete alternates between being hosted by the Church and the school, so in years like this when it is the turn of the school, the Tower Opening and Mini-Fete are one of our major fund raising efforts for the year, especially important in a year like this when we have a big campaign in progress. Thanks to the vagaries of the British weather, even in July it can involve a lot of prayer for a nice day – and since all the way through this week there has been rain forecast for this afternoon, it was great to have such fantastic weather. As a result we got a lot of people through the doors and climbing the tower, and fingers crossed a goodly amount of money for the conservation appeal.

Needless to say I was around with my camera, so I’ve included a set of pictures below. As you might have noticed if you follow my Flickr stream, I’ve started to take a picture or two with the much maligned camera on the iPhone. Although some aren’t going to win any awards, especially in poor light, I have to say that some, in particular this one and this one are a lot better than I perhaps would expect based purely on the specs for the camera on paper.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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Posted by Richard at 11:42 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Stop in the Name of Love

MobLog, Music, Pictures 1 Response »
Jul 272008

Sometimes there are times when you really feel for people organising live shows, Friday night was one of those nights. Over the years we seem to have turned into one of the many Basingstoke Tappers groupies, and have been along to every summer show they’ve done for the best part of a decade. Reading through the programme before the show started, Tracey Kinchenton’s introduction was bemoaning the fact that several of the dancers had injured themselves, and also that Matthew Winchester, one of the singers for the evening had also had to drop out. However they had managed to get a singer called John Amobi, who had had a number of lead roles in West End shows as a replacement. However the problems hadn’t ended there, in the week before the show, and after the programmes had been printed, Steve Pert, who is as much a part of the shows as the dancers themselves, was diagnosed with glandular fever and had also had to withdraw. They had managed to get previous vocalist June Boyce along in his place, but needless to say at that short notice it had thrown the whole programme into difficulties as June had to do songs from her repertoire with little time to learn the numbers against which the dancers would be dancing.

The problems were probably more apparent in the first half, where the vocalists came and did songs on their own, plus we also had a little of the first night nerves as things perhaps didn’t seem quite as polished as in previous years. However I don’t quite know what happened at half time, but the second half was way better.

One of the things we really noticed this year, was how things have progressed. The third of the singers on the bill was Francesca McMahon, who has grown up as one of the Basingstoke Tappers. A few years ago she made her first attempts at singing on stage at a Basingstoke Tappers show, since then she has come on leaps and bounds, and now sings regularly, and looks set for a good career in the business. What she has which the other vocalists don’t is the fact that she can dance in with the rest of the dancers, and is perfectly capable of pulling off a pretty complex routine, whilst still giving a great delivery on the song.

Another noticeable change is in the number of boys Tracey has managed to recruit. A few years back there were just one or two, now she has sixteen, and a number of them are good enough to be able to dance on their own, so we had one number with John Amobi and all sixteen doing the Temptations classic My Girl, and the two most experienced as front row dancers elsewhere.

They weren’t the only talented men on the stage. All the way through the show we were wondering about the slightly odd staging at the back of the stage – at the end we found out why it looked odd. Tracey had managed to get her son and a number of his friends who spend a lot of their leisure time hanging out at the various skate parks around the town to come and participate in the finale, where they rode their bikes live on stage performing a number of the tricks they practise in the park live on stage. No offence to the dancers, but in that finale I really can’t tell you what they were doing as I was watching the fantastic performance from the guys on the bikes! As Tracey said in her introduction to the finale, she wanted to prove that not all young people are hanging around on street corners drinking – slightly ironic considering that the town mayor who had made a speech just before the item had talked about attending a conference where one of the subjects was precisely that – anti-social behaviour from kids.

As you may know, this isn’t the only dance show we’ve seen this year, a couple of weeks ago we were down seeing another great show involving a friend of ours down in Plymouth. Although the two shows were rather different in scale and content, one consistent thing between the two was that they both included a tribute to Thriller, the Michael Jackson classic that first came out twenty-five years ago. Down in Plymouth what they produced was recognisably close to the original routine. The Tappers with a cast about twice the size produced something that was more inspired by, including a diversion into a Missy Eliot track (isn’t Shazam great) part way through, and a forest of dancing trees along with the ghosts, ghouls and skeletons.

All in all, despite the clear difficulties they’d had putting on the show this year, it was as much of an entertaining evening as ever, and we’re looking forward to seeing how Tracey and the Basingstoke Tappers better the bikes next year.

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Posted by Richard at 11:00 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Baby Update

MobLog, Pictures 1 Response »
Jul 142008

We’ve just got back from the hospital after the mid-term scan. This scan was a bit longer than the first, with the ultrasound operator having to take a number of measurements to make sure everything is okay, and made somewhat more difficult by the baby starting off in a bit of an awkward position, and being less than keen about having a picture taken, hiding behind a hand at one point.

In order to try and encourage the baby to turn around she adjusted the angle of the bed such that Beth felt at one point she was going to slide head-first off, as we tried to encourage the baby to move.

Thankfully that did encourage the baby to shift position, so all the required measurements were able to be taken – they can send you away and ask for you to come back another day if the baby refuses to co-operate!

Anyway, all the tests came out clear, so as far as we can tell the baby is fit and healthy. The other thing the the ultrasound operator was able to do was to take a look and see what sex the baby is – although obviously they don’t guarantee anything, the operator said that from the scan it looked like a girl.

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Posted by Richard at 5:51 pm Tagged with: ,

Discovering Great Flickr Pictures

Computers, Pictures, Web/Internet No Responses »
Jul 022008

Last week, blogging photographer Thomas Hawk wrote a great piece extolling the virtues of FriendFeed for discovering great pictures on Flickr.

I’m certainly with him in that respect for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unlike the contacts page on Flickr itself, FriendFeed has a nice expanding interface that allows you to see all the picture thumbnails in a particular batch. Secondly, it shows you more than the Flickr contacts page, in particular it shows you pictures your contacts have marked as favourites, and also pictures posted and marked as favourites by their FriendFeed contacts. As a result you get a great, and sometimes pretty eclectic collection of great pictures coming through. Thanks to the filtering features you can even get to a page of only Flickr items.

The down side? Back to the old chestnut of having to manually add people to FriendFeed, which is an incredibly tedious process with a lot of contacts (Thomas has over 9000).

So what sort of things have I been finding? Check out this great set of pictures of Ghost Towns of Saskatchewan from bonedad:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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Posted by Richard at 1:22 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Howard's Birthday Party

MobLog, Movies & TV, Pictures No Responses »
Jun 302008

On Saturday evening we headed off to Yateley to help celebrate Howard reaching the ripe old age of thirty, and had a great time. Needless to say I took the odd picture or two, plus some video. The pictures can all be found in our photo galleries, and the video can be found on both Vimeo and YouTube. (It is worth comparing the quality of the two services as both were given exactly the same file…)

Alternatively I’ve embedded both below for your viewing pleasure – and yes that is a video of a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings playing Pass the Parcel…


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.


Pass the Parcel from Richard Peat on Vimeo.

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Posted by Richard at 12:57 pm Tagged with: ,

Seeing in Full Colour

Apple/Mac, Computers, Pictures, Web/Internet 1 Response »
Jun 272008

test 2 no profileDepending on what platform and browser you’re using, you may be looking at this post thinking that I’ve gone totally nuts and posted the same picture twice…

I haven’t.

What you’ll see depends on which platform and browser combination you are using. Anybody using a PC or Mac running an out-of-the-box install of Firefox or a PC running Internet Explorer will be seeing two identical pictures. If you are using Safari on the PC or Mac, Internet Explorer on the Mac, or you’ve made certain changes to the configuration of Firefox 3, you’ll be able to see a difference between the two images.

The difference is down to colour management. The two images were posted to Flickr by user jamieourada, who had always put the fact that his pictures appeared badly on PC’s down to lousy or mis-configured monitors on the PC’s that were viewing the pictures, but had just discovered a relatively unknown fact, which is that Safari honours the colour profile embedded in an image.

test 1 with profileEssentially colour management is about ensuring that colours appear the same across multiple devices, so for example the colours that your digital camera records are the same colours that are displayed on screen when you are working with the picture, and that are printed out when you print your picture on a printer. This is dealt with by embedding a colour profile into the image file. Tools like Photoshop can work with, and even change these colour profiles for a particular image, which is what has happened here.

The problem is that most web browsers totally ignore the colour profile that has been embedded in an image, and instead apply a generic profile, so whilst this doesn’t much matter in an average web site, when you’re looking at photographic images it becomes a noticeable problem. If you look at the second image here, which is the one that is using a colour profile the colours look a lot more vibrant than they do in the version without a profile – but only if you’re using Safari, or have enabled colour management in Firefox 3. Of course a lot of the time the differences can be quite subtle, but the differences in this image, particularly the areas of rust, are really quite striking, really highlighting the issues.

So, if you’re serious about wanting to see pictures online as was originally intended, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of Safari, or enable the colour management settings on Firefox 3.

test 1 with profile and test 2 no profile originally uploaded by jamieourada. Hat tip to regularjen for twittering the picture.

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Posted by Richard at 1:31 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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