Saturday in Oslo

Friday in Oslo

Clifton

Had an hour or two before my train on the Sunday morning to go out and have a coffee with Heidi, and we decided to head to the posh part of Bristol called Clifton. There are many stunning architectural features around these parts. Lots of sweeping terraced crescents with a view over the Avon gorge and the Clifton suspension bridge that spans it.

You cant get far enough away to get a good shot all in one so I made this stitched together shot.


And then cropped it to get rid of most of the annoying things like people and cars... but there is still a pesky lamp post right in the middle! Bring in Photoshop and off we go...


Bye bye lamp post and hello beautiful shot of the bridge with nothing to spoil it... don't look too closely you might see the joins. Probably not the best composition in the world but I can always do another version if anyone would like to add any creative input. What would we do without computers?

Heidi and Darren

It's been a long time since me and my friends all moved away from home, but at least my old school friend Heidi has something to show for it in bricks and mortar, and now, a baby on the way too! Caught the train up to to meet them on the Friday night and it was a lovely sunny weekend to enjoy their house and garden, and the delights of Bristol.



This is Boo (half of the "other half" that did Changing Rooms with Heidi and Darren), with her son Stanley who was very cute and slightly hyperactive.


Darren doing his catalogue shot pose, and Heidi just looking well happy but a bit pregnant.


Back to Heidi and Darren's house... haha... no... this is part of the Blaise Estate which we had a quick walk round on Saturday afternoon. I think this castle is the old family summer retreat from the main house. Beautiful views though and I'm sure it was quite a treat, back in the day.

Get the gardener in...

I know I know this blog has been neglected and I'M SORRY OK?! I did have a few pictures to show you but I have only just come around to sorting them out. One of my recent jobs when visiting Mum up in Manchester was to sort out the greenhouse.

Unfortunately I have missed the golden opportunity for telling the complete story as I failed to take a before picture. Anyone who has visited No.3 over the past few years may have seen that the greenhouse was a bit dishevelled and was in need of some TLC.

I do have a picture of all the stuff that was not thrown in the bin initially.


After much snail removing, insect killing, mould and cobweb removing and general tidy up, this is the state I suggested that it should stay in. Clean, neat and completely devoid of ... well... everything. This idea was kiboshed and I was instructed to put everything back that was there before... just neatly. We compromised to adapt the "Chuck 75% and keep 25%" rule, which has since been implemented as the standard household practice when clearing and tidying.

The end result, a much nicer (snail and leaf free) potting shed and parcel storage facility. Job done.

Easter in Wales

Hello all... well yes without Master Blogger Matthew for inspiration we have all been a little slow on the blogging front. But finally, after a lovely Easter weekend away I have some blog-worthy photos to show you all. I had a free day off from work on Thursday so flew up to Manchester early. Went to see The Producers musical on the Thursday night, starring the man of the moment Peter Kay who plays outrageously bad theatre director Roger De Bris. Was very funny and Peter Kay did not hijack the show too much, although there were inevitible and amusing diversions from the script. Most importantly, the boy from Bolton can sing his part too, and this was the most entertaining and well rounded outing of this show I have seen around the globe.
After that we packed our bags ready to head off on Friday morning for No. 6 in Wales. As you can see from the shots below the weather on Friday and Saturday was glorious. The ice cream was accommpanied by a gin and tonic but I didnt have enough hands to get that in the shot ;-)




Saturday we went to Newborough beach and walked down the lighthouse and back.

No.6 Trip

I was up north this weekend, as Mum and I had decided to do a trip down to No. 6. I flew up from Southampton on the Saturday morning and met Mum at the airport, then we headed straight for Great Grandma Williams (or Nanna if you prefer) in Rhos. Had a lovely lunch out in the bistro round the corner and then headed off in the afternoon on to our final destination. The pictures are from Sunday morning at Penmon Point. The Black Point Lighthouse has a constantly chiming bell, probably to warn of the dangerous passage between Anglesea and Puffin Island, as I don't think it is just for effect.

Grandma's Pictures

Hello everyone, just downloading a few shots of our trip to No.6 and found Grandma's happy snaps from Maud's birthday weekend. As always ultra cute poses and tiaras on show. Looks like one of the first attempts at eating cake was a bit wobbly... but I'm sure with a bit more practice that will be ironed out. Mmmm... cake!

New trip planned!

Woohoo... no pictures in this post but just to announce my new ticker above that is counting down the days until our next Oslo trip. I will be testing the transport connections from Southampton to OSL via Heathrow for the first time, and meeting up with Mum at the airport at the other side all being well. We are taking full advantage of the May bank holiday weekend which occurs in both the UK and Norway which is handy. It will be May before you know it!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAUD MARIE!

One year young today! Thank you Maud Marie for bringing us all so much fun over the past 365 days. Many happy returns! Lots of love, Uncle Tim x x x

Ubuntu is the future...

For a bit of fun, when I moved down to Southampton I took the old PC that was sitting in Mum's garage. I needed a bit of a pet project to see if it still worked and if it could function as a useful object in my new place. Basically I thought it might work as a glorified Hi-fi if I could plug in my external harddrive that contains all my music. Anything else would be a bonus. It had a CD reading drive (that sounded someone blending a handful of nuts and bolts), no USB2.0, and no ethernet, so fairly useless. I managed to install Windows XP (which was a struggle) to find out that it would not recognise the disk format (Mac) anyway. Add to this that it would not work with my ADSL modem via USB and you end up with a huge waste of time.

This was all around the time that the new and "fantastic" Windows Vista was being released. I begin to devour the trouncing in the media that it received with glee. People have been waiting months (if not years) for its official release so that they can get their sticky little hands on all the new features. Well, as far as I can see it has a moderately fancy new look, a heap load more security features to block out all those nasty viruses and an indexed search facility similar to Spotlight in Mac or Google Desktop. Wow! And all this will probably require 2 or 3 times more RAM and Ghz than you had before and it ONLY costs between £200 or £350 depending on how much of this new fantastic stuff you can possibly live without. Well I hereby declare that unless forced by my employer, or through some catastrophic chain of cosmic events, I will NEVER purchase a Windows operating system again in my life. Ever!

So I was reading some Vista-hating blog and the guy was saying "Anyone with half a brain is going to be using Linux. Its free and functional." Not being a total geek, I always assumed that Linux was reserved for the IT professionals only. How wrong I was. A little research and a 30 minute download later and I had the latest Linux operating system Ubuntu burned onto a CD. Slip it in the drive of this old PC. Reboot and off it goes.

Ubuntu is all the free and functional philosophy of Linux, packaged in a beautiful and easy to use geek-free way. The tagline for this software is "Linux for Human Beings" which I think is a good way to put it. To my delight, after the short installation, the graphics and navigation through the system are smooth and intuitive, and everything JUST WORKS! USB modem: no problem, on the net within seconds. Cant it read my Mac formatted harddrive? Of course.. im surprised you even needed to ask (I imagine it saying??)!

Just like Windows or Mac, everything is completely customisable, so I might lose the pooh brown themed that it loads with for something a bit cheerier, but ultimately this system has endless possibilities, and they are all FREE!

Keeping up with the bloggers...

Well everyone is posting these pictures... so I'd better try and keep up!

Unfortunately, Southampton does not have a spectacular array of webcams... in fact, they are very poorly located. It says that its supposed to look like this...


But currently, we have this to look at...


Thankfully, round the corner in Portsmouth they have built the lovely Spinnaker Tower, which is worth pointing a camera at. This is the view today... quite clear and blue but still only +7 degrees.

Window on the world...

Im a couple of weeks into work now and I suppose you might be wondering what I actually get up to. Below are a taster of what I get to look at... bacterial scunge.


This picture 100 times magnified and shows the edge of the flow cell at the bottom of the picture and above the line half way up the picture are the bacteria growing on the surface of the glass.




I have zoomed in (400x) on some of those bacteria, who in this flow cell, like to grow in clusters. These are big groups of bacteria all growing quite quickly in this ball like structure... we dont really know why they do this yet.




This picture is looking at one individual colony of cells, 1000x normal size. You can see the individual cells. This is a seething mass of bacteria all jostling about and slithering around... its very cool to watch!

Hopefully soon... VIDEO of these little guys....
(look I know it's not as exciting as Maud on a sledge but I have limited "cute" subject matter)