The 2008 Farnborough Airshow took place last week, and while surviving the strong cold winds all day wearing only a t-shirt, and managing to get out of the carpark after 2 hours of queueing, I managed to get back home and sort through my photos… here are a few which I’ve picked out; if you want to see more - check out my photography section.
Yesterday I travelled into Central London to go and visit the Motorexpo 2008, the world’s largest (according to their website!) free-to-visit car show at Canary Wharf, giving people the chance to see the latest vehicles from some of the world’s leading motor manufacturers such as Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, Aston Martin and more…!
I took the liberty of taking a few snaps of the event which you can see in my photography section, or see a sample of a few below;
After reading Thomas Hawk’s blog post about a new little hack for flickr which Daniel Catt put together I had to try it out for myself! It searches through all your photos and puts together all your most commonly used tags and makes a pretty and colourful tag cloud!
Here’s mine below;
If you want to try it out for yourself you can find it here.
Today the A1 Grand Prix stopped off in Central London ahead of their race at Brands Hatch next weekend, and after the rain stopped I snapped a few photos of some of the Pit Girls, 3 of which are below;
Here’s the third annual “lets look back and think about what actually happened in the past 12 months post”, but time I’m going to take a slightly different approach…
Lessons learned this past year;
1. Flat hunting with limited time is stressful.
2. It’s less sunny in the UK than the US
3. …is a crowd
4. It doesn’t matter what you do, your Acer laptop will die at the most inconvienient time.
5. Take advice from those ‘in the know’ with a pinch of salt.
6. Searching for a placement with limited time is also stressful.
7. You don’t get a private jet or escort to uni for being an ambassador for the faculty.
8. A Canon SLR is better than a Sony point a shoot.
9. Exams are also stressful.
10. No matter what you do to fix a problem with your car, another problem will develop.
11. Regret hurts.
12. Memories don’t fade… quickly…
13. Starting a new job is less stressful than you’d think…
14. It doesn’t matter if you know you have all the cables - because you wont.
15. Friends come and go…
16. Have a plan.
17. Pink stuffed pigs are actually good fun at an office christmas party.
18. Taking photos of fireworks is actually quite difficult
19. Residents are not allowed to park in visitor parking on the street without consequences!
20. Hope is a good thing…
That was 2007, and this is 2008… and hey…. day 1 down, and so far, it’s been pretty damn good… lets just hope the next 364 days will be just as fine……..
Today was the first Nano Show; a bi-monthly series of science lectures presented simultaneously in real life at NPL and in Second Life. A real life presenter, in front of a real life audience in the NPL auditorium discusses Nanotechnology related topics, while an audience in Second Life, listens and watches the presentations in real time, and all having a chance to participate in voting and questions at the end.
All in all it went successfully, and hidden amongst a tower of cables and computers I came out ok! The set-up was - and is - quite hectic! The speaker, and thier Second Life avatar use and are logged in to the main Auditorium computer on the main screen. Then there’s a moderator taking questions from Second Life attendees and managing the presentation slides on his own computer.
Then there’s me… managing the audio, from three microphones - one for the speaker, one for the moderator, and one for the real life audience when they ask questions, all feeding into Second Life as and when required. I’ve also got 2 laptops, one showing the second life audience for the real life audience to see on a TV, and a second using Wirecast, to record everything as it happens from the computers, and two video cameras.
Here are some photos taken before, and during the event of the real life speaker and audience!
I’m not sure if this is comparable to Myles‘ Kingston University network outage incident of 2006, but it must come close…
Last night while investigating my databases within my site’s admin area, I happened to click on a button entitled ‘Check DB’, expecting to find some sort of lovely report about the health / condition of my database. However, this was not the case, and found my site broken… as it would have seemed I corrupted my databases…
…after making a support request the issue was thankfully resolved after a few hours, however I later found out my faux pas was more wide spread than previously thought, and I had actually taken down everyone’s databases and emails on my entire server, which I’m guessing is quite a few…
Three years to the day since ABC1 was launched, two and a half years since I launched the unofficial abc1uk website, the channel has come to an end with Disney pulling the plug and so with that, the unofficial website has had to close too.
It’s been a good couple of years with the site, with it being the first large scale site I’ve had to manage and deal with, and then a year later after teaming up with Myles, we recoded and redesigned the site to make it into the monster it became!
I’ve had online interviews with stars from ABC1 TV Shows, namely Sabrina Lloyd from Sports Night and Sherri Shepherd from Less Than Perfect, the site gained a whole heap of users and members to it’s forums, and it really did become a mini community with Disney having a look around the site on a regular basis!
Sadly though that is now all over, but there are always some people I would like to thank, namely;
Myles Noton, for to whom if it wasn’t for him the site probably wouldn’t have become so big and rich in features, and thus popular.
John Thackery, for providing hosting and tech support, and being there in times of crisis!
Joyce Rubin at Disney, for patiently providing as much information as she could on news about the channel and shows
The interviewees; Sabrina Lloyd and Sherri Shepherd, and their agents, to take the time to answer a few questions
And finally the visitors who took the time to keep visiting and who joined the community, and stayed with us when things sometimes went bad!
