After much persuasion from Myles, and much retaliation from myself, I finally joined Flickr for somewhere to showcase my photography, and to my original surprise I love it!

I’m going to be uploading some of my better works onto Flickr for the world to see on my account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lloydengland/ . I hope to get some publicity out of this move by getting my work ‘out there’ as Myles would say, but also it’s a good website with a great established community.

On occasions I am also going to be blogging a ‘featured’ photo, like my Snooker one below, which will be photos I have taken and uploaded to Flickr which also deserve a mention on my blog, similar to what Thomas Hawk does, however probably less frequently as an when I take a photo worth featuring.

I plan to get alot more photos up in the near future, for now there is a small selection of what I’ve taken on a few topics and places. So if you’re find yourself browsing around Flickr one day, give my account a visit!

According to a news blog post at CNet, the average American household has 994 digital photos, stored on CD’s, DVD’s, Websites & hard drives, holding about 3 to 4 years worth of photos. Now, for the everyday household this may seem ‘average’, but after a quick snoop through my digital photos on my laptop, I have approximately 8048 photos of my own, a little above the average 994 for an entire household.

Now as these 994 photos are supposedly taken over 3 or 4 years, lets assume the latter, as I too have digital photos since 4 years ago. This would mean that each household takes 248 photos per year with their digital camera, supposedly on holiday and the odd family outing. Seeing how the average household has 2 children, lets assume one is old enough to have their own camera, and there is also one camera for both parents. So, with two cameras snapping away, thats 124 photos per camera, per person, per year.

Then theres me, 8048 photos over 4 years brings my average to 2012 photos per year, a tad higher than the average 124 per year everyone else is taking. But with over 8000 photos brings problems and that is how to easily store and manage photos in a way which makes them easy to locate and categorise. The main hurdles which I’ve been facing are exactly how to categorise over 8000 photos, is it best by name, by location, by date which I can always adhere too, and something which will be future proof.

On the right is my current folderisation method which I sorted out only a couple weeks ago; sorting photos by main location first, and then by date, however this poses a few problems in itself, such as if I wanted to find a certain photo from a certain place, I have to try and remember the date, or atleast the rough date that it happened. My America folder is slightly different, categorising photos just by place rather than date, which too works well to some extent, but as always has its problems, and would be difficult to implement on a full scale basis as I would have to merge photos from different times, sometimes years apart into the same folder, and that would become messy, and something I wouldn’t like to have.

There is always of course 3rd party applications, such as Adobe Lightroom which tries to help with photo management by using folders and tags and such, but its not future proof, and Lightroom won’t be around forever, so knowing my luck I will tag and categorise all my photos for Lightroom, get use to it and then have it replaced or become defunct. For now though atleast I’ll continue on with my current system until I get frustrated with it more and try to change it again, but with an ever growing photo collection, the future doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy!

The other day I visited the London Aquarium next to the London Eye on the Embankment for a couple hours while it was raining outside. It was a good place to visit, and has the potential for some great photos to be taken, once you wade through the hordes of people around the tanks to actually get to the front. Now, I say there’s potential for good photos, as I seemed to walk away at the end of the day with very few which actually were any decent. People may have thier own reasons, but I put it down to poor lighting, the fish moving too damn fast and a crappy camera.

So, out of 145 photos I took actually in the aquarium, I have uploaded a magical 8 for your viewing pleasure, 3 of which arn’t even of fish. Now to add to my photography woes from the outing, on the camera screen at the time most looked marvoulous, but what any regular digital photographer should know, you can have a photo which looks like a masterpiece on the back of your camera’s 2.5″ screen, but when it’s back at home on a 15″+ screen at full resolution, you find that you’ve got something which looks like its been hit by a truck.

Well, another year, another television season is coming to an end in the states. Here, I’m going to delve into each major show which I watch and give my views on them all!

[I'll be discussing the plots and season finale's of - Lost Season 3; Ugly Betty Season 1; Greys Anatomy Season 3; 24 Season 6 - all at American Pace - so if you don't want to know yet - look away now - you have been warned!]

Ugly Betty

A pretty good season finale here; with the shock of Santo’s surprise death which was done pretty well, and with Betty not being able to stop Henry in time, what will happen!? A show I’m looking forward to returning in a few months!

Grey’s Anatomy

It ended?!?! I was honestly expecting one more final episode! A pretty mundane finale compared to the others this year in my opinion, granted we do have the ‘What’s gonna happen to Burke and George?’ and I guess we were introduced to a couple potential new stars, namely the new 1st year interns. But, other than that there was no real fanfare, the worst kept secret of all time that Addison Shepherd would be leaving was hinted at, and yea, we’ve now been left with then ‘What’s going to happen to Derek & Meredith… but, unless it’s just me, that story is getting a bit old now, over the past three season’s they’ve split up and gotten back together more times than I’ve gone toilet! But, nevertheless, it’s still a good show and I’ll be waiting eagerly for the next season…

24

Fantastic double episode finale, and really sums up so far the true Jack Bauer, and how his career has changed and affected his life and everyone he cares and loves forever. The suspense throughout was gripping, only to end with a sentimental last ten minutes. It’s what the season and the show needed at this point, and they pulled it off fantastically. I now don’t know how I will cope having to wait until January 2008 for the next season and what the future has instore for Jack, especially how the network executives are planning a ‘major change’ to the show; I’ll be waiting with much anticipation!

Lost

Oh My! I’m not going to say much about Lost, for all those who are yet to watch it! - Ahem! - but this was a truely amazing season finale! The twists and such and wow. Best finale from Lost yet in my opinion, and I really, really, wont be able to cope until it returns in January!

Other shows which ended thier seasons a while back, but still worth a mention; Eureka - A show which finished it’s first run way back in the Autumn which seems like a life time ago, it’ll be good to get it back! Stargate SG-1 - Sadly TV Season-wise it may be over for good, but the two new TV Movies which are airing this Autumn will be a long waited return and hopefully a final good end to a good story line. Stargate Atlantis - Back this Autumn as well, and seeing as how we were left on a knife edge not knowing what will happen to our Atlantians, and the rumoured ‘Cast Culling’ will be interesting to see what happens, and hopefully when Sam Carter arrives there will be plenty of Sam - Rodney scenes! 

So, what will I be watching over the summer months to keep me sane until the next season starts in a few months? Well, Studio 60 starts again tonight, and after a few months off the air, it will be good to get back into that, even if it will probably only be for a 6 - 8 more episodes. Another Aaron Sorkin show which I’ll be watching is The West Wing, which until recently I hadn’t seen even one episode of, but now I am hooked!

So, as you may have noticed, the website has had a few changes here and there to bring a fresh new change to some sections, and hopefully improve the website as a whole.

A change to the blog area as you may notice below, is a newly designed commenting section, as shown to the right. All comments are now shown grouped together spanning the entire width of the page at the bottom underneath every post on each individual post page. To go along with this change, a new range of commenting guidelines have been placed on the page to provide guidance and help when posting replies.

Each individual post page now also featured a comprehensive guide on the left hand side, providing information, published date information, tag categories, post rss feeds and other basic information.

Another large scale update was with the Photography section on the main website. The section now features galleries to specific locations and subjects, which then include a mimimun of eight photos for each, all with larger versions, and breadcrumbs for easy and simple navigation.

Currently only three galleries exist, but more will be added in due course to make this section a more fundamental part of the website itself.

The site has also had many smaller make overs, and the layout of all pages have been tweaked and improved. The profile page has also been rewritten and now includes a downloadable micro version of my CV. Some bugs have also been fixed and the site should work better in FireFox now than before.

For the second time in my Acer Travelmate 8104’s 18month life, it decided to break at the most inconvienient time once I had arrived back in Kingston from the Easter break. This time the laptop simply failed to turn on at all ever, and after being taken to a repair company to confirm my worst suspicions, the motherboard was at fault and would need to be replaced, which would have then been the laptop’s 3rd motherboard. However, as Myles’ Acer laptop also broke a few months ago with similar problems, a replacement motherboard was priced at £800 by Acer + £300 labour.

So, with the laptop being far too much to be worthy of a repair, I went on the hunt for a new laptop, and as Myles blogged at the time, the number of decent laptops in the high street are few and far between, especially if you want Vista. So, we looked online, and after a while debating I decided on a customised Dell Inspiration 6400. But, thats where the second wave of issues arose, which was after ordering the laptop, I recieved a phone call from Dell telling me that they won’t deliver the laptop to Kingston as my debit card was registered in Torquay, to help prevent fraud. So with not many other options, I went to my bank to change my address, and then re-order a new laptop the next day.

So, for the next nine days I waited for my new laptop to arrive, using Myles’ laptop to check my emails hourly it would seem, and try to sort out Dell to make them not charge me for the original order which they had reserved the money out of my account for. But today, all was resolved, and my laptop arrived at the door! So now I’m back online and able to do work again alot more easily, and at a much faster speed since my new Dell laptop has alot higher specs than my old 18 month old laptop now has.

While heading towards the town center earlier today, Myles and I came across what we thought was a film crew getting prepared, and, shortly there after it was confirmed, The Bill (which reguarly uses Kingston as a filming location) was being filmed just minutes from our flat. Then we spotted Louisa Lytton (PC Beth Green (aka Ruby Allen from the Eastenders)) who will be on your screen in The Bill in a few weeks time and John Bowler (PC Roger Valentine), filming scenes in and around an abandoned shop which ended up lasting all day.

We then attempted to take a couple photos from my car as we drove past from my camera phone, but luck wasn’t on our side and the photo didn’t end up too good, even with Louisa smiling and posing for the shot as she noticed what we were doing. So, Myles and I took Plan B into action, when Myles went to get his proper camera to try and get some better photos, some of which are shown below.