Photos and Videos

Morningside by night

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Projects on 3 November 2009 with 2 comments

Can we cla­rify: post­ing a photo before giv­ing up and just going to bed counts as fully-fledged blog­ging, yes?

Cleaning windows

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 2 November 2009 with 2 comments

I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Win­dows. In fact, I quite like it. I could hap­pily use Linux if it could run Pho­toshop with any pro­fi­ciency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a rel­at­ive I could sell in order to buy one, but des­pite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warn­ings have been dis­abled within an inch of their lives, the Win­dows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a use­ful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watch­ing Win­dows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Win­dows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graph­ics driver and the web­cam only show­ing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceil­ing? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Win­dows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my com­puter and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awe­some Edi­tion to Win­dows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Pro­fes­sion­als Edi­tion, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incid­ent­ally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of say­ing, I love Nin­ite. The first thing I nor­mally do after a rein­stall is open Inter­net Explorer and use that to down­load Fire­fox. Once Fire­fox is sor­ted, I then start the three-day-long pro­cess of work­ing out what it is I actu­ally use, remem­ber­ing only when I go to use a pro­gram that I still need to down­load and install it. Nin­ite takes out the guess­work. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis — includ­ing Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Note­pad++, Spo­tify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and Win­SCP — and I can down­load a cus­tom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only soft­ware I need to manu­ally install are the big­gies — Pho­toshop, Illus­trator, Light­room, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assum­ing that those drivers are avail­able before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Nin­ite — you have made the past two weeks infin­itely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pump­kin above must go to our next door neigh­bours. Sadly, I can­not take any credit for those artist­ic­ally swirly eyes or the way our stair­well sud­denly smells a lot like rot­ting veg. You don’t know how temp­ted I am to take the lid off and put the ham­ster inside, just hav­ing him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)

I capture the tenement

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Projects on 1 November 2009 with 2 comments

Sit­ting in front of a blank file titled “NaNoWriMo2009.docx” won­der­ing where all the words that flooded my head for the past month have gone, it sud­denly seems like a bril­liant plan to take part in NaBlo­PoMo as well. This reminds me a lot of being in Uni, when it sud­denly seemed like a good idea to scrub the flat from top to bot­tom the day before an exam, but if it gets me doing two things I want to do more of (writ­ing and blog­ging), and see­ing as no-one’s going to mark the res­ults — although they may taunt me for the rest of my nat­ural life if I fail at either — I’ll run with it. I’m temp­ted to make myself take a photo a day through­out Novem­ber as well, and blog that, too. Hell, why not go the whole hog and run a mara­thon every day in Novem­ber, Sarah?

Novem­ber is my planned month of end­less health. Tech­nic­ally you can’t plan these things, but it’s surely due, after spend­ing the whole of Octo­ber with vari­ous vir­uses. Virus begets virus, it turns out. Over the course of the month I’ve done pos­sible ‘flu, stink­ing cold, ton­sil­itis, laryngitis, to the point that the doc­tor has now given me anti­bi­ot­ics just in case there’s some­thing kil­lable in there. If I was well enough to leave the house for even half of the days in the month, I’d be sur­prised, and when I did go out I man­aged to get myself attacked in Waitrose (Waitrose! Maybe you expect to get kicked by ran­dom strangers while stand­ing in the bakery aisle of Lidl, but Waitrose?!), mean­ing the whole of the month of Octo­ber can safely be filed under A for “Atrocious”.

But Novem­ber? Novem­ber, you’re going to be won­der­ful. Together we’ll write a book, a blog, take pho­to­graphs, catch up and get ahead with work pro­jects, leave the house on a daily basis (okay, we can work on get­ting to the top of the street without dying again before we start on the daily mara­thons), catch no germs and be okay.

C’mon Novem­ber: let’s get started.

Before delivery commences

In Photos and Videos on 17 October 2009 with Comments Off

Ater two weeks, I’m begin­ning to feel human again after a bout of the Death Virus/‘flu/something really quite nasty. It feels like the whole of Octo­ber so far has been spent in a fog of ill­ness, but apart from tired­ness and a marked inab­il­ity to breathe (I’m hor­ribly asth­matic, it turns out. Who knew? Oh, every­one? And I would feel bet­ter if I just took my indus­trial strength inhalers some­times? Oh. Well. I’ll think about it.), the fog is start­ing to lift. I’ve even done things today that don’t involve star­ing into middle dis­tance and for­get­ting what I’m doing, although admit­tedly that was along­side star­ing into space and for­get­ting what I’m doing.

The old pet­rol pump in the photo is just around the corner from the flat, but as it’s on a route we don’t take very often I man­aged to not notice it for almost three months. It’s sur­pris­ing how quickly you stop noti­cing things, even in new places, when you for­get to look and start tak­ing the things around you for granted.

Detail

In Photos and Videos, Projects on 1 October 2009 with Comments Off

I set myself a little pro­ject this morn­ing, and the res­ult is this series of little still lives fea­tur­ing the details of my day and my home (there are more pho­tos on Flickr). Some of the images are stranger than oth­ers — who takes a photo of a bottle of bal­samic vin­egar or a doorhandle? — but the answers give bizarre little insights into who I am and how I live: I add bal­samic to everything (except maybe por­ridge) and I think the old doorhandles are the favour­ite part of my new flat, other than the bath­room and kit­chen win­dows (light!) and shower cur­tain. You prob­ably have to have lived without a shower rail for three months to truly appre­ci­ate the power of a square of clear plastic.

Later, I headed out­side and grabbed a few of the little details from my walk and the area of Edin­burgh that I live in, much to the bemuse­ment of every school-age per­son in the city. I can tell I’m get­ting old because the orange num­ber 8 below? It was stuck to a com­munal bin. And I took a photo of it just to hor­rify the school­girl who had been star­ing at me and my cam­era for the pre­vi­ous few minutes. She’ll prob­ably need coun­selling to get over the sheer hor­ror of it all.

Mouth

In Photos and Videos on 29 September 2009 with Comments Off

I think there’s a very high chance Al took this photo, because I had the little cam­era tak­ing foot­age for my awe­some sea creature doc­u­ment­ary I will never edit into an actual film. This was taken at the point where “stay in the Atlantis Palm Hotel” was added to the list of things to do before I die, because even stand­ing in the lobby/shopping centre/aquarium was, frankly, amaz­ing. I’m fairly sure that most of the people who designed Dubai were on very strong hal­lu­cino­genic drugs at the time, but you really need to hand it to them for actu­ally mak­ing it all hap­pen. And for hav­ing no end of awe­some ice cream for sale.