Naquada

So yesterday I went to Womad 2005 at the Rivermead center, Reading. Unlike pretty much every other year I’ve been, it wasn’t scorching hot this year, although it was warm, and I managed to get a little sun blessed!!

I wanted to go this year for a few reasons, some personal and some in that I wanted to play with my new camera again and see what pictures I could come up with..

So I now have a huge number of odd pictures of bits and things, and pretty much anything I found out of the ordinary.. I’m getting closer to being able to take that picture I want to take, meaning that I know what I want it to look like, its just taking the photo and making it look how I want..

This photo was taken a few minutes before the heavens absolutely opened, and its looking better than previous photos I’ve taken (that aren’t of stuff in and around my garden!). Maybe the The New Manual of Photography by John Hedgecoe is paying off!!

I’ll most likely clean up and select a few more to put up onto Flickr in the next few days, especially as I’m on annual leave this week coming..

Wow, I didn’t realise it but today was my, as far as I can remember it, anniversary of starting with the company, July 27th is the day I started at Ardent Software in High Wycombe, a small office where the DataStage team was pretty much two people and a sales guy. We were the bunch in the corner sucking all the profits out of the database team to stay afloat. The loons in the corner that had the weird idea that data integration was a good idea..

..And today I now work for IBM, and the whole business is wanting Data Integration, and its now the integration team pumping huge profits back into the business.

Along the way we’ve come up with some great (and no so great) products.. the new Google Video Search seems to be powered by the product we produced a few years back.. Media360.. allowing you to search video for words phrases, very cool and far too ahead of its time!! So now not only can you search the web for useless information, you can search hours of video for it too..

I mean.. how can you survive without knowing on the 6th January 2005 at 11:49 and 30 seconds, a contestant on the American ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ said ‘Yes, all my students thought that I should go on “millionaire” because I know a lot of useless information’.. Technology huh??

So what does the future hold.. Will I be posting in a years time saying I’m still here.. starting my ninth year? Will I be posting on the merits of working for Google or Yahoo??? Who knows…

So today I had a call from a close friend who said that two people they knew had been identified as dead by their family in the Sharm al-Sheikh bombing. Originally listed as ‘missing’, its now been confirmed that they were among the victims of the bomb.

Its so unfair that lives can be taken away like this, snuffed out and erased for no reason, for no cause, for no sensible reason. It probably never enters these peoples minds of the knock on effect, the scars and gaps they leave in peoples lives with these cowardly acts, the future that they take away from these people, and from their families and friends.

Its now the closest I’ve been to losing someone directly, to have someone close enough to be able to relate to that loss, and the frightening thought that it could be anyone, anywhere including myself that falls victim to these pointless murders..

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right

if I surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

and supremely happy with Him

Forever in the next.

Bit of a snippety post as I’ve got a slight headache this morning..

So after weeks of travelling, heading from site to site and working away from home for what seemed like an eternity, I’m finally back home for what I hope will be a reasonable period of time. One of my discoveries on my travels was the album Lazyboy TV by Lazyboy.

Its just a great album, somewhat hard to get hold of, but I managed to get mine from Florida. Its absolutely the sort of music I love, sound bites and odd talk overs on top of some rolling pads, beats and rhythms, and it just sound so good in the new A6 on the BOSE system…

So what else’s been happening in the world? Well accept the obvious I’ve been working hard on a few large mainframe systems for a number of the large banks over the last few weeks, obviously I can’t go into the whys and what’s on those but its been a pretty exhausting few weeks, so its been nice to get back see friends and have some sort of life again..

Last time I went down to you The Jazz Cafe at the Madejski stadium in Reading, after have a great meal at Pepe Sale. Both of which were great, especially with the company I had. A few hours of sitting around the Jazz club listening to the band and doing some magic was just nice, relaxing and absolutely what I’d like to be doing every Friday evening..

Its really kicked me back into wanting to do all the things I want to do and that fact that I’m actually worth it, and as the LazyBoy says.. ‘You are the very reason reason for everything that happens to you..’

I saw Jim yesterday, and we were talking about various things, and the Boing Boing blog came up in conversation, which I started to read late last night, and I found what I think is some of the cleverest / fun sets of long exposure photos I’ve seen for a while.

Alexia Abegg’s Flickr stream has a great collection of photos taken on long exposure with sparklers. There’s quite a few really nice photos in there, I particularly like this one, although I’m wondering if Alexia used a tripod or held the camera.

I’m thinking it was hand held as quite a few of the images have blurred backgrounds and main subjects, on some they work really well with the blurring, on others the picture would have been absolutely fantastic with a clear subject, although it would depend on shutter times for the person to keep absolutely stationary I guess! Even so these are really nice and different photos.

A long time ago, when I was thin, young and living at home, my sister took some long exposure photos of my fire swinging which created some really nice photos. If you’re wondering.. Fire swinging is pretty much what it sounds like; swinging a pole, or two clubs that have flaming ends around your body at high speed, which produces not only a great visual display, but something called ‘firenoise’, the sound the the flames whooshing round your body. I will have to find the photos and get them up onto my flickr account at some point, or better still take some new ones!

I’ve yet to work out if the Canon 350D has an ‘open shutter’ mode or not, it definitely has a 30 second exposure, but I guess I really should read the manual on that one!!

Love the photos Alexia!!!

So today was a sad day, london was attacked in a cowardly act of terrorism. A number of bombs were set off inside the tubes, and at least one on a bus.

In all cases completely innocent people were targeted, injured, and murdered.

A lot of the London Bloggers have put photos up on Flicker’s in the 7/7 Community. Jeff Jarvis also has some updates on todays events.

It sends a chill through my spine that I would have been around any of those areas if I’d had meetings in London today..

Currently 700 people are injured, 37 are dead.. and likely to rise..

The company I am working on site for at the moment is in ‘lockdown’ assuming that they are targets, life will be tough for the next few weeks, and it makes you value the simple things you have, your friends, family, and close ones..

My thoughts go out to the friends, families, and those effected by this cowardly act..

Dear Mr Blair,

Next week you and your G8 colleagues have the opportunity to make poverty history by delivering crucial changes on trade justice, debt and aid.

You and seven other men in Gleneagles can stop a child dying every three seconds. You can stop the policies that create poverty and instead begin to transform the lives of the world’s poorest people.

Please use your unique position and influence as G8 host to:

change the unjust rules of trade, respecting poor countries’ rights to decide on trade policies that will help end poverty

cancel all the debt of all the poorest countries that need it

deliver at least $50 billion more in aid each year starting now, and make it work better for people in poverty.

Along with millions of others around the world, I’ll be wearing a white band to remind you of what you must do and waiting to see if you deliver.

Now is the time Mr Blair. Please do not squander this moment.