Daily Archives: Thursday, 18th October 2007
Not much change there
Another very minor weight variation today. Once again I walked to work, but got the bus home, and lunch was a sandwich and a banana. I’ll aim to do the same tomorrow, then look at walking more next week.
I seem to be posting a lot more since I started walking again. Most odd…
Photographic developments
No, I haven’t taken to using film and playing with chemicals, but I am trying to take my photography in a new direction, and to learn some new skills. I’ve bought a light tent[1], some little studio lights, and a stand to put things on, all from various eBay suppliers. The light tent arrived today, making my mini studio complete. It was described as an 80cm tent, which I thought would be a reasonable size for most small to medium things I might want to photograph. I haven’t actually measured it, but it looks a wee bit bigger than that, so I should be able to photograph things of a wider range of sizes than I expected. Cool.
It’s one of those clever folding up things that squeezes down into a handy bag, so it won’t get in the way when I’m not using it. I’ll have a proper play with the lights and everything at the weekend, but I couldn’t resist giving it a quick test using flash. This geode is another recent acquisition – I found it at Stonehouse Originals in Newcastle – a lovely little shop just around the corner from the Tyne Theatre, which has a great selection of stones, fossils and other interesting and attractive objects. I’ll be going back for more later[2]…
More pictures of more stuff soon. 
[1] No, not a non-heavy camping thingy, but a collapsible white fabric box in which I can place photographic subjects. The idea is that the subjects can be given even light by means of two rather bright lamps, without any of the harsh shadows you can get with flash. And I can get nice reflections off the stand thingy. You can see the tent in this Flickr set.
[2] As of May 2009, they seem to have gone away
Related posts
Gravatars become Automattic
Regular readers[1] might recall me mumbling about Gravatars previously. They’re the little icons that appear next to the names of people who comment on posts here and at many other sites. It’s a free service, and pretty cool. But offering a free service was always a bit of a challenge for Tom Werner, who thought up the idea. The more popular it became, the harder it must have been to maintain the service, which is why I was quite happy to read that Automattic, the company behind wordpress.com[2] and other goodies have had a nice chat with Tom and bought Gravatar. Automattic founder and WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg explains on the Gravatar blog, which has now moved to wordpress.com. More to the point, he’s moved the service to Automattic’s servers, where it’s apparently running much quicker, and has enough redundancy to ensure that the service will keep running.
Seems like a good result to me.
[1] Those lovely semi-mythical people 
[2] If you’d like to have your own blog thingy but you’d rather not get involved with servers, configuring databases and all the fun i have, you can get a free one from those guys, running a remarkably similar package to the one behind Losing it[1]. Worth a rty if you just want to get a feel for blogging and don’t want too much trouble setting things up, or you’d rather not pay for hosting.
Boldy going somewhere
As you may have heard, a new Star Trek movie is being made. For this one, rather than continuing with the characters from any of the TV series, they’re trying something else: a look at the early careers of the original Enterprise crew. BBC News reports that the main cast has now been selected, and the movie is due for release in the US on Christmas Day 2008.
I have to say I find this a bit confusing. Apparently it will feature younger versions of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc at Starfleet Academy. how they all met for the first time and saved the universe, or some such. The slight problem with that is that the characters were not all the same age, and had not (as far as this old geek can recall) been in Starfleet for the same length of time. No doubt some continuity-preserving silliness will be invented to explain the, err, slight anomaly[1], but I really think it would be better if they tried taking Star Trek forward rather than making a mess of its history.
[1] Oh, I know!! It’ll be an anomaly! That will do nicely!
