Break left!, originally uploaded by JamWheel.

Finally some sunshine!

With this, Becky and I managed to go out to the river in Marlow. This is always a great chance to get out with the camera as there is plenty of bird life and since I hadn’t had much chance to use the 7D yet I took it with me.

To try out the auto focus I thought I would try panning some of the back headed gulls that were darting back and forth scrounging food as they are tricky to follow, let alone for the camera to manage to focus on.

The 7D did well and I managed to get some nice shots. This guy was abruptly changing direction as I took the shot which made for some interesting angles and a slightly different pose.

So, I thought I would write a little update (mostly for myself should I ever read back, given that probably no one reads this!) to round up 2009 and the various things that have occurred in my life during that time.

The year seems to have really really flown by, which is a bit frightening as the speed at which it passes indicates you are continuing to get older.

Anyway, hit the “More” link to check out the rest of the post as the chances are that this could get quite lengthy

New Job

On the 5th of January this year, I did something I hadn’t done for almost 4 years previous. I started a new job having left MIND CTI (formerly Abacus). I am now very close to having been in the role for a year and I have to say it has been excellent. The commute is tiny, I have lucked out and got a good boss, the pay is good and I don’t have any stress at all at this place. I have settled in very nicely now and know quite a few people around the building and my year end review went very well. Also, I have managed to pick up some new skills and have boosted my confidence that my database skills have carried over into a different industry nicely (I know they do, but I had convinced myself I was stuck in Telecoms!)

Flying

Nothing to report here I am afraid, I haven’t managed to go flying for just over a year.

Slipped Disc

At some point not long after my kidney stone operation I started getting nasty sciatic pain in my right leg, this turned out to be a slipped disc and subsequently I pretty much wrote off most of the year to the sciatic pain as it stopped me walking the rescue dogs and made getting anything done a nightmare more or less. I had an operation (through my work’s BUPA, w00t!) to sort it out and it has worked well! No more pain down my leg!

I am still in the recovery period but am now out walking with the dog and taking some pictures again. I just have to be mindful of what I am doing and take care of my back. I have a series of exercises I am supposed to do but I am being hopeless with them, so I am actually going to have a new year’s resolution next year to get fitter as core strength can help prevent a disc slipping again.

Wile E

Wile E (we think) has more or less grown as much as he will. He is mostly very very well behaved for a 7 month old puppy. The only real issue we have with him is his somewhat anxious excitement whenever someone new comes into view. He tears off to meet them and tends to jump up, most people understand this but we did meet a jerk who tried kicking him in the head a few times last week (he wasn’t hurt, the guy nearly was!). He has been a pleasure though and we really enjoy walking him in the hills.

Meeting Mr and Mrs Altman

Becky and I met with friend of mine I have known for about 7 years or so but have never met in person! He is in the US military and is stationed in Germany so he came to the UK for a holiday and we met up with them in London. This was a real blast, the girls really hit it off as they have about a billion things in common so we sent them into the Natural Science museum and headed to the pub. Shortly after this we got to Oxford Street and sent them off shopping while we went to the pub for more Leffe Blonde! This continued and we finished off the evening with a meal in a pub on the real ale trail whose name I forget.

So, a strange year with both good and bad things going on and 2 more operations than I generally find acceptable. Looking back I can see I blogged more than I thought I did this year but felt it worthwhile  doing a round up anyway.

Shot yesterday during a walk in the woods with Becky, Wile E and a neighbour. The trees looking beautiful with many inches of snow resting on their branches.

We were off the beaten track because there wasn’t one! Shin deep snow was unspoiled until we passed through.

I do love the snow and am always glad to get snowed in as it means I can get out in the daylight with my camera.

Wile E.

He has been immense fun and managed the 2 hour drive back without peeing in the car! Unfortunately he was a little bit sick, probably due to the heat and the fact we were stopping and starting a lot at the time on the M25.

So far he has only had 2 mistakes in the house, both on the kitchen floor so that is no problem. One was in the middle of the night which I cleared up then put him back to bed. He slept through until the morning. The following mistake was my fault for not letting him out to pee on time.

The heat today is immense and he has been mostly sleeping as a result. The cats are following suit!

The cats are unsure of him, he thinks they are litter mates and careers up to them wanting to play. They of course do not understand this. Psy gave him a significant punch on the head before making a run for it. He has to learn somehow! Munky is very wary but ok as she is still washing and still talking to me!

I took this the evening before the Bentwaters Cold War Museum Open Day after the half track had been driven out and parked up.

I thought the cloud above it seemed like it was watching over the half track so framed it as portrait to include it.

I was asked by my Mother to go and photograph some flowers she had arranged for a funeral (just some record shots for her work) so I went to St Mary’s church to do so.

While I was there I decided to have a play with my wide angle lens and my polariser given the sky was quite nice.

After spending some time being unable to get back up from my kneeling position (due to back problems I will cover in another post some time) I set off home to see my results and decided to have a bit of a play with photoshop while I was at it.

I tinkered with the sky a bit to produce an odd colouration of it. With the wide perspective making the church look quite imposing and the odd sky I am quite pleased with the results.

I had read about it a bit since it was announced and have to say I didn’t really understand what it was from a worded description. The best way to understand it and realise the potential of this is to watch the video of the presentation. It is a long presentation, I sat through about 45 minutes of it and stopped when they really started getting on to the APIs for the developers.

I think this product could be pretty incredible, especially for use on projects in businesses. At one of my previous companies we would frequently have email trails involving 5 or more people attempting to discuss a few points. Inevitably the conversation would end up branched as people ended up replying at the same time as each other and very quickly the whole thing was chaos. Google Wave would have happily done away with all of this nonsense and allowed for multi user documents and conversations to take place.  I especially like the feature to play back the events on a Wave, if a new person was added to the email trail they would have to read through the history and the mail branches to try and piece everything together. The playback feature allows them to start the wave from the beginning and “play” what happened since then. They can see who added what and in which order very very easily! Superb!

Anyway, watch the vid, it is much easier to understand this when you see it in action.

For some reason it had been decided to hold 3 events on the grounds at the same time. A classic car show, an Alfa Romeo club meet and the airshow itself. The traffic getting into Old Warden was appalling, fortunately I knew a sneaky short cut which got rid of about 50% of the queue but the whole place just seemed over capacity and it still took around an hour to get in. Massive queues for the toilets, car park was rammed and I think by the end of the day they had actually filled the parking. Getting money in is very important, especially after last season’s dreadful weather, so I am sure this has helped but I felt the general volumes of people spoiled the atmosphere of Old Warden somewhat for me. If they do the same next year I won’t bother going I don’t think.

Anyway, I have just done a round of the photographs (sorry anyone else who is waiting on me to do photos) and put them up on my Flickr account. There should be more to come when I get some more time to spend on them.

Curtiss P-40 at Old Warden by James Wheeler

Instructions: “No food for 6 hours before, no milky or fizzy drinks. Drink 2 pints of clear liquid 1 hour before the appointment and don’t empty your bladder until afterwards”

This is the same as the last time I had one of these done, let’s just say they don’t make an effort to hurry through the queue of cross legged people.

Maybe I should have 2 pints of black coffee… that would be very amusing, massive caffeine high!

I used InstaMapper to track our walk via the GPS on my G1. Compared to the HTC Tytn II the GPS on the G1 barely uses any battery power at all, you could literally watch the battery meter going down as you used it on my last phone. We just used it for nearly 2 hours as we walked and it was fine.

I guess this is something to do with how GPS Tracker, the Android application, utilises the GPS. It only tracks and send every so many seconds rather than having it on all the time.

Anyway, for those interested here is the track of our walk. Very hilly and surprisingly warm!

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com