Wednesday, 27 October 2010

Two weeks leave :)

Well, here I am at the tram stop, having knocked off for just over a fortnight away from work, and I see a rather nice red sky...

Hopefully, that'll be auspicious for a good couple of weeks off :) Here's hoping, anyhow!

Monday, 25 October 2010

That's a nice suprise!

So, there I am, wandering into work at my relatively normal twenty minutes to half an hour before my shift starts (I like a coffee before I start, sets the shift up right), when lo and behold, I find myself "stepped up" to do the earlier shift. Nothing was said about the bloke who should have done it, so I guess he overslept - we've all done that, after all!

Anyhow, the upshot? I got what we call "DX'd", and get paid for doing my assigned shift, even though the shift I'm doing is actually shorter!

Now THAT'S a nice start to the week :-)

Sunday, 24 October 2010

Daylight full moon...

It's not very often that you get to see a full moon in broad daylight, but that's what we got this morning :)

Must explain why there were so many damned idiots on the roads yesterday... *evil grin*

OK, here are the photos; first off, the wide angle shot, no zoom...


Taken leaning on a rest, the photo has only been reduced in size for file size.
This photo was taken at the cameras' maximum optical zoom (x10); it's then been cropped for file size. You can see a lot more detail, of course :-) It's not been adjusted or "shopped" in any other way, no gamma correction or anything.

I'm actually rather proud of this shot, it's probably the best one I've done of such a long-range object ;-)

Thursday, 21 October 2010

They're madmen. And we, the morons, put them there.

There is no argument that spending cuts need to be made, in order to get the national deficit under some measure of control. But the scale of these cuts is frankly horrifying - and reading between the lines, even hardened politicians on all sides of the current government are shocked at the levels of cuts that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is demanding.

And now, as expected, he's hit the defence sector. And in a moment of complete insanity, he's killing off any chance we have at keeping our ability to project power, by scrapping HMS Ark Royal, and removing the fixed-wing assets of the Fleet Air Arm, and the V/STOL capability of the RAF, by scrapping all the harrier Jump Jets currently in British service.

BBC News link.

To follow up on the last line of that article: it's not just pathetic, it's tragic.

Successive governments have wielded bigger and bigger axes at the military budget, and the result is mission creep, overstretch, combat stress in troops in record numbers due to appalling under-manning, and a military that's close to being the poorest funded in the developed world per head of the nation.

And we, the idiot public, put the politicians there. What does that say about us, then?

Monday, 4 October 2010

Hmm... lost in the mists of time...

Someone I know from another blog recently got back from holiday, and made the following observation...

"Isn't it amazing that we don't have FILM cameras?"

Y'know, I hadn't even thought about that for many, many moons, until she mentioned it; I switched to digital a while back, something like eight to ten years ago, I think, and while I still have a point-and-shoot film camera, I hardly ever use it these days, since I've got both a camera on my phone (yeah, I know, who hadn't these days), and a dedicated pocket digital camera that aces out the old film camera anyhow (it does video too - whoopee! - it's good for Candid Camera at Christmas, lol).


Ahem.

Anyhow, it used to be over here in Great Britain, that chemists (Americans would call them Pharmacies, I think) and most large retail chains (I'm including Boots, Sainsburys, Tescos, other supermarkets, and so on) would stock film in many and various sizes, formats, and speeds - not any more, though: I can't recall seeing film in anywhere other than dedicated camera shops for quite a while, now (not, really, that I was looking, I suppose).


Makes you wonder - well, makes me wonder, anyhow - what else we've changed to, and never really noticed is missing these days.

Anyone care to chip in with observations?

Sunday, 3 October 2010

Tea Threat level...!

I saw this image recently, being used as the avatar for someone online...


It made me laugh, and then my mind went sideways (as it sometimes does), thinking about how one might define the other threat levels...

  • Low – No real chance of tea being spilt
  • Moderate – Not very likely that tea might be spilt
  • Substantial – Mild chance of tea being spilt
  • Severe – Tea WILL be spilt.
  • Critical – I SAY, old boy! That was my monocle!
Any ideas on improving this will be read with great amusement :-D