Andrew Wilkinson

Today is my last day at work. Tomorrow I pack my bags and make the 90 minute trip up the East Coast Mainline to my parents house. Unfortunately Ellen won't be with me, she'll be making the considerably longer trip from Stanstead to Dublin. As we're not spending the actual day together we decided to have an early Christmas yesterday. We tried to make it as much like the real day as possible, although with less Doctor Who.

For my present Ellen brought me a subscription to New Scientist magazine. For the last five years I've had a subscription to the NME but I found it less and less interesting and cared less and less about the bands in it so I canceled. It's nice to have a high-brow replacement so I'll look cool^* reading it on the train home from work.

Our flat looks a little bare and we have looked at, and discussed buying, some art to go on our walls. Unfortunately real art is far to expensive so for her present I got two photos from our holidays blown up onto 14"x18" canvas by The Digital Room. I think they've come out really well, and Ellen seemed very happy with them. I haven't taken a photo of them hanging in our flat, but the photos I used were of Geraniums and Dun Laoghaire Harbour Lighthouses.

I think it's nice to spread the presents out, now I get to get excited again on Thursday :-)

* Is it even possible to look cool while reading a science magazine? I hope so!

I've gradually been copying all my old photos onto Flickr, and now I'm up to over 1000 photos I'm starting to get some activity.

Yesterday some of my photos of sheep were used on a NowPublic news story - it's a news site a bit like Digg but more user generated than just a collection of links.

My photo of LOLcat from Darren's party at the weekend has been added to Purina's Pet Chart. Please go to the site and vote for my photo - you don't even need to sign up, just click a button!

In order to get my photos from the Editors gig I went to in Camden last night onto Last.fm I had to sign up for a Flickr account. I've been annoyed at my own home grown gallery script for a while, so I thought why not see if Flickr is usable to store all my photos.

My photo album program, KPhotoAlbum, has a Flickr export plugin but I discovered that it mangled the tags. If you tag a photo with a single multi-word tag in KPhotoAlbum it appears as multiple single word tags on Flickr. A quick download of the svn, create a small 10 line patch, test it, place it on KDE's bug tracker and less than five minutes later it gets applied to their subversion repository. Open source software at it's best :-)

In other, Last.fm related news, I'm through to the second round of jobs interviews there. Keep your fingers crossed.

Today I went for a rather lovely walk with cailin_ciuin and the rest of the Outdoor Society to Aysgarth in the Yorkshire Dales. For those that don't know Aysgarth is where the fight between Little John and Robin Hood in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" was filmed.

Photos for this, and the previous Outdoor Soc trip are on my website.

I've just come across a rather interesting website, it's a collection atmospheric black and white photographs... taken from within computer games. The games featured are Quake III, Enemy Territory and the ubiquitous Counter Strike.

So, last night was the grad ball - it was good fun and I made it to my second survivors photo. Liberty X were, er, interesting but at least they were actually singing and not miming! Editors were frickin' awesome but also frickin' loud!

Photos, as usual, can be found here.

What with moving house and then not having internet access it has taken me a while to get my Glastonbury photos up on the internet, but now they are! Click here to see them!

I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew on Saturday, it was lovely. For those that like looking at flowers and palm trees my photos can be found here.

Today's issue of the campus rag known as Nouse features a rather unflattering photo of myself in the Garden of India on page M18. I'm guessing they shamelessly stole the image from Google Image Search. I wonder if amunra84 will share his royalties with me?

This doesn't beat the time I was in the Guardian though...

Only one day over the three week estimate my room is now finished!

( Pictures )

Here are my photos from my holiday. They could do with better comments describing what is in each photo, but that'll wait. For now they at least tell you where they were taken.

If the menu is too big then scroll down to the bottom and click on the "Czech Republic and Slovakia" link.

Glastonbury was great! It rained a lot and so everything got quite muddy. That didn't bother me nearly as much as it seemed to bother other people, so I still had a great time.

My Glastonbury timeline...

Wednesday
Leave house at 8:45am
Arrive at Castle Cary train station at 2.15pm.
Queue for ages.
Eventually put my tent up.
Talk late into the cold, cold night.

Thursday
Wander round the site
Watch the football with lots of other people.

Friday
The Others - Shouty
South - Melodic.
The Walkmen - American.
Grand Transmitter - Indie.
Concretes - Pop.
Snow Patrol - Awesome!
Franz Ferdinand - Bouncy.
Kings Of Leon - Dull.
Oasis - Far away.

Saturday
The Duke Spirit - Rocky.
The Subways - Surprising.
22-20s - Okay.
Keane - Soaring.
My Morning Jacket - Hairy.
British Sea Power - Disappointing.
The Killers - Amazing.
Hope Of The States - Sad.
Tim Booth - Guitar smashingly good.
Zero 7 - Beautiful (in both the musical and physical sense of the word ;-) )
Started to watch Kill Bill, but half way through it broke so we went to bed instead.

Sunday
English National Opera - Cultured.
The Zutons - Crazy.
The Divine Comedy - Intellectual.
The Ordinary Boys - Extra-ordinary.
Eighties Matchbox Beeline Disaster - Terrible.
James Brown - Funky!
The Ravonettes - Noisy.
Delays - Angelic.
Bill Bailey - Hilarious.
Stay up all night with a camp fire.

Monday
Pack up tents and leave the site at 9am (ish).
Queue for quite a while for a train, catch one at 11.50am.
Arrive home at 6pm.
Keep tidying things up until about 8:30pm when being up for 36 hours straight finally catches up with me and I fall asleep.

You can see all these photos, and more at http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ajw140

You can have lots of fun with the Church Sign Generator.

Darren, I think I've found a new user pic for you!