Paul’s blog

Well its been a long while since I have posted something to my blog, so it’s about time I did something about it! Let me start by wishing you a belated Happy New Year. Since I last wrote we had my mother-in-law visit us from Hungary over the Christmas and New Year period.

At Christmas we stayed with my parents in Stroud for a few days. We had an enjoyable time with my family and I even managed to fit in a Forest Green Rovers match on Boxing Day. We went home the next day, dropping into Gloucester on the way back to visit the docks and the Cathedral. We also discovered that Mothercare no longer have a shop in this fine city.

On New Years Eve we ventured into Oscars, meeting up with Andy Mason. Although not the most exciting of places to see in a new year we still had an enjoyable night.

On Friday we have the 20 week scan which I am looking forward to. The time is slowly passing, although the 3rd June seems a lifetime away at the moment.

A week on Saturday I am attending a Woodland Wonderland Photography Workshop in High Wycombe. Here I can learn from award-winning photographers how to take stunning photographs of woods in winter. Hopefully even I can learn something J

Woke up on the Sunday to the noise, of what we thought was thunder. Two hours later when we finally left the comfort of our bed I found out what we heard just past Six was the Buncefield oil depot explosion. As we left the house to travel to Wolverhampton we could see the dark clouds formed by the smoke. Travelling down the M40 we encountered several pockets of fog/smog ranging from black to pink in colour.

We got to Park Hall hotel by 1030, as the Hungarian dancing at the hotel was due to start in less than an hour we decided to go for a quick walk. 1130 came and passed, but no one from the hotel had gotten the room ready where the dancing was to be held save a couple of token gestures. In the end I helped clear the room and put out the seats with a member of staff and one of the Hungarian dancers. The dancing finally began at 1200, but at least I gave us front row seats The dancing was excellent and afterwards they gave me their card so I could send on the photos I took. Unfortunatley I realized when I got back to High Wycombe I still had the ISO set at 1600 in RAW mode from a previous shot. Cursed myself many, many times! Also the strong light from the back windows did not help. Luckly a very kind soul pointed me in the right direction to clean up the noise in the photographs.

After lunch at the hotel, we booking in then travelled into town to explore the stalls. I enjoyed trying my limited Hungarian and my wife was able to have a few conversations with the stall-holders. We also had some Goulash soup which was nice, but quite expensive. We bought a few items too and had a look around Wolverhampton. In the evening Évi and I had an Indian meal at a restaurant which was part of the hotel.

The next day we decided to return to High Wycombe, but visit a couple of places en-route. First we stopped at Warwick to look around the town, then we ventured down the road stopping at Oxford. We hopped to visit the city museum but it is closed on Monday. After a quick look around we ended up in the cinema to watch the latest Harry Potter movie, thereafter completing our journey home.

Very happy news. My beautiful little Évi is pregnant and with all things being well, we will be a true family around the beginning of June.

Something Évi and I wanted for a while was a new car. I used the word was as we are now the proud owners of a brand new Ford Focus. The old car proved too small, I bought the car a fortnight before meeting Évi, so it was never intended as a family car. Now we have five doors opposed to three and much more room for luggage and passengers. Now Évi’s mum will be able to bring a suitcase with her when she visits

On Monday night Évi and I went to the cinema. I was hoping the latest Harry Potter film will be showing but alas it was not to be. Instead Évi insisted we see ‘In her Shoes’. The film was not as bad as I thought it would be, not surprisingly the majority of the audience were female - but those are the breaks…

An ingenious method of viewing flickr photos on Google earth is a little servlet was coded by Rob Roy. Below is a quote from Rob’s flickr group.

The FlickrFly servlet lets you fly in Google Earth to the location of a geotagged photo in Flickr. Optional tags let you control the viewpoint in Google Earth.

Add your geotagged and FlickrFly-linked photos to this group’s pool so we can explore the world together.

The only rule is that your photo must contain:
* the physical location where the photo was taken (either as geo:lat/geo:lon tags, or stored in the EXIF data), and
* a link to FlickrFly.

Optional but highly encouraged:
* Additional tags to control the viewpoint (ge:heading, ge:tilt and ge:range) so it matches the photo.

You can find full FlickrFly documentation at:

http://www.roblog.com/flickrfly-docs/

The only problem I have is getting it to work. There seems to be something stopping the connection on my computer but I cannot seem to track this down. With Rob’s help I tried:

In Firefox - config-file:
* Enter “about:config” in the address-line.
* Search the line “network.http.sendRefererHeader”
* Value should be set to “1″ (or possibly “2)

I have also tried whilst NIS has beed disabled, trying FF and IE. Now I am at a loss, which some might say is my usual state!

Update:This is now fixed

I got it to work! I retried something which I did ages ago and played around with NIS Privacy controls. This time I added both Flickr and Roblog, permitting everything. Tried again and it worked! Must of still been blocking the script when I disabled NIS yesterday - somewhat confused by that.