Failure is the Key to Success

The sickening tragedy that has occured at Virginia Tech causing the loss of 33 lives defies words.

I have seen the following on both Carol and Ilker‘s blog. Spare a thought for those killed and those left behind.

Silence can say more then a thousand words.

This day shall unite us all about this unbelievable painful & shocking event and show some respect and love to those who lost their loved ones.

On April 30th 2007, the Blogosphere will hold a One-Day Blog Silence in honor towards the victims of Virginia. 33 died at the US college massacre.

The Blogosphere is in deep mourning.

All you have to do is spread the word about it and post the graphic on your blog on 30th April 2007. No words and no comments. Just respect and empathy.

I saw this quiz on scan man’s blog this morning and had to try it out.

It would appear that I am a Science/Math Nerd, no suprises there then.

Thank you for recent comments from jmb.

Tags:Fun

My musical tastes have, like most people’s, changed over the years.

When I was at school, unlike most of the rest of the class, I enjoyed the classical music that was played to us and remember my first performance of Elgar’s Enigma Variations at the Royal Albert Hall at the age of about 12. At about the same time, I was also into the music of The Police and Dire Straits. A couple of years later I remember describing my musical tastes as ‘everything except classical and heavy metal’.

So it only follows that when I left school, the group of friends I used to hang out with were into rock / heavy metal and so I found that I did actually enjoy it. One of the group was also into classical music, or to be more accurate anything by Beethoven. I got into the band Magnum, no that’s not quite correct, I was obsessed with them and would get tickets to see them several times on each tour. I also had to get every record in every version that they had released, which led me to be a regular visitor to record fairs. While at one record fair, I picked up a copy of Mahler’s 2nd symphony and found that it really hit a chord, no pun intended. So now I was into both heavy metal and Mahler at the same time and it wasn’t a contradiction.

I used to listen to BBC Radio 1 on the car radio, until I changed my car about 10 years ago and the radio was tuned to Classic FM and I remembered that I liked classical music. The car has since changed, but the radio station has remained. Before the Christmas of 1997, Classic FM started playing the single Salva Nos by the group Mediaeval Baebes and I found it really different and enjoyable. At the time it was a group of 12 women singing ancient songs. I have since seen them at both Joust 2005 and last year at Joust 2006.

I won a copy of Diana Krall’s album The Girl in the Other Room in a competition on Classic FM’s website in 2004 and now enjoy a more jazzy selection including Norah Jones, Katie Melua, Madeleine Peyroux and Amy Winehouse. I have always enjoyed the music of Sting, who late last year released the album Songs from the Labyrinth featuring the songs of John Dowland, an Elizabethan composer.

So all in all, I think I have a fairly broad musical taste and it seems to be broadening as time goes by.

Tags:musical taste

We took the kids to the zoo this afternoon. We have got season tickets again, which gives us more flexibilty in when we go and what we see. Whipsnade Zoo which is part of the Zoological Society of London is only about 15 minutes away from us and is well worth a visit. We didn’t go at all last year, but had season tickets the previous two years. This means that if you feel like popping in for a couple hours, you can without thinking that you won’t get value from your entrance fee.

When we got there, the car park was very full, but due to the size of the zoo, it never feels full. We visited the lemurs first, which are directly opposite the entrance. Since our last visit about 18 months ago, a path has been added through the enclosure, so you can get In with the Lemurs. While we were in with the Lemurs, the elephants walked past, complete with the baby that was born mid January. After the lemurs, we saw the Chimpanzees and the European Bison before walking along by Wolf Wood with the Grey Wolves. We then saw the Giraffes, Zebra, Flamingos and the Siberian Tigers. We caught the last Sealion show at 4pm and then had a ride on the Jungle Express. The Jungle Express was pulled today by their steam engine Superior, which is 87 years old. I remember the railway at Whipsnade from when I was a boy. It opened in 1970 when it was called the Whipsnade and Umfolozi Railway.

After the train ride, the kids played for a while in the kids playground, before we went through the Children’s Farm on the way out. All in all a very enjoyable 3.5 hours leaving everyone worn out. We’ve still plenty to see on future visits. Hopefully, I’ll post some pictures soon.

Thank you for recent comments from jmb, Carol and nightS

Thanks again to Carol who also identified a problem with my comments which could under certain circumstances prevent submission.

Tags:whipsnade zoo,zoo visit

A couple of days ago I finally got around to scanning the negatives of the photos I took of the lunar eclipse on 3rd March.

I set up my film scanner and scanned the films in the same way as I had with previous films. However, the results I got were absolutely awful. Instead of a black sky with the moon, I had a very grainy mottled green/grey sky. As I already had a set of prints from when the film was developed, I knew what it should look like and my scans were not it.

When I had first installed the Dimage Scan software on my computer I had installed versions 1.0 and 1.1. For some reason I had problems with version 1.1 and was unable to save the images that I scanned using it. Version 1.0 worked and gave me good images and so keen to play with my new toy I ignored the problem with 1.1 and pressed on with using version 1.0. This was slow, taking about 10 minutes to scan an image, but I wrote this off as an investment to get the films into digital format. Of course this was over 2 years ago and so I had totally forgotton about version 1.1. Anyway, I ran up version 1.1 and scanned one of the moon images and it looked just like the print and nothing like the previous scan. So that was the good news, at least the scanner worked properly, I just had to be able to saved the better images.

I download the latest version from the Konica-Minolta website, uninstalled my copy and reinstalled it. Success, now I could save the scans.

There was another plus to this, using the new software, the time to scan a negative at the highest resolution I could (2800dpi) is only about 2.5 minutes. This meant that I was able to rescan the 26 images later that evening.

This then got me thinking, I had already scanned 10 films and burnt 6 to DVD for long term storage. Did this mean that there was better image possible from the films I had already scanned. So, I did some tests and when I looked in the shadows of the original scans compared to a new scan of the same image, I was able to see the same noise instead of black and a grainier image. The saving grace is that I have found this fairly on during my scans rather than 40 or 50 films in. As the scan speed is much quicker it shouldn’t take too long to get back to where I was before I discovered this.

Original scan
New scan

So anyway, after all that, my photos of the Lunar Eclipse March 2007 are up on my gallery.

Tags:film scanner,lunar eclipse,negative scanner,scanner software

We had a party this afternoon for my daughter’s birthday. After they had played at the local indoor playground for an hour and a half they had sandwiches, cocktail sausages, crisps etc. Later when we had been home for a while, my 7 year old son asked if we had any of the cocktail sausages left. I told him that we didn’t bring them home and he replied “Never mind, there’s more to life than cocktail sausages”.

It just wasn’t the sort of comment I expected.