Birthday Macaroni

As another year of my life has disappeared rather more quickly than I had imagined it would I decided, once again, to bury my head in the sand and pretend that it hadn’t actually passed.

This year I decided that I would make Lorraine Pascale’s famous (in my house) Glam mac and cheese in a fit of self-indulgent solitude and eating. See the full recipe here. I note that the BBC has changed the name of this recipe from Glam(orous) mac and cheese to ‘mac and cheese’. In my opinion everything with that amount of double cream called by the recipe is glamorous.

The only thing with eating a large amount of carbs that I spent the rest of the evening sleeping on the sofa and finally dragged myself to bed around 10pm to wake up at 4am. Obviously i have hit that age where you don’t need as much sleep anymore.




Legion

I was offered some complimentary tickets to the opening evening of the “Legion” event organised by Rough Castle Experiences last Wednesday. It is described as a family night like no other. At The Antonine Wall you can take a walk back through time to see a magical woodland and performances by experts in theatrical combat and aerial artistry.

The history was to be brought to life by a sate of art sound and light technologies, live action and lots of imagination. Unfortunately, lots of imagination was a rather large understatement. I was rather underwhelmed, but I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why this was. The actors that were meant to be pushing the story along as you wandered through the trail just failed to convey what their part was. If this was so that they didn’t ‘break character’ the stewards also gave no commentary and there were no signs describing what the point of some of the pieces were either.

So you kinda felt lost with the story while wandering the woods with some lighting and at one point a projector displaying a film that was meant to set the scene. There was also an unnecessarily long delay in seeing the acrobatic piece, which coincided with a “retail opportunity”. I was glad that my ticket was complimentary as I would have felt ripped off if I had paid £18 for an adult ticket. To charge £3 for hot water and a tea-bag while waiting on a performance was a touch rough.

I wish I was the sort of person that could let little things go, but this photograph kind of summed it all up for me. Good intentions that fell short. If nothing else it made me laugh, and take a photograph, I may also have tweeted it, instagram might also have been involved. It was exceptional. I accept that this is small minded of me, I will work exceptionally hard at being better.



 

Anyway, I took some photographs and video for your viewing pleasure! Thanks for reading.

Edinburgh autumn

I travelled to Edinburgh for the first time in what feels like months (except for train journeys passing through). I was meeting up with a fellow M.Sc. student that had some free time before her journey back south ( @kmurphster ). It’s always great seeing friends from the M.Sc. course and hearing on how they are getting on with their careers and life decisions.

I decided to talk a walk along Princess Street gardens as I had some time on my hands and the weather was nice and crisp. It also gave me some time to think about some problems that I need to solve in work. The problem is primarily finding one good solution to loading all Ordnance Survey data into a PostGIS database, instead of having one workflow for each data type. It would be more logical to have one workflow that fits all data types, or at the very least uses one program without having to do a ton of coding.

I find that having these types of thoughts at the back of my mind being processed without me really ‘thinking’ about it can often provide a solution, or at least things to try. Alas, it appears I’ll have to spend more time actually thinking about it.

On the bright side I did get a few photographs of the autumn that has come over Edinburgh on the day that the clocks change :-)

Thanks for reading!

Ancient Scotland

I have a love/hate relationship with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones as most of you know them. I very rarely "like" or "select" a drone photograph, they feel like a way to cheat at photography. I realise that of course that's a similar way that people find that editing a photograph is also cheating at photography :-)

Anyway, I found a video that really shows the potential of drone videography, a mix of some spectacular scenes of my home-country with perfect ambient music. Definitely worth three minutes of your day.

 

 

 

June/July

William Adam

As my Instagram followers and posts can attest to, I haven't had much time to go out photographing in the last month. In what was probably the best month of weather that Scotland has ever seen, with included spectacular sunsets, I have been busy moving to a new apartment.

As much as I enjoy building furniture from IKEA after hauling it up three flights of stairs and then having to spend over a week building it, my body decided that it was not much fun. Never before has a bowl of Swedish meatballs cost so much.

Now that I have been in the apartment for over a week I am starting to get myself into a routine where I can balance working with some web design and some photography. After the world cup has finished I'll start appreciating this summer weather before it disappears again.