Category: Blog

Winter Walking

The weather has been pretty cold and snowy recently but I’ve tried to not let it get in the way of getting out and about. Yes – it’s another one of those self righteous “I’ve been out walking again while you’ve been sat on your ass” posts.

A couple of weeks ago there was a fresh snowfall in Glasgow so I walked down to Kelvingrove Park to take some winter pic’s before the thaw kicked in. I wasn’t the only one with that idea as the park had loads of people in it, mostly taking pictures. The one’s I’m most pleased with? First up is this robin. I was pre-occupied with the ducks struggling against the flow in the Kelvin, a far cry from their more sedate duck pond which was frozen over. I then turned round and the robin was 4 foot away on the handrail of the bridge. Very lucky.

Robin

I then walked up uni avenue just as the sun started to break through. Got some lovely snaps of the Glasgow skyline in winter which will always remind me of days in the tenement. Views all over the south side with many a winters day looking like this.

Glasgow Winter Skyline

Today was the first hill walk of the year, a nice stroll in the Kilpatricks up Duncolm. I expected the snow and ice to be clear but there was still some snow and ice even at this lower level. Loch Humphrey was still frozen over!

Loch Humphrey

Again we were very lucky with the weather as it was mostly dry and from our lofty perch we could see the rain over Glasgow. It was also clearer further north and we could see many of the Perthshire hills and had a great view of Loch Lomond later in the morning.

Loch Lomond

I must admit, I still love the walks. Fresh air, escape for a few hours and a chance to clear the head. Scenery is usually amazing too. Next up in a few weeks (leg permitting!) is a 13 miles stretch of the West Highland Way. Can’t wait.

Rob Jarvis Photography

Do a search for Rob Jarvis photography and you’ll turn up his website, which seems to be mainly a Facebook page, his Flickr stream, Twitter account etc etc etc. You’ll see a wide variety of great photographs. You’ll also find he’s copyrighted those photo’s which seems a sensible step. Protect his IP and all that malarky. Except, not all the photo’s are his. Some have been stolen from Flickr users. In fact, there’s nothing to prove that any of those photo’s are his.

Meg Pickard tweeted that Rob had copied one of her photo’s and copyrighted it as his on Facebook. Theft. I along with a few other left reviews on Facebook, comments and reported the page. Rob quickly took the reviews down, deleted comments and removed a couple of the photo’s that had been mentioned by commenters – some things you can’t remove though.

You can also find a copy of some of the comments made before they were deleted here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/version-3-point-1/4263212273/. Hopefully Facebook will look at the complaints people have made and act accordingly. Would be nice if Rob actually commented on his theft, owned up, apologised even. I doubt it. Meg followed up with a thoughtful post on copyright theft. Well worth a read. I never restrict anything on Flickr, thinking none of my images are worth anything anyway but then again, if they were used it would be nice to get the credit. Something to think about. Looking forward to that apology Rob.

Early Start

So, does this still work?

Now what?

Ah yes. Write. About me.

…sometime later…

…and I really do mean sometime later…

Happy New Year everyone. Hope 2010 is good to you all. So I’ve not blogged much recently. In fact I’ve not blogged much at all this year. I could blame Twitter as that’s where all my quick moans go now. I could also blame DigitalOutbox as that’s where my tech posts go now. I could blame the sciatica I’ve had for about the last 10 weeks which has curtailed my walks. In fact I could present a whole host of reasons that are all pretty valid and if truth be told that’s the real reason I haven’t blogged.

I’m not bored of blogging – I’m just scattered over the web instead of my focus being here on my site. Shame shame shame. I hope to change that over the next few weeks, either by actually writing more on iand.net or by making some changes to pull the content together again in amongst my infrequent blog posts. Not quite sure how yet but that’s all part of the fun, no?

So, look back and look forward. The done thing at this time of year. 2009 was an OK year I guess. Nothing stands out as being overly good or bad so things could have been worse and definitely a lot better.

Aim’s for 2009 were weight loss (another stone), start hill walking to get out and about and finally iPhone programming. Ummmmmm……………………………….shit.

Let’s get the fails out of the way. Weight loss didn’t happen. Well, it just happened. 1.5 kg over 12 months is very disappointing.

The weight loss is still good but the year has been fairly static and rising over the last 3-4 months, partly due to the aforementioned sciatica which has really got in the way of exercise. The good news is that after 6 or 7 weeks of not getting help I went to a physio who has really helped so despite my back still being very sore the pain has mostly gone from my left leg, although I’m still pretty inflexible compared to the right leg. Time is a healer hopefully alongside daily stretches to help with the problem. So no big weight loss predictions this year except to maintain if not lose a little. If that happens I’ll be a happy bunny. Saying that, I’m dreading stepping on those scales on Sunday morning.

Next fail was iPhone programming. I’ve done a little but that’s really it. Nothing to blame but me not prioritising. Will 2010 be any different. Hopefully.

Thankfully I did get one of my aim’s up and running. The hill walking has been a success although I would have liked to have done more than I managed. What was a surprise, as I had no intention to go so high so quickly, was I managed four munro’s this year. We were also pretty lucky with a couple of the walks in that the weather was superb which meant for some great photo’s. 2010 I’m aiming for at least a walk a month.

One surprise that I’ve been heavily involved in was DigitalOutbox, a tech podcast that I launched with Shakeel. We’re enjoying doing the podcasts and we’ve been joined by Chris and Henry. We are slowly growing our listener base and we’ve got some idea’s of how to take things forward in 2010. if you haven’t tried our podcast then visit the DigitalOutbox website or listen in via iTunes.

So, anything else for 2010 apart form weight, iPhone, walking and podcast? Photography. I want to get out and about and take some more photo’s over the next 12 months. A DSLR isn’t for me as it’s just too expensive and too big to carry around so I’ll make do with my little Panasonic for now. I also need to manage my time a lot better as well or else I’ll get hee-haw done this year. I’ll leave with a fav photo of mine from jut before Christmas. More like this over the next 12 months would do me nicely.

Winter Sunshine

Schiehallion

After getting back in the swing with a walk up Tinto Hill it was time to tackle another munro. We had planned to do Schiehallion back in July but illness, holidays and finding a suitable weekend meant it never happened. So last Saturday we got up early and headed up to Perthshire. It was a two and a bit hour drive but empty country roads were fantastic. We were also pretty lucky with the weather and the day was dry with some clear spells. One very lucky find was Loch Lubnaig just to the north of Callandar.

Loch Lubnaig

Mirror like surface and some great photo’s. I don’t often think about a DSLR but this was one of those times that I knew a better camera would have been very handy. Onwards to Schiehallion which is 3547ft/1083m high and thanks to a well maintained car park and excellent path is fairly popular. As we climbed up the sun started coming out and it was getting pretty warm. The climb up is fairly steep but as I mentioned previously it’s helped by a great path. However the path doesn’t take you to the summit. You think your at the top but you’ve got around another mile of rocks and boulders to navigate before you get to the cairn. This was the trickiest bit of the walk and I can only imagine it’s fairly treacherous on a wet day. However it only took a couple of hours to get to the summit from the car park.

Me at Schiehallion Summit

Not long after these photo’s were taken the cloud rolled in and it got very cold -fleece and gloves required while we ate lunch and got going again. We were now on the north side of the hill and it was very slippy – I managed to cut my shin in four places as it slipped down a rock and you had to tread carefully to avoid a sprained ankle. We could have taken the old path back down but it had badly eroded the hill hence the newly constructed oath so we were respectful and retraced our steps back to the car park.

Schiehallion Runkeeper

This was a great walk and one that anyone could do as long as you’ve got the right footwear for the rocks on top and also remember that at this time of year it can be very cold and windy at the top of a munro compared to conditions on the ground. A full set of photo’s can be found on Flickr.

4th Year

September 30th 2006. Just over three years ago. It cost more than other similar hardware but it looked oh so desirable. It was all new to me but yet quickly became familiar. It was the day I took delivery of an Apple iMac. Three years have actually flown by and a lot has happened in that time. Unusually for me though one thing that hasn’t changed is the hardware I use. I’m still using the 24″ iMac which is running really well with Snow Leopard. Three months after getting the desktop I picked up a Macbook Pro which I still use today. What’s interesting is that prior to switching I would buy a new PC every couple of years. Maybe that was to do with PC gaming that I used to do more off, maybe it was the slowdown over time that I noticed with Windows. All I know is that for an initially high outlay compared to a same spec PC I’ve gotten far more use out of both my Mac’s.

Another key point is that the three years have been relatively hassle free. My iMac failed to boot once but I restored from a backup disk and it’s been fine ever since losing only a couple of day’s worth of files which wasn’t much. Touch wood. During that time I’ve upgraded the O/S twice to Leopard and recently Snow Leopard. The upgrades have left me with a faster O/S each time which was impressive and surprising.

One change that I’ve worked on over the last three years is making sure the software I use on the Mac is either open source or I pay for it. It’s taken a while as I couldn’t afford to buy everything at the one time nor find good alternatives to some expensive software but I’m there now. Torrenting makes it easy to get any app you need to be honest but I felt more and more uncomfortable about stealing software especially as the Mac development community is smaller, tighter and does make some great software. Definitely the right thing to do.

So that leads me into year 4. No need to upgrade, everything working fine. Except my head. More specifically my gadget head. One thing I’ve toyed with buying for a couple of years was an Apple TV or a Mac Mini for the TV. I’ve an ever growing library of digital media and I want to rip my DVD collection. Out of the two products I’d prefer a Mac Mini – more flexibility when it comes to player choices with Plex being the favourite at the moment. But I don’t want a third computer!

So the plan I have formulating…

  • Sell iMac and replace with Mac Mini for under TV.
  • Sell Macbook Pro and replace with new Macbook Pro with larger local disk.
  • Pick up a good monitor (not Apple as prices are eye watering!) for use on desk.
  • Pick up a Drobo as I’m running out of disk space as my local media grows.

That would leave me a great setup that should do me for a few years except it will cost money that I don’t really need to spend but when has that stopped me before. Mmmmm. Also, new Mini’s and iMac’s are rumoured this month both at a cheaper price. Interesting.

I might not know what hardware I’ll end up using but I do know I’ll be sticking with Apple over the coming years. Hopefully year 4 will be as trouble free as the last three.

New Clothes

The change in season’s has prompted me to give the blog a fresh look. Nothing fancy and quite simple like most of the other blog templates I’ve picked up. I plumped for Modicus Remix which I’ve been tweaking today. Quite pleased with the look although I do want to edit the CSS slightly as some things look a bit iffy.

I also took the opportunity to remove Intense Debate and switch to Disqus. We use Disqus on DigitalOutbox and I’ve been impressed with the better options and faster performance than I saw here with Intense Debate. One big advantage of Intense Debate was the plugin support but they haven’t really taken off yet, certainly not to the level I expected.

I also tweaked the Google advert locations. I finally put on some ad’s back around April/May and they’ve earned enough to pay for the blog hosting so that’s not too shabby. The theme change also allows for a nice DigitalOutbox link in the sidebar. Nothing like a bit of self promotion from time to time. So that’s the theme change for another year although I do have some thoughts around adding a more colourful theme next time that I want to hand crank myself. Just need a bit more time and motivation.

Tinto Hill

It’s been three long months since my last hill walk. Work, a wee bit of illness and some bad timing meant a long delay between Ben Lomond and yesterday’s walk on Tinto Hill. It was good to be back. We decided on Tinto as it was a bit smaller and shorter than previous walks. We hoped for good weather but low cloud and a strong wind at the summit proved that no matter what time of year you really need to be prepared for all sorts in Scotland.

Ian on tonto Hill

RunKeeper was flawless again – can’t recommend the app highly enough if you’ve got an iPhone. I’ve thrown up a few photo’s but the weather got in the way of anything decent.

Tinto Hill Runkeeper

Plans for the rest of the year – a munro in early October and then a walk in November and December but that is far more dependant on the weather. Still, we have the gear for all weathers – time to wrap up methinks.

Two Years On

It’s been two years since I actively started losing weight. August 26th, 2007 was my first weight reading and since then through exercise mostly, and the cutting out of biscuits, I’ve been trying to get my weight down to a sensible level. Two years on, how am I doing?

Overall not too shabby. BMI has dropped from 38.3 to 28.2. Total weight loss is 32.6kg or 5st 2lb. Current weight is 91.5kg or 14st 6lb. I’m really pleased but the weight loss in year 2 is a lot less than year 1. I’ve lost around 7.5kg in year 2 against 25kg in year 1. Oops.

I’ve only myself to blame as I’ve been exercising less this year as work and other projects eat up some time but at least I’m not gaining. I wanted to lose another stone over this year which would take we well under 14st but I can’t see that happening at current pace and workload. Can’t complain though. Feel fitter and healthier and a lot better about myself. I also make sure the above graph is always updated and available online – nice way to keep a wee bit of pressure on me in case I start to stray. The year ahead – steady and downward progress would be nice with a step up in fitness. Longer bike rides (currently around 20 miles per hour long session) and longer/tougher hill walks. Won’t be easy but I’m enjoying the challenge.

Blogging Bollocks

Interesting week with the NHS. Firstly the Republicans in America start spinning stories that the Brits hate the NHS. British people are shown in an advert paid for by a right wing group slagging off the NHS. Later the people who took part claimed they were duped into taking part and they are very annoyed at how they were portrayed. Worse, relatively unknown Euro MP Daniel Hannan has been spreading nonsense on right wing American news programmes about how bad the NHS is. This video tell’s the story so far.

Of course some of Hannan’s quote’s in isolation sound far worse than his interview as a whole but the fact that he chooses to peddle his thoughts on Fox etc in America devalues him in many people’s eyes. His blog claims he has spoken about NHS misgivings for 10 months now in the UK and you should go and buy his book to read what he says. He handily gives you an Amazon link too. Nothing like a politician making a bit on the side.

Anyway, of more interest was the backlash that kicked off on Twitter. Thousands of people tweeted with the hashtag #welovethenhs and a real show of force from NHS loving twitter users forced the NHS into the headlines. Gordon and Sarah Brown tweeted, David Cameron panicked and distanced himself from Hannan and Labour made the most out of the situation. Obviously this couldn’t stand so in waded the right wing bloggers, particularly Guido Fawkes. He blogged that this wasn’t a viral storm and then quoted some figures comparing the hashtag usage against the numbers signing up to the e-petition calling for Brown to resign. His Tory loving commenters lapped this up, quoting it on other blogs and tweeting it to all who wanted to listen. What a load of bollocks.

The e-petition has been running for over 10 months. In April this year, over six months after launching, it had reached 30,000 signatures. In four days, the Twitter hashtag has been used by 16,000 users. So which is the most popular? The e-petition has had roughly 230 sign up’s per day. The hashtag – 4000 tweets per day.
*Update* – looks like Sky news is wrong and the e-petition started up in April 09, running for six months. Thanks to Kalvis Jansons who started the petition for clearing that up. I guess that makes around 500 sign up’s per day.

Hold on you may say, the Twitter hashtag system is abused by spammers and advertisers posting up rubbish but using the popular hashtags. True, so those numbers are inflated. The numbers on the e-petition though are greatly inflated too. Scrolling through the latest 500 sign-ups on the e-petition website shows lot’s of made up names and dubious celebrity sign up’s. Some may be true but I don’t really believe David Miliband MP has been one of those to sign up. If it really was him he would have signed up a long time ago, not just in the last 500.

I’m all for healthy debate but I really despair when people can’t see sites like Guido Fawkes as right wing attack sites. Off course, he peddles it as an honest and fair attempt to expose those in parliament but look through his posts and in particular the venom that can be found throughout the comments (he also has a nice habit of blocking anyone who is anti him or anti Conservative) and then make up your mind. And next time, before you start to tweet round comments and stat’s, have a little think first.