Blogging from a train, Dublin to Belfast

It is an absolutely gorgeous day, it was getting to the stage where it felt unlikely we would ever see it again. So I'm on a train heading to Belfast where I am going to see a pal and help her get sorted photographically wise on her computer.

She is a recent convert to digital and after years of wanting to take a photography course finally started one last year.

As time went on it was clear that she was not enjoying it as much as she thought she would. Some of the classmates were very competitive. She was not learning what she wanted to learn and was feeling under increasing pressure with projects as it was an exam class. Couple all this with caring for two young children she eventually knocked the class on the head.

I figured the best thing for her to do would be to maybe join a camera club and at the very least join Flickr. There are groups for everything there full of tutorials on how to do everything. You can also store and sort images in an easy to manage fashion. You would not believe the amount of images I have and one of the easiest ways for me to manage is through Flickr and an external hard drive. Someday soon I will find a better system but for now it works well enough.

So one of the plans for today is to get out and about and take some snaps, hopefully we will keep the wonderful big clouds. I am going to try some HDR shots but my attempts at that so far has been eh strange. I need some slow moving clouds!

Anyway here's a song for the day, weekend even! Ah go wan.

Tips for travelling on the bus - for the selfish travelling commuter

RIGHT you asked for it, you know who you are. I'm talking about selfish commuters who must feel somehow that because they have bought a ticket that they own the bus. This post is for you because you obviously do not know how to travel on the bus, where others are travelling too. Hopefully after this post all our journeys can be more pleasant.

As you can probably tell I had one of 'those' bus journeys home this evening, couple the selfish traveller with rain, umbrellas and lots of other people trying to get home and oh it just wasn't nice.

My rant is against the obviously clueless (well I guess they must be clueless, maybe it is just pure and utter selfishness) commuter and in particular the one who irked me this evening, sitting at the end of a seat who think that doing so makes the whole seat theirs; no matter how much you pretend not to notice the bus is packed to the gills. Rather like those drivers who drive into yellow boxes and sit poker-straight staring out the front of the car and not at the hoards of cars honking their horns who are legally turning into the yellow box the poker-straight driver has kept them out of.

I have also noticed that the people who sit at the end of a seat, whether it is on a bus or indeed a train normally read as if pretending to be engrossed in a book somehow distracts the perpretrator from the surrounding dirty looks. I think I would feel that amount of annoyance directed at me.

This evening despite the crowded bus, despite the rain, this woman sat perched on the end of the seat at the back making it doubly hard for anyone to take the seat beside her. Adapting this trick by placing a bag on the seat next to you also doesn't wash. And I am not talking about someone who has got on a semi-empty bus who falls over themselves to pick up their bag and move over when they see people moving up towards the seat.

So the first pic illustrates what not to do:



And this demonstrates what to do.

Laundry day

SUNDAY is among other things laundry day in our household. Not possessing or having the room in the flat to possess a washing machine is the single most pain in the ar*e in my life.



So each Sunday the laundry is trailed down to our local friendly launderette where I negotiate my way through the wash, the spin and finally the dryer.



I missed my go on the spinner yesterday because the door wouldn't open on my machine and 15 mins passed before I realised. This meant I had to wait about 45 for the spinner due to the influx of people after me.



Thems the rubs, so while I waited I snapped some very contrasty shots with my camera phone. For once I didn't have the real one with me and despite the chat going on at Gingerpixel's the launderette is one place where I would leave the camera behind.

Anyway I have told you before about the launderette rules, so if you shouldn't look at someone's washing, you probably shouldn't take pics of it either...





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