So, for the past week, I've been diving with my old club in the Isles of Scilly... felt really good to be diving with a bunch of people I've known for a long time and can predict their reactions to things so well... St Albans SAC is very good, but I don't have that depth of experience with them yet...

Next time I'll be diving with this crew is January 2010, in Socorro, diving with giant Manta Rays - really looking forward to that :-)

In preparation for the Socorro trip, I splashed out on some new photography kit, and the results are visible here

Whaddya think?

(NB: I've got a couple of videos of the seals too, but I need to transcode them for posting to youtube yet... will post when that's done.)

Well, if you're counting in hexadecimal that is :-)

There shall be food and there shall be beer and there shall be relaxation sometime in my near future...

But for now, there is turtle!

Many, many thanks to gleth, debitha, owlfish (and C.), jacel, a_d_medievalist, cynicaloptimist, daisho and firenightingale for adopting a leatherback turtle for me for my birthday. Thank you!


And, of course, many, many thanks to taldragon for organising it all :-)

(And also a belated thanks to Jacel for the Shiny new icon... sorry for not posting about it sooner dude)

So T and I went for afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason on Saturday with owlfish, C. and daisho

While the tea was very pleasant and the replenishments were frequent enough to curb, if not tame, my appetite, the really cool thing was the coffee table we found when wandering afterwards:

Castle Jigsaw

It's a coffee table that is also a 3D jigsaw of a castle! They also do a dingin room table of it.

T demanded my credit card for my own safety... which is probably a good thing, with hindsight...

I can't help but wonder what the expression on her face would be on Friday to turn up at my flat and find a big new piece of furntiure </evilgrin>

This makes me sad:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/kodak_retires_kodachrome_film/

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

*grins*

Cutting the ponytail off! The tail is still there and I have no plans to lose it. Sorry if the suggestion that one of the four wasn't true wasn't clear enough.

So yes, I've got a new car, a mondeo estate, ideal for diving and towing boats. My battered old astra is currently being sorted out before I try to sell it.

My new phone is the HTC Dream on Vodafone, the new android phone. No physical keyboard, and a lot sleeker than the G1. Battery life could be better though...

The Lj app on here is fairly basic, but better for posting than the webpage. Whilst at Praxis, I tended to post from work, but that's not an option here, and I tend to collapse when I get home and vegetate. Hopefully with the new phone, I will be posting more often during my commute...

So far this year, I've experienced a variety of changes that I really wasn't expecting at the start:

• I have an awesome girlfriend
  
• I have a new car
  
• I have a new phone
  
• I have cut my ponytail off
  

One of these is not like the others though... can you tell what it is?

I wonder what the rest of the year may bring?

Apparently, I need to post more often, or so I have been told...

( Small World Incident #1 )

( Small World Incident #2 )

( DIY )

Elsewhere... I saw two cars today with big cameras on poles stuck on top of them. One was a tiny smart car with NCP emblazoned on the side, so I assume it was for enforcing parking restrictions...

The other was just outside my flat, with me walking along peering at it, trying to figure out what it was.

It was, of course, the Google Streetview car. I suspect that in a few months, searching for my postcode will show you, well, me.

Um. Yeah :-)


That is all.

Wow. Not posted since the end of august. 5 months, must be pretty much a record even for me...

Needless to say, the snow has been pretty impressive today. Got up about 4am last night to get a glass of water and was seriously impressed that the reflected light from the snow in the back yard was enough to light up my main room. Went to back to bed, expecting it to have mostly disappeared this morning. Nope, still there. About six inches of it.

Made my ay to the train station and waited for a train. And waited. And waited. My normal commute is 30-40 minutes. Today, I added another hour onto that... On arriving home (earlier than normal, in case the weather detiorated and the few running trains were cancelled) I found 8 inches of snow on the bonnet of my car...

Can't face the carnage of the trains tomorrow, so I'm going to work from home :-)