Apologies for the flash; after exams I hope to HTML5-ify this site.

A bit of off-the-cuff iPhone photography about the house. I decided to try (and procrastinate by) playing around with Aperture’s Monochrome Mixer. This is the first time I’ve ever done black and white, and there’s something not quite right about it. Alas, procrastination only allows me to go so far, and then it’s back to the books.

A few months ago, Cassie was playing around my room whilst I was trying to get some work done. I left her to her own devices, because I knew that after a short while, she’d settle down and just nap on the end of my bed. Indeed, after a while, she went quiet and out of the corner of my eye, I could see her on my bed. What I couldn’t see was the fact that she’d taken my alarm clock and decided to play with it. This was the result.

Cassie isn’t allowed on the ground floor, as we (pretty much permanently) have loads of building work going on. Whenever she hears the front door open, she likes to poke her head through the balcony bannister to take a look at who it is. In the top right of the photo is my dad, who has just come in and is on his way up the stairs to say hello back.

I frequently work in coffee shops, and if I happen to have forgotten to bring my Vodafone USB modem I use the free WiFi, which is run by BT Openzone. Now, I like to use OpenDNS, particularly when I’m not at home. It’s significanly faster than both the BT Openzone servers and the Vodafone ones, so it really does make a difference whilst browsing.

The only problem is that in order to login to BT Openzone, you have to visit the domains www.btopenzone.com and my.btopenzone.com which, if you’re connecting from a BT Openzone hotspot, have different A records compared to what everyone else thinks they resolve to. This is distributed through the nameservers they supply to you via DHCP when you connect to the wireless network. So connecting used to be a rigmarole of removing my custom nameservers, connecting, and then putting them back. This takes quite a while on a slow laptop (plus requires authentication three times). The solution to this turns out to be rather simple: just put the special A records in /etc/hosts. I’m unlikely to want to connect to those domains outside of their WiFi. To save you from having to query the DNS servers, here’s what you need to append to your hosts file:

192.168.23.21 www.btopenzone.com
192.168.23.22 my.btopenzone.com

Connection should be pretty seamless with OpenDNS servers permanently residing in /etc/resolv.conf.

Instead of doing some work, as I should have been, I spent a while last weekend playing around with my camera (I live in a perpetual state of procrastinating and feeling guilty about not working). This is the first photo I’ve posted with a lens I bought over the summer when I stumbled across it at a bargain price whilst in Hong Kong, the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 (DX, AF-S). It fulfills that niche of being fast, autofocus on the D40 (important for trying to catch pictures of a feisty puppy) and inexpensive.

I’m not particularly happy with how this photo has turned out. I’ll probably revisit this shot at some stage when I have more time. Part of the problem stems from the fact that I didn’t have a lot of control over the lighting: the curtains let through a lot of light, and the only light in the room was a bright binary on/off lamp. There also wasn’t a lot of space to manoeuvre (the camera and I were at opposite ends of the room, with the former precariously perched atop a stack of books). All in all, though, a fun concept to play around with.

I seem to have fallen rather behind with my weekly photo project. Furthermore, with a splitting headache, no milk in the house for tea, and a wake up alarm time of 06:45, I currently have 8 items still to do in Things (note the time):

Intermittent uploads (including backlogged photos) will resume shortly. In the meantime, Chris is persevering with his daily photo project.

Cassie likes feet. There’s no getting around this rather odd penchant of hers for all things feety. When we lived in our previous house she wasn’t allowed to access the area where we kept our shoes (and, by association, socks stuffed inside shoes). Every now and then she’d manage to get there and the first thing she would aim for as soon as she got past The Forbidden Door was my dad’s shoes, where there were guaranteed to be a pair of socks. She’d pick them up and not let them go without quite a lot of coercion. She’s also ruined a few pairs of slippers by carrying them around and playing with them (I think she likes to put her nose into them and wear them like some sort of muzzle).

Anyway, the other day I wasn’t paying all that much attention and I left my flip-flops within easy reach of her. Of course, she spent the next ten minutes biting and licking and pulling at them as if she would somehow evoke some sort of reaction from the poor flip-flop. She even got angry with me when I tried to take them away from her! I decided to leave her to her worrying and take a few photos of the spectacle (which isn’t easy with a manual focus lens and a crazy dog).

Week three already, and I’ve fallen behind. My lateness (which I hope won’t become a recurring theme) is due to a combination of working nights at the end of last week, being away last weekend, and getting a new iPhone. As a testimony to that, here’s a photo rather hastily taken on my iPhone just now which shows that Mr Bear has had the opportunity to play with my D40 now that I’m spending lots of time playing with the new phone. The novelty has yet to wear off!

Continuing on the theme of week one, I arrived home at the end of this weekend to discover that my mother had bought a new toy for Cassie (this is not an infrequent occurrence). What was unusual, however, was that this new toy bears a startling resemblance to Mr Bear who, as you may well remember, had a mildly distressing incident wherein he became Cassie’s toy. I protested that we might teach Cassie a bad habit (viz that all bears can be considered hers) but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears. At any rate, she seems happy with the new addition to her playthings :-).