Categories
Miscellanea

Your Host

Your host! The photos of me on this website are a bit old, so the picture on the left is a stab at correcting that!

I don’t often appear in my own albums, since the camera is usually in my hands. So I spent a pleasant couple of hours on Sunday with Jason as he took about 300 pics. After some brutal editing, the profiles I have elsewhere now feature 4 new pics!

I’m not sure about the iPhoto image manipulation I did to the image – it has gained a bit of a sepia tint, without actually pressing that button. However, I have added a free tan, just in time for summer!

Categories
Railways

After Ipswich

For the second coming out on this blog, it’s time to document my interest in railways, and particularly the model variety. For some reason, model railroad fans in the UK have the habit of being rather discreet about their hobby! No more ;-)

As a kid my trainset seemed to take hold as a hobby, and I avidly read magazines, and built up a little collection of trains. I even graduated to modifying and repainting them, to make them ‘more like the prototype’.

The hobby has never really left me, and over the last few years, I’ve been slowly aquiring the tools to have a more serious go at building a layout. There have also been a few interesting technology advances – DCC control should let me combine computing and railways at some point in the near future!

After looking at a micro layouts website, I felt here was a project I could tackle and complete – most of my previous attempts to build layouts have faltered for being too ambitious for my skills or time.

A few months ago, the final part of the puzzle fell in to place – a place to base the model on. During a trip to Norwich I passed Ipswich on the train, and outside the window was the perfect location – Ipswich Stabling Point.

So watch this space, over the next year or so, and I’ll try and write up my experience as I build ‘After Ipswich’ – a micro layout based loosely on the real thing…

Categories
Miscellanea

Goodbye Friends Reunited

For a few years (Since Aug 01 my profile claimed) I’ve been a member of Friends Reunited. When I signed up it was free to receive messages, and you paid to send them, which seemed like a fair deal.

As I learned last year, when an old schoolfriend contacted me, you now have to pay to receive messages too. Now, the money isn’t much – £7.50 – but it leaves a bitter taste to be obliged to pay to receive a message that my friend also paid to send. I also no longer see the sense in messaging people via the site, since you can’t tell if the recipient has already paid, or whether the message you send will oblige them to fork out. That seems plain rude.

Over the years, I think the website has become slow and ugly, and I’ve realised that with my (fairly) unique surname, I’m pretty easy to find on Google.

So, if you were in my year at school – in Coventry or Clacton – and you remember me from then, feel free to get in touch.

In the meantime, it’s goodbye to my friends reunited profile!