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I finally got my new macro lens delivered that I ordered a few weeks ago so I've been playing with it this morning. I decided to get the new EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM, which is the new Macro lens from Canon specifically for digital cameras. This is the first 'expensive' lens I've bought but I didn't really have any ideas about how much better quality it would be.

The image recovery program finally finished at 0015 this morning and it worked like a charm. I would highly reccomend it. It's called Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery and it's a freeware data recovery tool geared towards recovering images. I've just put some quick and dirty versions of a couple of the pictures I took up here. The sky was particularly grey that day so the backgrounds are certainly nothing to shout about. I may play a bit more over the weekend and sort out something better but for now...

Today shall officially be known as the 'Kat, you're an idiot' day.

To celebrate the successful production of 37 years of Pegasus engines (they go in Harrier aircraft) there was a fly-by today at work consisting of a couple of Harriers the company Spitfire and friend and I believe a Hercules. We were allowed to bring a camera on site just for today so this morning I packed my zoom lens and camera and looked forward to geting some good pictures.

Living in Bradley Stoke can be both a blessing and a curse. Quite a few people live there but there is no real town centre and no high street at all. One of the good things about it though is that there are a lot of 'green paths' around so although you are near to very busy roads you can still feel like you are surounded by nature. As I'd been having trouble recently finding places to park legally when out exploring with my camera I decided I'd just explore what I could walking from my house. I'd finally bought the OS map for my area so map, compass (I like the security it gives), water and camera in my bag I set off.

I bought myself some new toys and whilst I am waiting for one of them to turn up, one of the others arrived this morning. I am now the proud owner of a Hoya R72 Infrared filter lens. I wasn't sure whether I would be able to get anything even remotely decent out of it as the discussions I'd seen on the web either said that I would get nothing useable at all to my camera being able to get reasonable pictures in the infrared. It also seems that there is a big difference in quality compared to what lens you are using with some lenses being poorer than others.

Sundays in Spring is a netlabel specialising in indie / acoustic style music. It's pretty easy listening, nice to have on in the background type music. The label is definitely worth checking out as pretty much everything up at the moment is good. Their home website seems to suggest that they have another couple of releases coming soon or already out. Hopefully they'll be uploaded to the Internet Archive soon as well.

I've taken this thing before and I'm sure I didn't get such a high score that time? Am I getting worse? 8-o

If the site is looking very strange / not working bear with me...I'm upgrading.

Hopefully I won't break anything.

Woo! I've performed a massive update and hopefully everything wil still be working OK. If you spot anything funny, please let me know. Some of the template that it is running off is a bit odd but I really cannot be bothered to try to fix it at the moment. I'm off to clear off my server and drop a temporary database - oh what an exciting life I lead ;-)

My wrist feels naked.

For the last couple of years I've been wearing a silver bracelet that my mum picked up at a boot sale or charity shop or something. It's hardly ever left my wrist. I only ever took it off a few times when playing badminton but normally I'd just leave it on. The band fits semi-tighly around the wrist so in order to take it off you have to bend it out so that a gap big enough to pass the wrist through is present. Any engineer worth their salt will tell you that constantly subjecting a material to cyclic stress like this is a 'Bad Thing' and so it has proved with this band. Today the band finally snapped in half.

Being the engineer I am I immediately examined the fracture surface and I freely admit to this being a rather sad thing to do :-) I took a photo of it anyway although I only have a couple of close up filters rather than a macro lens so there's a limit to how close I can get.

Stress Fracture Surface

No Brainer is a rather fun game. It's simple but very addictive and irritating when you get the simple questions wrong! The idea is to answer yes or no to easy questions and 'increase the size of your brain'.