cricket shots

A few shots from Lords yesterday. NZ v England, final ODI.

Yeah mate, that was a cracking delivery...


This guy kept our entire stand entertained for a good 5 minutes looking for his friends. Half the icecreams had melted before he found them.


Just a nice action shot in the late afternoon sun.

Heaps more on my flickr set. And another couple of hundred still sitting unprocessed on the hard drive! Shot with a 70-200mm f4 L IS, from up the very top row of the Upper Grandstand, so about as far away from the action as possible - mostly around 1/640th, varying ISO depending on how much sun was about.

busy

busy two weeks coming up.

To kick off, we're going to see The Black Seeds [official site | wikipedia] (one of my fav bands, who happen to be from NZ) play at the Camden Ballroom on Wednesday.
On Saturday, we're going to Lords to see the final NZ vs England One Day Cricket match. Fingers crossed the weather is good - we only saw 40 mins play the last time we went to Lords for a NZ v England match.
The next week, we head off to Silverstone on thursday (couple of hours north of London) for a long weekend of motor racing and camping for the British F1 Grand Prix.

Should be a LOT of great photo ops in that lot...

dinner tonight

k is cooking dinner tonight, based on this recipe from yesterday morning's Saturday Kitchen on the BBC. "Loin of pork with braised artichokes and courgettes with thyme and lemon zest", minus the thyme and artichokes, and with pork escalopes rather than smashed out Loin, but close enough!

smells good anyway...

BBC iplayer on the telly

BBC iplayer on the telly
Originally uploaded by rachaelr

Via the Macbook through a dvi --> hdmi cable. sweet! Just plug in the cable, drag firefox over to the TV display and hit the full screen button on iPlayer. Not the best quality, but then the feed is really fast, so I'll sacrafice a bit of quality for 'instant' streaming.

Papparazzi alert! Joe Satriani

Joe Satriani
Originally uploaded by rachaelr

A shot I took last weekend at a London Music show, of Joe Satriani looking rather inconspicious while signing autographs.

Shot with a 70-200mm f4 IS lens from about 10 meters away (looking through a gaggle of security guards) and the trusty 430ex on camera, with horrid dim red and blue ambient lighting :)

night night macbook

in the last two days, I've had two occasions where my macbook won't wake up from sleep. both times, just have a black screen with a cursor, and no amount of hitting buttons/moving the mouse/shutting and reopening the lid seem to help. naughty macbook!

so it's a hard shutdown and restart, which I really hate doing on any laptop. Both times the macbook was plugged into AC power.

If anyone has any ideas (I've googled around, but nobody really knows why safe sleep is causing this), please drop me a line!

a change is as good as...

...supposedly, a holiday. but changing my blog header hasn't *quite* been as good as a holiday.
enjoy anyway!

The new header was a crop of this image taken by me a little while ago.

v-v-video

Never been a huge video fan, I'd rather look at stills, but am trying out the flickr video features vs YouTube just to see what it's like. Have uploaded the same video to each site - don't laugh, its really really old!

This one is a flickr video:


And this is YouTube:


First impressions:

• flickr was really fast to 'process' the video. YouTube took aaaages
• Private videos can't be embedded from YouTube, but can from flickr. I don't really want to have this live on YouTube, but oh well.
• neither had any hassle with the encoding, but it is a stock standard avi from a digi cam, so wouldn't really expect any hassles anyway
• YouTube has the option of picking a different 'still' for the video. Flickr just shows the first frame which if you had a movie that started with a fade in, wouldn't be great (tho I've only tried two uploads, must create one with a fade in and see what happens. Still waiting to be able to select a still for YouTube tho, will check back later and see if they've given me any options yet (I might just be dense tho!)
  
• flickr video is limited to 90 seconds - this is part of their video philosophy rather than a technical limitation
• I like the annotation features in YouTube, nothing similar in flickr
  

Other than that, they both seem pretty similar.

speedin up the macbook

Over the last few months, I've been having a continual slow down on my mac book. Everything has been getting more and more sluggish, and slower to log in/shut down and even resolve dns addresses.

Over the last day or so, I've run a few things that seem to have it back to almost full speed again (yay!)

• Ran Leopard Cache cleaner, and did a few things including running most of the maintainence tasks - repairing
  
  
  permissions, the mac maintainence scripts, rebuilt prebindings, optimised system files (not sure if that helped or not), and did a medium level clean of local, system and user caches
• Repaired all my duplicate fonts, and removed a dodgy font (oh creampuff, I miss you!) - details on cleaning up fonts are down the end of this apple support discussion. No idea why that font was causing a problem, but it showed up as errored, so in the bin it went :(
• The usual hard drive cleanups - move off anything that can go to the network drive, ruthlessly kill junk from the downloads folder etc
• Got rid of a whole lot of stuff from my Quicksilver catalogs - probably doesn't affect startup/shutdown/login etc, but should help quicksilver in the future

Hope that helps anyone else that's suffering from a bit of a slowdown! Now to work out which of those tasks actually helped, and run it a bit more often.

(I'm running a Macbook 2nd(?) generation, Core 2 Duo 2GHz, OSX 10.5.3, 2GB Ram)