Welcome to Heathrow Terminal 3

You can't beat a low ceiling for adding atmosphere....

everything breaks

I was pretty much set for the trip to Cairo for the Imagine Cup. I'd squeezed all the required bits into the case and finished agonizing about taking the big camera (decided not to in the end) and all was well. I opened the laptop for my final email check. It was dead. Very dead. Take the battery out and it still won't work dead. Not good. In fact very bad. It had all the things on it I needed, plus a bunch of stuff I was going to work on. Wah!

The only good news was that if it had done this a day later I would have been totally stuck. And I had taken a backup the day before (perhaps that is what caused the problem).

Anyhoo, I'm presently sitting in Terminal 3 at Heathrow with my trusty NetBook in my bag. It has most of what I need on it, thanks to some feverish installing last night. I'm always nervous about going away, but fine once I get on the road. I've never been to Egypt before. This should be fun.

Learn All About HTTPS

If you want a really, and I mean really, in depth description of just what happens when you visit a secure website you should take a look here:

http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html

Fantastic.

Little Weighton Steam Fair

Went to a steam fair today. I love the smell of steam engines, and there were a lot there, along with assorted classic cars, tractors, models and all sorts.

The weather was kind to us and a good time was had by all.

Klaus at Pixel Creations

Many years ago I used to work with Klaus. This was when robots were wildly fashionable. You wouldn’t think that things like engineering research have fashions, but they do. Klaus was doing things like making robots weigh chocolate bars, figure out where they were and all sorts. Great fun.

That was a while back, and I met him today when he was buying a flash gun. As was I. I’ve not done any flash photography for a long time. The first flash gun I ever bought was a Sunpak DC3. This was solid state, made a fantastic whistling noise like the scary bit at the end of the Silence of the Lambs, and was very optimistically rated by the manufacturer. So much so that the first roll of, very expensive, colour slide film that I used it with just showed lots of pictures of eyes and teeth glinting in the darkness. I’ve not been that keen on flash photography ever since. But I’m told that the new flashguns can do very fangled things by talking to the camera and you can use them for fill in effects and all sorts. So I thought I’d get one.

Klaus was buying one for his business. He now works as a professional photographer and is really enjoying his work. You can find him at http://www.pixelcreations.co.uk/.