Google +

I suppose it had to happen, Google has announced that it's shutting down it's public section of Google +, it's Facebook competitor. Problem is that I and many others like it, it's not as intrusive as Farcebook, there's a lot less rubbish on it and it's generally more civilised.

I've been trying some alternatives such as Pluspora, Diaspora, Mastodon but they all feel like Twitter replacements, the nearest so far is MeWe, but it's far from perfect.

I'm still active on Twitter, Instagram, MeWe and Farcebook at the moment and my G+ account will remain in case they change their mind but I think the time has come to do some culling. Twitter seems the least intrusive, there's no communities like you get on G+, Instagram is filling with more and more ads and of course is run by those Farcebook people.

Farcebook has been less and less usable for some time, adverts pop up everywhere, fake news stories, articles designed to create hate, data leaks and then there's the use they make of your data.

I'm thinking that Christmas will be the cut off point when I close down most of the networks.

How Much? !!!

During a recent trip to London, we opted to stay at a Holiday Inn in Kensington as it was an easy walk to the Royal Albert Hall for a concert. Having stopped at Holiday Inn's in the past we expected something really special here. I knew parking was going to be expensive and had prepared for that, we checked in and had to leave a pre authorisation of £100 on top of the hotel costs and then there was our room, I have seen larger cupboards. 

The choice of food at the restaurant was limited, £32 for a bottle of wine and a total bill of £94 for something you could get at a Premier Inn for half the cost but in the morning, the breakfast was quite good to be fair.

Then there was a bit to eat at The Royal Albert Hall before the gig, just under £40.00 for two slightly warm burgers, a packet of crisps shared between us and two bottles of water.

The staff at the hotel are wonderful and helpful as were the staff at the Albert Hall, but if you take the costs of the stay and food into account, we could have had a last minute all inclusive holiday in Europe.

Public Transport

We've just had a trip to London and to be honest I really wanted to use public transport but the return ticket for the two of us to London was £170.00, then we had to get from out house to Swansea station, and then somehow get to London wetlands and back to our hotel, this means a trip of over 5 hours to get there for about 10.15 as opposed to about 3.5 hours by car. On top of that we would have to carry a suitcase and camera equipment with us. Then there's the trip from the WWT to our hotel, about 20 mins by public transport or car. And then the homeward trip via RSPB Ham Wall about 4 hours by train as opposed to 3 hours in the car. The other main difference is that we would need a taxi from Glastonbury adding to the time and expense. Another stop at RSPB Newport Wetlands on the way home. About 1.5 hours by car or 9 hours by public transport and finally the trip home. Just over 3 hours to Swansea and then a bus or taxi trip home or 1.5 hours by car.

Let's look at costs, £170.00 for the return train tickets and that's just London and back, assume about another £50.00 for local transport that gives about £200.00. By car, petrol £55.00, parking at the hotel, £78.00, congestion charge £11.50 or £144.50 and door to door service .

Had I timed the homeward journey better I could have got away without paying the congestion charge too, public transport is too expensive and too inefficient to compete and really needs to get it's act together.

One Of Those Days

Somedays, no matter how much you like your job you come out feeling stressed and fed up, today was one of those days. For no reason it's been incredibly busy and there's no moment to pause. I walked out of the building, sat down in the car, started the engine and hit play on my music player. Immediately I heard the sound of some animals and then the music kicked in. Within seconds I started to relax and was actually smiling by the time I reached the gates onto the main road. 

The track that put the world to rights was At Wild End from Colin Bass, this is the track, the lyrics are after it and if it don't get you smiling you've lost your happiness glands.

Walking out on Autumn day

Under a clear blue sky

Sun shines down on golden lanes

And shoals of birds swim by

Shoals of birds swim by

At Wild End

Walking up to the higher plains

See the snow-capped mountains shine

Spending time with the farmer girl

She's a friend of mine

She's a very good friend of mine

At Wild End

Nothing lasts forever

No-one is here to stay

And you'll find out where you've been

heading

At the end of the day

At the very end of the day

At Wild End

Sometimes it takes a long time

To come out of the blue

When you're following the wrong signs

You get lost

You lose yourself

You're someone else

Playing the game

But I love my love with a free good will

I own she has my heart

And I will love her all my days

And we will never part

No, we will never part

From Wild End

So we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night

Tho'the heart be still as loving

And the moon be still as bright

For the night was made for loving

And the day returns too soon

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon

So here's to you

The parting glass

And goodnight and joy to you all

Photography and Stuff

I'm going to wander a bit off course now and then with this, but it's about photography as a hobby, self esteem and a bit of depression gets thrown in too,

Let's get started with depression, I do suffer occasionally, but thankfully manage to sort myself out, sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's not. An acquaintance of mine shared a post once that asked questions about depression. One of the questions was, "Do you go to bed, not because you're tired, but because you don't want to be awake anymore"?

My honest answer is that I do.

Going back to my teens, life was crap. My mother died, i went off the rails, had a failed marriage, stupidly gave up some good jobs and it was only in my late 40s, thanks to some good friends, relatives, a kick up the arse and more especially a wonderful new partner that things started to come together. There are days when I struggle, but I put on a brave face and get myself sorted.

You may now be thinking, what the hell has this got to do with photography?

I enjoy getting out with a camera, I've upgrade to a reasonable DSLR with some decent lenses and enjoy wildlife, quite often it's not the quality of the picture, it's just that I've got something new. Same with landscape,  if I like it I'll snap it.

I've listened to people who insist that the only way to get a decent picture is to use RAW and then process it afterwards to get the most out of the picture. This may be true, but it adds a lot of work to the process but it can be worth whiile

Then several  remarks from people who really should have know better made we want to sell up my stuff and give up, this together with me being on a downward spiral at the time made we look at selling all my gear and getting a cheap point and click camera as in the words of the people in question, "a lot of my pictures were crap".

A few days later, a work colleague of mine said these words to me, "I've not seen any pictures of yours lately, the nature ones really brighten my day up". Bless her, this is what I wanted to hear, I discarded the decision to get rid of my gear and decided to go back to using it the way I wanted to.

While taking wildlife, I leave the camera set to JPG fine mode, with a Sony SLT, you can judge if the exposure is right when you take the picture, if it's too dark or too light you can tweak it as you're taking it. For landscape, I still use RAW as you quite often have to deal with a huge range of brightness.

My enjoyment has gone through the roof.

So in the end, be yourself, don't try and be somebody else, it will only make you unhappy, do the things you like to do, listen to the music that hits your emotions, ignore negative people, enjoy life as much as you can and be the person you want to be

Lots of rambling there, some of it may not make sense to you but it will to some people.

SSH Stuff

I've just managed to install a load of stuff onto my desktop as I didn't realise I wasn't connected to a remote machine via ssh.

G+ gave me a suggestion about changing the login colours on the remote machine so a bit of searching came up with this.

Connect via ssh and run

nano .bashrc

Add this lot in just above the last fi

#Make prompt colored when logged in remote
export NON_LOCAL_LOGIN=`env | grep SSH`
if [ "$NON_LOCAL_LOGIN" != "" ]; then
       PS1="\033[33m[\u@\h:\w]#\033[0m "
fi;

Save and close and you're sorted

Original answer came from here