Livre d'Or

I had this idea that switching to a digital camera would mean speedier turnaround for getting my shots processed. It hasn't really worked, it still takes me months to get round to uploading photos from my camera and tweaking them and putting them online. Anyway, here's a few snaps showing "what I did on my holidays", as they say:

( thumbnails linking to Flickr )

I'm just sorting through the very small number of photos I actually got round to taking when we were exploring the far north of Sweden. They are mostly not very good, which is partly because I haven't quite picked up the knack of photographing endless landscapes, and partly because Kiruna itself honestly isn't that photogenic. Anyway, here's a small selection of snaps of Kiruna (the last few are of the cultural museums at Jukkasjärvi).

I did manage to get one good shot of a reindeer (in a fairly small enclosure in the Sami cultural museum), though:

This is what I saw from my front window a few minutes ago:



I grabbed a snap of them in the last 30 seconds before my camera batteries (which I haven't charged in months) gave up. It came out better than most of my attempts to photograph the deer that periodically visit, but it's not exactly brilliant either. The deer usually try to run away if you take photos of them, so by the time I got the shot they were the other side of the garden and not keeping very still. But hey.

Other than that, I have just realized that the file I need for my work was saved on the network, not on the work laptop which I cunningly brought home. So I shall either brave the snow and the Sunday transport and go into the lab, or see if I can work from a slightly older version.

Various stuff worth recording this week. Besides which, a few lovely concerned people worry about me if I go for ages without posting anything, so here's an update.

( diary stuff, with a few pics )
Two annoying things, though. Firstly, my phone is being unreliable again; it's giving an engaged tone to people who try to call me, when to me it seems fine and is not at all engaged. This has caused me to miss calls from people I really wanted to talk to, pseudomonas and compilerbitch in particular. So if you've been trying to get hold of me and not managed to get through, that's why. I suggest writing me an email and asking me to call you if you want to speak to me, just to be sure.

The more serious negative is that Lyndon LaRouche's evil "Novelle Solidarité" group, the people responsible for the anti-semitic murder of my brother's friend in 2003, have set up a stall in the station just outside the campus where I work. They look like your standard lefty student protest group, with posters about how evil Bush is and protesting about the Iraq War, maybe just a smidge more glossy and professional than some. I don't even know what they're doing in Sweden. I guess looking for more naive students with lefty, anti-authoritarian views to sucker into their scary cult. They have no way of knowing that I'm Jewish, of course, but I'm really concerned about seeing them here.

Here are the best of the photos I took in Edinburgh last week:
( thumbnails only; click for full version )

I thought I'd post the best of the crop my attempts at taking photos of sunsets and other interesting lighting conditions when I was in England mid-December:



I've included with this lot, though it doesn't quite fit, a photo I took of Dundee when lethargic_man was here in November:



Also, a couple of photos of my parents' place:



Theoretically, you should only be able to see those if you're on my friends list, but I'm not sure how well the security is working. Anyway, the main claim to fame of that house is that Rupert Brooke (who was a regular visitor) described it in his diary as a "castellated mansion", and I think these photos show that quite well. Well, the other claim to fame is that the Macaulays lived there, but they are quite limitedly famous compared to Brooke!