Feckoff.net

I came across this handy thing on the boards.ie photography forum ages ago. It’s BigHugeLabs’ flickr DNA web app. It’ll tell you all sorts if interesting stuff about your flickr account - here’s mine.

If you scroll right down to the bottom there’s an ego surf section that you can use to find out where your flickr photos are being used around the web. All of my flickr stuff is tagged as creative commons so I’ve found a good bit of it around without anyone telling me. The most used of my pictures seem to be the ones I took of exotic cars in Germany, which is not surprising to me, as they tend to be my most viewed on flickr too, as well as a shot I took of an aircraft traffic jam in JFK airport back in February. Apparently there was a bit of outrage in the US over passengers getting stranded on planes for hours shortly after so it came up high in search results and got used in a bunch of articles as a result.

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I read books. A lot. I have two shelves in my room that are stacked high and starting to bend a bit in the middle under the weight. Its a mystery to me why I haven’t blogged about them until now, so here goes. Most of what I read is fiction - crime thrillers and the like. Stuff that’s likely to be frowned upon and called airport novels by literature snobs. Here’s what I’ve been spending most of my reading time on over the last year:

• Anything Everything by Lee Child. His Jack Reacher novels are proper page-turners. I only stumbled upon his stuff this summer in a bargain bookshop, and now I’m working my way through everything he’s written. For a Briton he sure writes a great American novel!
• Nelson Demille’s “Wild Fire”. Terrorists and mutually assured destruction. Fun! I’ve read pretty much all of Demille’s books over the last couple of years and eagerly await his next one some time next year.
• Everything from Michael Connelly. His books are like crack. I’ve read every last one of them (eh, not all in 2007) and have always been left wanting more.
• A bunch of Clive Cussler books. I’m not fond of the nautical setting of most of them and I find a lot of the characters to be two-dimensional and ridiculously perfect but the adventures are compelling and enjoyable, and that makes the rest forgivable.

And now some non-fiction brain food: I picked up a box-set of Stephen E. Ambrose’s World War II books last summer but didn’t get around to reading them until this year. I found them a very easy and interesting read. If you have any interest in WWII, I highly recommend them. For those who don’t know, Ambrose is the man who wrote Band of Brothers, the book that spawned the critically acclaimed TV series of the same name. Cracking stuff. Sadly, he died of lung cancer shortly after the series aired.

I also picked up comedian/activist Mark Thomas’s “As used on the famous Nelson Mandela”, an investigation into the global arms trade which looks quite interesting. Its in my queue to be read in the near future.

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So its almost Christmas. All the prezzies have been bought. I finish up in work tomorrow, thanks to using up a few of my remaining days of leave so I won’t have to be back there till the 31st. I’ve been really busy with work and stuff recently, hence the lack of posting here.
The new ring road extension in Kilkenny opened today after about 3 years of excruciatingly slow road works. I think it will be of great benefit and should make the Castlecomer road into town much quieter now that every bit of traffic coming to Kilkenny from the north doesn’t have to travel straight into the centre of town on it.
The road out to my house now forms a flyover on the new road. I think I’ll have to head down there some evening and try some long exposure cliche shenanigans with the camera

Speaking of which, anyone got a second hand Nikon D80 to offload? I need a bigger, brighter viewfinder!

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Got back home from China (again) late last night. The 12 hour flight from Shanghai was fine except for the fact that I was stuck sitting beside the smelliest, most ingorant bollix I’ve ever had to endure that kind of time with in my life. I also had several hours to kill in the dump that is Heathrow terminal 1. I arrived in Shannon at around 9 last night. Got out to the long term car park at around 9.30 to find my car’s battery completely dead I really did not need that after being on the go for 24 hours between travelling and airport hanging about!
Fortunately the airport has a jump start service and they arrived after about 10 minutes and got me going.

Here’s a photo of Shanghai at night. I took this last Sunday night. Forgot to change the time on my camera so the EXIF data will have the GMT timestamp on it. I was very busy with work this time around and ended up taking bugger all photos.

Click it for the flickr page and larger sizes.
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