There used to be a tradition of taking pictures of everyone in the tree at the annual picnic. What you never see is the view from the tree.
Goths in a tree
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
In the frame
This shot, from one of the Hampstead Park picnics, started me thinking about how photography could be an art under my control. Completely by accident the hoop framed a number of people – something I have since gotten an eye for and deliberately tried to capture.
Waltham Forest Nights
I never really got the hang of taking pictures of people. They are too unpredictable, and don’t stay still long enough to line up the shot. This particular party, poor James (not pictured) got the raw end of my inability, with constant flashes from my repeated pointing and shooting. None of those pictures came out well, but maybe that wasn’t the point. As we entered an age where photography became more-or-less free, you didn’t worry so much about wasting film and could take entertainment from the mere taking of the pictures without thought for the photographs produced.
Just trying to make sense of these new surroundings
I found a collection of photos like this, with no context to go with them. I have a feeling they were from when I was moving and looking for a house. I went and took some pictures of places where houses were advertised for rent. Given the dates they would be from my move to Oxford, which didn’t see me living in anything quite like these places.
And, wow, there was a lot of pebbledash at the time, or maybe in the area. I’m so glad I didn’t end up living somewhere like this.
Count on me
Another piece of art at the Pompidou Centre was a Fibonacci Series. This was the second outing for my camera and I hadn’t worked out how to use it. This picture got me chased around the museum by an angry custodian who didn’t like the flash. Indeed, it would probably have been a better picture without the flash, but this is how you learn.
“I’d love to stay but I got no time”
Keith, you plonker, what were you thinking? It’s so easy to question. It’s so easy to say that you should have stuck around. Let me say this:
Thank you for hanging in there for as long as you did.
I was never a part of your jilted generation but your energy leaked out into my world. And I am glad of that.
The thing is that you don’t know is how you are going to act until you get into that place. All the ‘you should talk to someone’s in the world are not going to be heard when you are there.
I remember a day in London. I had just started working there, commuting from Cambridge until I found a house more locally. I got on a crowded tube train holding a large book I was reading, there was a big crowd on the platform and as I moved onto the train the corner of my book brushed against a girl standing on the train. She wasn’t paying attention to the crowd boarding the train. She started shouting at me to stop assaulting her.
That evening, on my return journey, I made a conscious decision to walk close to the wall as I went down the platform because I knew that if a train arrived and I was walking next to the track the temptation would be great. No one would have known the reason. No one could have known.
Since then, I’ve been there again and again. Talk to someone? No. I only function this well because I’ve got a plan to get out when I need to. The option is there and, all the time it is, I can probably live another day.
Flatpack heaven
Friday midday my Ikea delivery arrived, with 15 boxes of flat pack furniture. Some 30 hours later all boxes have their contents built and ready for use, my thumbs and knees are sore, and we have destinations for the contents of more boxes.
The unpacking is progressing, all the easy wins have been done, its the complicated things now, but it looks like a house we can live in. And, shortly, we’ll have somewhere for guests to sit too. So if you would like to visit, get in touch and we’ll find a time.
She said “Don’t go dark on me again”
Some years ago I shared a house with a number of people – it was a large terraced house opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral in Northampton. One of our housemates there returned to her native France where three of us would visit her. Mostly we’d pile into Daves company car and he’d drive us there. One year we visited the Pompidou Centre in Paris where we found a cave installation.
All these moments will be lost in time
On my thirtieth birthday, I met with a number of friends in London. I was, then, as now, not very organised and didn’t have a plan. We dithered and tried to find a restaurant in Leicester Square that could seat us all. So we ended up in Wong Kei in China Town. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but it was a great night.
The most determined of us went on some Goth night at Gossips afterwards, a slimy dark hole of a club under the back streets of Soho.
It was also the day I got my first digital camera, a small, cheap, fixed focus thing with a memory card that would take 8 pictures. This is one of those first few.
It gave me no clue about the joy I would get over the years as both my cameras and my skill improved. A lot has happened in those eighteen years and I have pictures to show for most of it, behind many of those pictures is a story that could so easily be lost like tears in rain.
Resurrecting the octave build
My AWS heavy utilisation instance expired some time ago so I brought down the build server. Now I have a replacement, albeit local network only, running on a Synology NAS.
By default these boxes don’t come with a compiler installed (!?) , so I have had to install Entware, which puts everything in /opt/, nice for separation, but it means a bunch of stuff needs wiring together. This is what I have done:
- Installed Entware
- Installed GCC
- Installed Mercurial
- sudo ln -s /etc/ssl /opt/etc
- Installed Tomcat 7 (Synology package)
- Installed Jenkins
- Created build in Jenkins
- Install libtool-bin
- Install autoconf
- Install automake
At this point the ./bootstrap of Octave would run, but failed with a syntax error in automake – at line 3936. This is in a variable substitution function and *might* be ignorable, so I have commented out the line for the moment. This allows ./bootstrap to run, and, in turn ./configure to run.
However, ./configure now fails with a requirement for a fortran compiler, of which none are installed yet.