Striding out

My throat still feels scratchy and my nose has been dripping all morning ... :) apart from that all is well!

Around 1pm the sun was making a real effort to push through a relatively thick layer of clouds. Was this my cue to grab my camera to make a move?

Bother, I didn't remember to put my battery on charge. The Canon 5D has no juice left. Luckily I had charged the battery pack of my Canon D1 mark II the other day. I wanted to familiarise myself with it again and now was my chance. The menu layout and positioning of buttons is slightly different and it's funny how I have to quickly reacquaint myself before feeling fully at ease again.

I was in two minds as to where I wanted to go. I didn't fancy going into town. Sitting on the tube when I am finding it difficult to breath didn't sound too appealing. So I decided to hop in the car and to drive to Wimbledon Common. I have never been there but a guy at the pool mentioned the other day how beautiful the Common was.

I'm always game to explore new areas, besides, bit of fresh air would do me good as well.

Shirley was up for it too. As we are driving along the clouds are getting darker and darker again ... never mind we're on our way and there is no way I'm not getting a shot for my blog!

We didn't quite know the way but followed our nose. Well, Shirley's nose actually! Past the All England Tennis Club and up a hill towards Southfields.

"Stop! I just saw a sign for Wimbledon Common."

I reverse and we take a left and another few turns passed some beautiful houses. Nice area! And we find ourselves bang opposite a path that leads into the Common. By now it's drizzling but it's beautiful at the same time. The Common turns out to be more woodland like. Huge. Not many people around - the rain must have kept them indoors.

I'm fascinated by the big old trees and the remaining long grass. I frame up my shot and as I'm about to take the shot I can see from the corner of my eye that two people will soon be making it into my frame. Impatient I take one shot and wait until the two are where I want them to be. As they reach the exact point, one of them decides to kick a stone. I'm happy with that because it adds a bit of humour to my shot.

The rain is getting heavier. I'm quite willing to carry on walking and see what else we encounter.

"No, not the way you are feeling!" I was told.

"Ok then, boss" :)

How streetwise are you?

Waking up this morning I was all set to have a productive day!

I had a few thing lined up. The major one was to research (and hopefully find) a gadget that will assist me in capturing the best ever under water footage anybody has ever taken at the Lido :)

The next task was to update my website by adding a page that would inform people about my blogs.

Number one was done in good time! Amazing what one can find on the Internet - And, I must tell you, I have the coolest brother because this "thing" :) I will introduce you to in due cause, is a belated birthday present from my brother ... yes, I had a bit of a "big" birthday back in April I'm afraid ...:)

Number two - adding a few details on my site went fairly smoothly too. Up until it was time to upload the changes that is. I'm designing my site in i.web 09 and, as of one week ago, I have installed Snow Leopard, the latest Apple OS.

Well, what can I say. Apple has let me down a bit for the first time. Snow Leopard has proved to have a few issues with certain applications. One of which is uploading to your FTP directly from i.web. The connection failed, failed and failed again. Time to call Easily, my host and figure out what is going wrong.

I'm sure you are familiar with the scenario when calling any technical support:) Yawn, Easily is no different!

Suffice it to say that by googling forums on the matter, I ended up figuring out myself what to do. Tip: should you by any chance have similar difficulties using i.web/snow leopard use the forum.

And as we are on the subject, should you be using Cyberduck and it worked well in Leopard, note that you will be needing Cyberduck version 3.3b1 if you are running Snow Leopard.

Yes, I know, tedious stuff :) But hey, I got my revised site uploaded! Monumental success I will have you know :) Specially as, while I was on the phone, trying to make sense of what Easily were (falsely) instructing me to do, a deafening racket that was going on in front of my house.

The windows of my office were vibrating and the noise would simply not stop ... here I was holding for Omar from Easily to ask his supervisor for advise ... cause his colleague managed to instruct me on how to delete my entire site but wasn't able help me upload it :)

Great stuff! The commotion outside didn't help in the slightest!

Time was ticking away. When was I ever going to go on my blog journey? Can't stop now. Have to fix the website first.

Still holding for Omar.

Suddenly Shirley had the brilliant idea of sending me out with my camera to document what that ear-splitting racket was all about!

"Ok cool, why not. You talk to Omar :)"

Off I went. No bicycle, no tube to take, not even a bus! I opened my front door and bingo: Action!

The lads were not enthralled having a camera being pointed at them. Not a smile - no, on the contrary, they went about their business looking rather grim faced. Well, I guess I didn't have much to smile about either at his point ... other than proving to be a touch more streetwise today than had been yesterday :)