Below Belief

Ross alerted me to a new service where you can see flight paths for aircraft arriving and departing from Heathrow based on real air traffic control data. It’s delayed by 24 hours for security purposes
You can see the maps here
This, by the way, is not satisfying any kind of latent “plane-spotter” in me (you may be surprised to note) but more importantly to work out how high and how closely aircraft fly over the new house. This will help us understand how noisy it will be. As it turns out, just like S’s flat, aircraft will be directly overhead from 4.30am most mornings… although over the new house they will be ~120m higher up so this may improve things.

Definitely time to invest in double-glazing…

Some photos from the day out with the hats:


A good time was had by all – and we came out of the day just about even – which wasn’t too bad.

I finally joined facebook.
I’ve been observing from the sidelines and now seems like a reasonable time to get involved. More from a research perspective (for interesting work opportunities) than from an actual participation point of view.
A lot of it feels like a big time waste, to be honest, but there are some very clever features. I like the way it kind of “self-discovers” interesting things about you and your network simply based on yours and other’s email address books. It’s quite amazing how that network is structured – and it allows you to see what your existing network looks like (rather than letting you create an artificial one – like LinkedIn etc).
So it has some very interesting potential from all sorts of perspectives. I’ll keep you posted.

Today we’re off to the races. It’s Ladies Day and I’m chaparoning S and her mum to win big on the horses.

There will be silly hats, fine fillies, pints of beer, champagne, strawberries and £20 notes a go-go.
Wish me luck

Have been playing around with macro-strobe photography a la Strobist. The first results are not too bad – although the ratio of good shots to taken shots is pretty damn low!
See more here

Here’s our latest thinking on the work we hope to do to the house

We decided to balance the ground floor – by putting the front two rooms together and extending the rear room using a glass extension rather than the side return we proposed before.
We’ve also planned the loft extension – provisionally at least – with two bedrooms and a bathroom. Plus we propose to extend the downstairs bathroom into the rear bedroom.

Well, I exchanged contracts on my flat on Friday. Feels quite exciting really – a new era of co-habitation ahead of us as well as hopefully a fantastic new house – in six months time. Big house is still awaiting the “tying up of the dead guy’s affairs”.
In the meantime I am only slightly daunted by moving in with lovely S – who has kindly cleared me a drawer and a wardrobe for my clothes and in return I have filled her spare bedroom with my newly thinned junk.
And we think we’ve finally nailed the house plans – got a better design all round and now know what’s going on in the loft too. Pictures coming soon.
All exciting stuff. Watch this space
Tomorrow I’m out on a photography day with friends from PA – and if I get my strobe batteries sorted I’ll be taking my off-camera flash techniques and trying them out in the real world, a la Strobist.