Home of the Dutch Gecko

The first term of my second first year is complete. Another ten week block of terrible stress and oodles of hard work. Ok, so maybe I was laying it on a little rich there.

It’s been good, I guess. The course makes more sense. There’s less of the “I don’t like this module I wish I was asleep” feeling. I’ve met a whole bunch of crazy new people. I’ve learned some crazy new stuff. I’ve moved house - again.

Quite a few changes. Yet it all seems so familiar - I guess it’s just the first year all over again.

I’m back in the nether-Netherlands, enjoying the whole family thing. My sister’s being nice so far, though this could be down to her revived counter-strike addiction. I’ve been tucking into revision like a good boy, but ICM is still worrying me. Nothing like sets and matrices to get the adrenaline rushing!

I’ve been trying to kick the insomnia habit, but my body seems to be keen on resisting any change. I’ve got a hell of a timetable next term so I’m going to have to fix things, but for some reason falling asleep is not an option until 2AM at the earliest. Of course, I’ve probably broken my previous progress by staying up this late now, but I theoretically have little to do tomorrow. And this is fun. Really. Blogging can be fun.

OK so I wrote all of that last week and never got round to sticking it on the site. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and that your holidays are going well. I’m going to hit the “Publish” button and do something else.

I’ve been all the way through my old photo collection and picked out some stuff to adjust the colours, sharpen, line up, resize and upload. I’ve been pretty self-critical this time round, so some stuff that existed on the site isn’t present. It might be later, I don’t know.

It was pretty interesting to see the stuff I experimented with from the moment I started shooting to the stuff I did this summer. It’s only been a year and a half since I got my own camera, but it seems like longer. I currently have 2651 photos consuming 4.72GB on my hard drive, though some of them are duplicates, and some of them are just a blur or a black screen. I’m proud to say I’ve only ever deleted three photos, and that was because my memory card was full and I desperately wanted that last shot (no, it’s not on the site, it turned out rubbish). Why does this make me happy? Because it means I can remember things. We can’t yet take a photo of everything we see during our lifetime, but when I have my camera in my hand I stop for a lot of things. Often when I don’t have it I wish I did. I might see a funny situation (four hens sitting on a fence) or just something beautiful (the sun breaking through icicles hanging off a tree branch). Just now I can remember these situations as if they were a photo, but I cannot share them with you and I know I will forget them one day. So I keep those photos that I do have, even if they are only a blur.

You’ve probably found the link to the photo gallery already. It’s available on the right, or you can click here to go straight there. There’s also some funky preview things, but they might break on occasion as I tinker with them. Yes the layout on the gallery is still fairly basic (read: broken) but I needed some photos anyway to change the theming, so I thought I may as well upload them all at once so you could take a gander.

There are some new ones up there. Some of it is very old, but most of it is from the past summer (when I should have been building a website).

As a final, but serious note, I haven’t worked out a copyright system that works for me just yet, so at the moment all rights are reserved, spelled with a capital ©.

Also, principles of programming assignment next week, so this place will be dead Enjoy the pics!