I’ve been experimenting recently with creating some voice recordings of the content of this blog and adding them to the bottom of each post. By the time you read this post it will, all being well, have it’s own narrated version at the bottom. Give it a try. As well as recording my recent more substantial posts, such as this one and this one, I have jumped back in time and recorded some posts from my Open Diary days which I have been slowly adding to this blog, such as this one.
I’m really doing it for two reasons: firstly it gets me back up to speed with audio editing software, something which I knew better when I was at university thanks to my time with Bailrigg FM, and secondly because it gives me practice narrating. I’ve been looking at doing some voice over and narration work recently and have voiced a couple of advertising videos in the last month or so. Given that practice makes perfect I set off looking for content which I could narrate. After looking for a while, and trying some bits and pieces out, it struck me that I have a whole load of content here on my blog and that, given it’s written by me, should be pretty easy to translate into my own voice. I will at some point soon graduate to reading other people’s work perhaps by choosing a book to narrate from start to finish but that’s a little daunting so I won’t make any promises.
Back at the beginning of 2014 I started another year of taking one photo a day. It’s something I had done previously (from March 2009 to March 2010), and decided to do again for a full calendar year. I managed 348 photos meaning that for 17 days I failed to take a photo. The full collection can be seen on the daily photo page, but the following are 15 of my favourites from right through the year. [read more]
I’ve finally finished migrating the gallery pages from my old bespoke gallery system into WordPress. Other than the time it took to re-upload all the images (more than 8,000 in total), the transfer went relatively painlessly. There are two pieces of work left to do: firstly I need to fix the category links so that they are pretty rather than using querystrings, and secondly I want to see if I can, in bulk, update the upload time of each image to match the (manually set) published time of the gallery. I’ll be taking a look at those little things over the next few days.
This finally puts to rest my old gallery system. I started developing the system way back in 2002 to make it easier for me to share the photos I had taken at events with my friends. Before that point I’d simply used a static HTML system. The old galleries have been through a number of re-writes and additions over that time, as well as seeing a couple of re-designs, but with less time to pay attention to them the code had fallen somewhat into dis-repair. By moving to a custom post type based gallery system within WordPress I hope to be able to spend the time I used to spend maintaining the old system to add functionality. [read more]
Over the years I have spent time blogging in a few different places with varying different levels of success. My first (reasonably successful) attempt started way back in 2000 over at Open Diary. For about 3 years, as I went though college and into university, I wrote pretty regularly about my life and day-to-day activities in general. I seem to have run out of steam when I started to get involved more heavily with things at university. (Or perhaps I just became a lazy student.) Thankfully I had the foresight to take a backup of my diary when I stopped writing and have kept hold of that backup — passing it from one computer to the next — through the years.
Now I have settled on writing here, a site I have had since about the same time I stopped writing at the Open Diary, I have decided to go back through and add all those entries to this blog. There are a lot of entries over the years I was writing there so it’ll take some time to finish uploading (and proof-reading, and spell checking) them all, but I’m working backwards from 15th November 2003. The old posts start here.
I feel bad. This month I’ve let myself down. There was a run of 4 days and have been quite a few separate days when I didn’t get a picture for my daily photo gallery, and at least one where I took a picture on a different day to the day I filed it under (although in this case the image was related to the day I labelled it as…). I must try harder.
Catch up with the gallery here: http://www.flutt.co.uk/daily-photo/
I’ve been thinking: as a photographer I don’t take enough photos. I don’t mean that in reference to work — when I’m working at an event I shoot hundreds of pictures — but rather in my day-to-day life. I never leave the house without a camera, either one of my work cameras, my general compact, or my phone (which has a better CCD built in than my first digital camera had (although the lens leaves plenty to be desired)), but I just don’t stop to take pictures when I’m out and about of the things which make up my every day life.
So I’ve decided to change this. My plan is to take a picture every day. The pictures might be anything — something I did, something which interested me, just something I saw — but whatever the pictures end up being, the hope is that they will build up a montage of my life.
I can’t promise I’ll upload the images every day and, I can’t even promise I’ll manage to get an image every day, but I will do my best and I’ll let you know how I get on. You can follow the images on my daily photo gallery.
Welcome to Carreg’s blog. This is a personal blog kept mostly for fun, as a record of my life, and as a place to say what I really think and feel. While I currently work in technology I have no intention of this blog becoming a technical resource — there are plenty of those around and I want an outlet for my artistic side — that’s not to say I won’t mention things in passing as, for most people, work makes up for a considerable part of my life. [read more]
Note: This entry was written before this blog was launched. A long time before this blog was launched.
Another train. Going to the same place as usual. Somewhere near the beginning of last year (February, in fact) I decided it would be good to start a blog. And so I wrote an entry while sitting on a train, going to Lancaster. I’d often thought about it before then and when I was in school, going to college, and even in my first year at university, I wrote on the open diary. But then I got busy. I got involved with things at university and following that started working. All this real life stuff gets in the way of writing things down. Anyway, last year I decided I’d start a blog and write about me, my life, and everything that goes with it. Obviously with this momentous decision came some choices which have to be made: should it be public or private(?); should I use one of the handles I’m known by at the moment(?); do I want people I know to know it’s me(?); what software should I use(?). Some of the answers to these questions were easier than others. Let me run through my choices. [read more]