Caboose

It turns out that the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria has a website.

Looks like you can’t listen on line quite yet.

It looks like I’ll be heading off to Nigeria on the 13th of February. For two years.

It’s a VSO placement with the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, as a technical coordinator.

I applied back in June and was accepted by VSO not long afterwards but it has taken a while to find a placement. Now I’ve handed in my notice at work (finishing on the 23rd of December) and I can ramp up the organisation.

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve been working overseas for a while, I’ve been in my current job for almost four years now so it seemed like time for a change.

As today is a Bank Holiday in England I thought I’d better do something with my long weekend (other than sit around the house watching DVDs). I got on the cheap airline websites a couple of weekends ago and the only place I could get to cheaply was Oslo.

I got back this morning.

Apart from the horribly early starts to catch flights in each direction it was quite fun. I’d have preferred if it didn’t take about 1h45 to get between “Oslo” Torp airport and Oslo, but that’s what you have to put up with when you’re flying with Ryanair.

It’s a nice city, although (as anyone can tell you) very expensive. I stayed at the Haraldsheim youth hostel, which is only about 15 minutes from the central station by bus or tram. It seems to be a very quiet and family-oriented youth hostel, not an Australian to be found anywhere!

The thing I had to see in Oslo was the Fram Museum, the ship used by Nansen, Sverdrup and Amundsen for various voyages of polar exploration.

It’s an interesting museum, with lots of artifacts from the voyage and (refreshingly) it barely mentions Scott. It would be nice if the building was a bit bigger so you could actually see the ship from a bit of a distance but that’s more than made up for by the fact that you can wander around the Fram itself.

More photos…
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I’ve got fed up with the comment spamming scumbags attaching adverts for their dubious sites to mine. If you want to comment on something here, use the ‘Contact me’ link instead.

I was in Barcelona last weekend, visiting my friend Peter. I took a few pictures but haven’t yet got round to generating an HTML album of them, the image files are in this directory.

I’ve also been playing around with software for creating panoramas from multiple pictures, here’s one of the Sagrada Familia:

Update: Several people have been linking to this picture from their own sites, using up my bandwidth. If you want to use the picture feel free but make a copy in your own web space and credit me (it’s only polite).

Update 18/5/07: I tried being polite but idiots (usually on Blogger) keep linking to the (very large) panorama but displaying it at thumbnail size, using up lots of bandwidth on my site. So I’ve replaced the image with one that lets people know that it’s my picture. I’ve also had to remove the full-size panorama from this site, if anyone wants a copy please contact me.

I used a program called Hugin to create the panorama, not the easiest thing in the world to use, but I got there in the end.

I’ve finally got round to rescanning some of the pictures in the Journeys section of my site. When I originally scanned them I was using a laptop, so couldn’t get much of an idea how light/dark the pictures were, some of them ended up way too dark.

It didn’t help that my scanning software was outputting 16 bit per channel (48 bit per pixel) TIFFs but that Paint Shop Pro just threw away half of those bits on loading the files.

These days I’m using VueScan on my Linux box, so the scanning is much less painful than using Minolta’s horrible software on Windows. It’s still pretty tedious though.

Here’s one of the rescanned pictures:

I’ll be doing some more tomorrow…

I back was up in Scotland at the weekend for the wedding of an old friend from University. I hadn’t seen Steven and Susan for about three years, we were all a bit surprised by how long it had been.

Here’s a photo of the happy couple, their bridesmaid and best man.

And here’s one of Susan on her own.

I get the occasional email from people who have found my website looking for information about Kerguelen. For some reason the idea of the place seems to captivate some people.

A while ago I’d heard about a book about the islands, by a Frenchman called Jean-Paul Kauffman. At New Year I finally got round to buying a copy of Voyage to Desolation Island (originally L’Arche des Kerguelen: voyage aux îles de la Désolation).

It was an interesting read for me, partly because I recognised some of the places. Kauffman’s writing strongly evoked the memories of the pervasiveness of the wind on the islands and the starkly beautiful landscape. He describes how the wind sounds different there, it isn’t broken up by trees and buildings and it roars across the landscape.

The translator, Patricia Clancy, has done an excellent job and added a few very useful notes on points of French culture. Only two things irritated me about the translation. The units of measurement had all been translated into American, forcing me to sit doing mental arithmetic every time I encountered a temperature. The other irritant was that some of the technical terms didn’t seem to be quite right.

Kauffman himself seems to have had a somewhat doom-laden approach to his trip to the islands, there’s almost no mention of the social life of Port aux Français. Of course, that probably varies from year to year, maybe the place was just especially lively when I was there.

Speaking of Port aux Français, I’d like a word with whoever it was at the publishers that decided to translate the place names on the map. It’s confusing to refer to Port aux Français in the text but then have to work out it’s marked as Frenchmen’s Harbour on the map!

The book also describes journeys to the islands made by various groups and individuals, before they became permanently inhabited. Disastrous commercial enterprises, malnourished scientists and military visitors have all left their traces among the grasses and bogs.

So, if you’ve been fascinated by the Kerguelen Islands ever since you first saw them alone on a mostly-blue atlas page or if you just have a strange obsession with remote and isolated places, this book is well worth reading.

I decided to treat myself to an early Christmas present, a SonyEricsson Bluetooth-controlled car:

In the picture you can see it plugged into my phone to charge. There’s no need for (yet another) charger because it sucks power from the same phone you use to steer it. The red light indicates that it’s charging and status messages pop up on the phone’s display.

It’s utterly frivolous and stupid but it has cheered me up no end after being miserable with a cold all week. The cat doesn’t seem to know what to make of it but spent a happy ten minutes chasing it around the kitchen floor.

It’s that time of the year again, when I was wandering past the Orange shop in Cambridge last weekend I realised my year was up and I could upgrade my phone.

The new phone had to have Bluetooth, IrDA and GPRS. That narrowed the selection down quite a bit and I ended up trading in my old T39m for a shiny new Ericsson T610.

A week later I’ve had a play with most of the phone’s features and I’m pretty pleased with it.
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