Saturday - a trip to Cheshire to visit our horse, Mouse, who is on an extended holiday there and apparently enjoying it very much. I was pleased to discover that she hadn’t forgotten me - something she demonstrated with a huge cuddle the like of which was in the past reserved only for special occasions such as the delivery of her dinner in the snow.
According to Google nobody has ever seen fit to utter the phrase “trains and grapes” on the internet before, so it’s lucky I’m here to put that right. In my defence, the real purpose is a bit of testing of video encoding and embedding. Firstly, Saturday morning fun with Duplo trains:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.
Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.
Kiko (she has a name now) took her first trip to Suffolk to meet Meg, a real Border Collie. They spent the entire weekend wrestling in the garden, leading to another gratuitous set of doggy pictures…
We took a trip to Huddersfield yesterday and returned with a seven week old puppy. She’s half Border Collie - the mother is a rescue dog who started getting fat when they got her home and then produced four large puppies, so the identity of the father is unknown.
Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.
It turns out I was wrong about the annual day of snow, as we had some proper snow today complete with snowballs and a snowman. Only the chickens failed to get into the spirit of things, refusing to come out of their house.
If the image looks odd, it’s a result of me inexpertly playing with multiple exposures to create an HDR image using qtpfsgui.
Wind is probably my least favourite kind of weather, and moreso when we’ve had what seems to be weeks of it. What’s normally an easy journey up and down the A1 on Friday was made a lot less pleasant by various obstacles in the way, ranging from lorries lying on their sides to bits of signage that had become detached and blown into the road.
We must have done something bad because someone or something has decided to unleash a plague of vermin on our garden.
Despite the sudden explosion of techy posts on here, life in the real world goes on. The highlight in recent weeks was my sister’s wedding, which was a brilliant day. Mia, in particular, enjoyed it immensely, singing away to herself throughout the service. Afterwards she played the church organ and followed that up with running round and round the outside of the church at high speed with me in tow. You might think that would tire her out, but she later spend a solid four hours on the dancefloor at the reception.