Status-Q

Spotted today in St Ives.

It’s uncanny. Just last night over dinner I was commenting to Rose that the flowers on the table were still beautiful even though they were wilting.

And I then went upstairs, looked at John’s blog and saw his lovely photo of the ageing roses on his windowsill.

So here’s my contribution to the genre…

I was in London today for the Westminster eForum on ‘VoIP and the future of fixed line telephony’. This brought home some of the difficult issues that the regulators and the security services have to deal with.

I was impressed, actually… I came away with the feeling that those concerned – at least as represented at the forum – were thoughtful, capable and understood the issues much better than I had expected. There was discussion, for example, of the need to ensure that the ‘999’ emergency services would be available to anybody picking up something that looked like a phone when a member of their household had a heart attack. But was there a better way to do this than excessive regulation, which would stifle innovation? They had some good ideas.

An interesting statistic I learned today: Every day in the UK there are 12,000 emergency calls which are ‘silent’ – there’s nobody at the other end. Generally, these come from phones in people’s pockets where the ‘9’ key has accidentally been pressed repeatedly. It has been as high as 25,000 and they were really starting to clog up the system until measures were put in place which allowed these to be detected and sidetracked fairly quickly.

As I walked back past the Houses of Parliament there was a wonderful sun on the buiildings against a dark sky, and I managed to get this photo before the rain started…

Lots of activity on our bird feeder this morning:

I’ve decided to sell my old Canon EOS 600 on eBay. I’ll be sad to see it go. Much as I love digital photography, you’d have to spend a real fortune now to get something as solidly engineered as this.

If you’re interested, you can bid for it, together with a nice Canon lens which is compatible with Canon DSLRs, here.

I’m sure you also won’t want to miss:

• A nice set of photographic filters
• A cool recumbent bicycle
• A collection of 70 Ladybird books from my childhood – now collector’s items

…from my recent trip to the Pyrenees.

A couple more pictures from the Pyrenees:

One of the local high-altitude inhabitants.

The gites that we rented in the little village of Gaillagos.
The ridge in the background made for a splendid walk one evening:

If you have Google Earth, here’s the location: Gaillagos.

…after a fabulous week in the Pyrenees. The Val d’Azun now rates amongst my favourite places on the globe.

I may post more about it in due course – the blogging equivalent of inflicting my holiday snaps on you – but for the moment I’ll just make you jealous with the view we’ve had from our bedroom window for the last week:

Another shot from Fort York, Toronto.

Neither this, nor the previous one, is a particularly great photo, but I love the way the natural light from the window goes with the period colours.

Inside the officers’ mess at Fort York, Toronto.

The first is a steam engine which formed part of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, and which, along with the rest of the laboratory, as been transplanted to the Greenfield Village museum, just down the road from Rose’s parents’ house.

The second was gleaming in the bright sunshine, just outside a Mexican restaurant where we had lunch on Monday.