Partying with pictures.

Friday was a rather woozly day after the two previous nights with not as much sleep as my body required.

I did manage, with the help of someone I met at the IT support staff conference the before, to get the new replacement iMac (which got delivered 30 minutes after the order was faxed!) fully on the network with full automounter and NIS authentication. Even home directories on NFS worked. Previously I’ve tried to do this in the past and failed with MacOS X 10..2.x. However, it seems that later updates of 10.2 have fixed a great deal of the problems with interoperability.

Friday evening was the department undergraduate finalists’ party. Seeing as I took some photos last year I got asked to do it again. The result can be viewed at http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/pictures/party03/ if you’re interested.

Seeing as I was rather pooped I didn’t go on to Wolfson College Bop and went home instead. I was in bed well before 10pm.

Saturday morning I had to get up at the normal time, ie. 7:30am. It was off to Sainsbury’s first for the weekly shop before going off to my old school’s summer reunion thingy. I’d arranged to meet one of the other reprobates who had been in the computer club at lunchtime.

After leaving home at about 10am I finally got to Kimbolton at about 11:45am. Having finally managed to find a place which had some phone signal I got in touch with Will Mumford about meeting up. He said that he got off work at midday and would meet me in the New Sun Inn at about half twelve. So, I went and had some lunch in the Inn. Erm, it was rather expensive, £6.50 for scampi and chips!!!!

Anyway, I waited and waited and no Will could be seen. So, at 1pm I decided to pop over to the castle (the school is based in Kimbolton Castle and its grounds). Typically, just as I got about 100 yards up the drive I got both a text message and a phone call from Will (yes, I’d got a signal!) asking where I was. He was just coming in through the gatehouse.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I did see a few of my contemporaries there, but no-where near as many as I expected. Still it was fun.

I left the school at about a quarter past four and decided to travel down my old usual route to Bedford, the B660, past where I used to live, Pertenhall. Following a slight nostalgic tripas far as Bedford I decided to see how my old stamping ground in Houghton Conquest was getting on. More building on infill land was basically what I found.

Seeing as it was only about 5pm-ish I thought I’d pop along the road towards Ampthill and drop by the old ruins of Houghton House. I was glad I’d decided to take my camera with me as it’s quite a photogenic place. I took about 60 pictures including about 20 ready to stitch together into a panarama of the Great Ouse valley from King’s Wood, past Cardington airship hangers, across Bedford and over to the chimnies and clay pits of Stewartby with the Midland Mainline railways sweeping through the scenery. All I have to do now is find some software to stitch them together.

I left there at about 6pm, stopped off quickly at Millbrook railway bridge, where I used to take railway pictures after cycling there in about 1980, took a couple of pictures and then travelled home.

I finally got home at about 7:45pm, slumped in my chair and soon went to bed.

Today, I’m just been getting the pictures formatted and the meadow in the back garden grazed by my electric mower.

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