Thunderbird Three at Humberside Airport. Who knew?
We are having a day or two in Amsterdam before heading off to TechDays in The Hague. So we hopped onto to the plane at Humberside and headed off to Schipol. After a quick train journey we checked into our hotel and then headed out for a walk. Of course I took the camera.
There are a lot of bikes here
Tooltip from Amsterdam...
I really do like it here.
I said to Emily yesterday that if the weather is nice on Sunday we'd probably head for Hornsea.
It is and we did. Of course I took the camera.
Slimbridge is one of my favourite places to visit. They have lots of different makes of birds and wildlife and stuff. We went there today and of course I took some photos.
It’s a pity that the camera decided to focus perfectly on the bit behind the butterfly, but I’m still happy with this one.
England in summer. Can’t beat it.
In preparation for the Imagine Cup World Finals in Russia I've got myself a tiny camera that I can carry round at all times. It seems to do a good job of the Union Building.
I don’t know much about tomatoes. Mostly red, different sizes, used in bolognaise and on pizza, some discussion over whether or not they are a fruit. Oh, and in New Orleans they have a festival for them. It was a bit warm, but you could always cool down with a Bloody Mary drink. We took a wander through the French Market and I took a whole bunch of photographs.
Including this one. We have to head home tomorrow, which is rather sad as I’m just about getting the hang of “The Big Easy”.
If you are going to have a day off, I can recommend New Orleans as a great place to do it. First we went off to Audobon Zoo, which has to be one of the best zoos I’ve ever been to. We expected to spend a few hours there, but we ended up finding a day’s worth of stuff to keep us busy. There were all the usual zoo favourites (pictures of which will filter onto the blog over time I’m sure) along with some local specialities.
There’s an alligator lurking in this picture somewhere, I suggest that until you know where, you should rule out any swimming.
In the evening we went on a riverboat cruise which was rather splendid. There is something extremely civilised about sitting drinking a cool beer while they move the scenery past you and tell you all about it. The Mississippi is a very busy river, with oil, sugar and all sorts of other things moving up and down in huge ships.
Today we also had a rather good sunset as well.
This morning we caught the ferry to Algiers. Its just across the river and the journey takes fifteen minutes or so. The good news is that the ride is free, and Algiers is a great place to take a look at.
Some of the land is still underwater.
And some of the houses are beautiful.
Tomorrow the main conference starts. I’m looking forward to it.
I’ve never been to an oyster festival before. And I’ve never had oysters from the BBQ before. Both were great.
..and so to Whitby. Love the place. And the Fish Pie served at the Magpie Cafe. Actually I like the cafe as much for its technology and business approach as its food. They have large screens showing you what fish is available on the day. All the attentive and hard working waitresses enter your order into a PDA (and have done for quite a while now). The cafe is on Twitter, and they are continuously updating what they do. In these respects they are very like Fudge in Hull, working to improve and extend that their reach while still remaining very good at their core business, serving really good food.
We were blessed with some of the best weather I’ve seen for, well, months, and so I took some more pictures of the place.
We didn’t take a trip on the boat, but these folks seemed to enjoy it.
Last time we came the sea was so bad that we weren’t allowed this far out on the pier.
Took a trip out to Elsham Hall today. The weather was cold and grey, but didn’t actually rain, which was something of a relief. We were able to see the promise of the place though, definitely going back there in a few months when the gardens have got going properly. As it was, the main attractions were the livestock, of which there was plenty.
They have a peacock there.
.. and a turkey…
.. and some rabbits.
If you’ve got kids and are looking for somewhere to take them and tire them out, I can recommend the place. After all, that’s how we found it a few years back. And with Humber Bridge tolls down a bit now, going south of the river for a trip out is looking a lot more affordable.
After a few days of early rises, what better way to spend a weekend than getting up at 5:45 to catch a train, a bus, a train, the tube and the Dockland Light Railway (DLR) to go to Greenwich.
Glad I went though. Lovely place. As well as the Cutty Sark they also have the Royal Observatory and of course the meridian. The weather was as kind to us as we could have hoped for, in other words it didn’t rain, and there was even a rather nice show in the planetarium.
I don’t think that Castle Howard is really a castle. But it is a great place to go and see. It is a country residence on a grand scale, the kind of thing it takes several generations of “unbelievably richness” to come up with. We’ve visited it on and off over many years and once saw Bryan Ferry play live there. That was a good night, that was. It is also famous as the place where “Brideshead Revisited” was filmed. Twice.
Today we went for another visit, and I took the big camera along. We also did something we never normally did when we took the kids. We paid extra to have a look inside the house itself.
This kind of puts our hall to shame….
This is what they have instead of a garden shed.
They seem to have lots of flat screen TVs, but they are all stuck on one picture…
If you are looking for a nice day trip (around 75 minutes from Hull) I can strongly recommend it.
We were lucky enough to snag some tickets to the last day of competition in the London 2012 Paralympics. Of course I took the cameras…..
Heading into the stadium.
The stadium is a very impressive piece of engineering
Especially from the inside.
Well, does he clear the bar or not?
Going for the win.
This is Oscar Pistorius (I wonder if he is any relation to our VC – Calie Pistorius?) winning in the very last stadium event of London 2012, by a pretty impressive margin.
Heading home.
Not much to say today, but we did get some nice pictures
Got some holiday coming up? Fancy somewhere really nice? Go to the Isle of Man.
Never been there before, but I’ve been missing out. It has scenery that will give Yorkshire a good run for its money (which is saying something) and a fantastic coastline. It gives you the feel of being abroad (different money) without the hassle of being abroad (english money works fine too). We got to spend some time today exploring the island. The Isle of Man is a bit too near UK to be guaranteed good weather, but we found a good bit and headed for it. As you can see above, I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This gives the pictures a bit more impact. Sometimes this means they look a bit more like they did when you took them. Other times it means that you can go for artistic effects like these.
I’m using Photomatix Pro to combine three images taken at different exposures. The program has a bunch of pre-set configurations which can be tweaked to get some very nice effects. And the good news is that the forecast is even better for tomorrow.
We went to the Bristol Balloon Festival today. It was probably advertised as “An Event for all the Family”, because all the families in Bristol seemed to have the same idea. My goodness it was busy. We had a bit of a queue to get into the car park, and then a bit of a trek to the balloon launching area. We’d heard on the way that, because of high winds, there was not going to actually be a balloon launch, but we’d already spent such a long time queuing at that point that we thought we’d stick with it and see what there was there.
The weather was great, we did get a glimpse of a balloon (see above) and it was a great evening.
We were lucky enough to snag some tickets for the tennis at the Olympics. This was held at Wimbledon, somewhere I’ve always fancied going to. So off we went. The trip across London was actually quite boring. After a media filled with dire warnings of travel chaos it was rather nice to just get on a sequence of trains and get there exactly on time.
The first match we saw was a ladies singles first round match and then we moved on to the highlight of the day for me, a second round match with Roger Federer.
Then, after a third match we headed for home.
There has been a lot of nattering about how London will have problems staging the Olympics and how the organisation and the infrastructure will not cope. This is rubbish. All the stops on the Tube were well highlighted and the trains were busy but very tolerable. They had folks lining the route from the station to the venue. The security check just took a few minutes and very person we saw, from the first chap at the traffic lights on the walk to Wimbledon to the cashier taking our money in the well organised souvenir shop, was polite and upbeat, asking if we had a good time and wishing us well. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. With a bit of luck we’ll make it to some Paralympics events in September too.
Today we flew home. But because the flight was not until the afternoon we had time to sample the Melbourne Europa Tower Skydeck , which has “the highest viewing platform in the Southern Hemisphere”. This gave some very good views, as shown above. 
It also had WiFi, so I could download some more Kindle books for the journey back..
Next we got to sit in an aluminium tube for 23 hours…..
This is in one of the Melbourne shopping centres, you get this view if you eat at Nandos, which worked for me. After lunch I dragged number one wife all across town and down to an industrial estate for some pinball action. I’d seen an advert for a place called Bumper Action that said they had lots of machines for sale.
The advert didn’t lie. They had loads. all on free play.
..including the best machine ever, on the left. No idea who the bloke is.
They also sold spares, and I was able to buy a replacement set of electronics for the clock on my TZ machine. If you are ever in Melbourne you should check them out. They have loads of juke boxes and some arcade games too. Lovely place, run by folks who really care about the important business of shooting small metal balls around a wooden playfield….
Once we had made our way back to town we headed off to the Imax to see the latest Batman movie. All I can say is wow. I reckon it was really, really, good. Spiderman last week was OK, but this film shows how it should be done. I was a bit worried that, at well over two hours, the film might drag a bit in the middle. But it didn’t. A fitting end to perhaps the best superhero trilogy that we have seen.
Thought we’d get out of town for the day. So we went for a ride on Puffing Billy, which is apparently Australia’s favourite steam train. This is not Puffing Billy by the way, this is how we got to it. Essentially we took a train ride to take a train ride, which made perfect sense at the time.
This is Belgrave, where the train starts from. They seem to have some really cool cars there apparently. 
This is Puffing Billy (or at least one of them)
Levers and pipes
Heading home.
It was great fun.I love the smell of a hot steam engine.
When we got back I had another go at capturing the view from our room.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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