Great Ayton

I took this picture at Great Ayton shortly before I took the one of Roseberry Topping. It was a really nice day to be in the countryside. I often find it really difficult to believe that places like this are on my doorstep. Stockton is such a different place. I honestly can't wait to escape living in urban areas and I will be living somewhere like this as soon as I can afford it.

Roseberry Topping

My parents visited me this weekend and we had a very pleasant afternoon visiting some very pretty North Yorkshire towns leaving me feel all the more discontented in Stockton!

Roseberry topping dominates the skyline on Teesside, clearly identifiable amongst the Cleveland hills by it's distinctive summit. This photo was taken from the National Trust car park near the bottom of the mountain. I aim to climb it before Christmas but I've been saying that all the time I've lived on Teesside so I'm not optimistic I will make that aim.

Cathedral Notre Dame

The park at the back of the Cathedral Notre Dame is my favourite part of Paris. The park itself is beautifully manicured, with the stunning back drop added to the scene it can't get much better. Just to the right of where this photo was taken there is a chap selling excellent crepes! Well worth a visit when in the city.

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My New Vista

Nope nothing to do with the new Windows operating system. This is the view from my new bedroom. Not all that exciting, but nicer than some. Plenty of trees, which I like.

The reason for this new view is my new job. I am the Assistant School Administrator for the Open University summer residential school in Durham. Basically, I help run the place, along with several other people in similar positions. So far the job has been great. Working alongside some great people, all from Durham/Newcastle Uni (except my boss who works for the OU but is equally cool) which helps things immensely. On my first night went out for some drinks (and eventually some dancing) and got quite drunk which was a lot of fun.

It's a bit strange being in a Durham college. I'm used to being a Stocktonite and this is a real eye opener. Not surprisingly life here is far better (even outside term time), which is disappointing in the long run.

Anyway, more posts to come from me with hopefully some nice pictures of Durham.

My bedroom (van mildert college)

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Recent Reading and Grand Central

The image is of the Atrium of Grand Central Terminal, New York. The massive flag was put in place shortly after 9/11 and has remained in place since. Quite an impressive sight. There is another flag in the building shown in a nice picture by the NY Daily Blogger.



In other news...



Paul McCartney has created an iTunes advert. I quite like it to be honest. Nice and colourful. Song is pretty good too.



A group of students have proved what we all knew to be true, an then some. Food is still safe to eat after you have dropped it, so long as it's less than 30 seconds - even for wet food!



In a story by the Consumerist blog, a Dell employee has spilled the beans on their tactics. I ignored the story until I noticed this afternoon that Dell have sent a take down request. It was then nice and clear that there is something worth looking at.



The part that interested me most was that if you go on the Small Business section of their website you get better deals than Home. Sure enough, you can get the Inspiron 6400 from the home site for £429 with Vista home and a 80gig HD. On the Small Business site, the same laptop, with a 120gig HD and Vista Business is only £399. Crazy!







Technorati Tags: dell, new york, grand central, consumerist, itunes, food

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Stockton Town Hall

Stockton Town Hall is located in the centre of the High Street (which incidentally is the widest in England). The bulding isn't overly impressive, and not a patch on South Shields Town Hall (which I will upload tomorrow).



Been a day of good news. Most of my medic friends have passed this academic year and Kieran was elected to VP of the JCR. Well Done! 

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The Lakes

Camping in the Lake District may not be the most glamorous of holidays, but I love it. The fresh air and the peace and quiet of the mountains. Nothing quite like it.



The picture above was taken about 5 yards from my tent in Keswick. The view is Derwentwater showing Cat Bells.

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Safari on Windows

I'm posting this from Safari on Windows. 

My first impressions are mixed. The speed is defianatly faster and the look of the general interface is as sleek as would be expected from Apple. 

However, there are two big flaws for me. The biggest problem is the fonts. The font's aren't even close to standard windows fonts, let alone what you get when you enable cleartype (or use IE7). Fonts have always been the biggest issue for me with linux, and is still the reason I don't use it more. Without nice basic fonts, web browsing is a pain!

The second problem is the lack of extensions. I use several extensions in Firefox, mainly adblock and scribefire. Without them it isn't really going to change my browsing habits.

A third and minor flaw is the lack of a spell checker. I'm used to the one you get on Firefox.

Still nice to try something new and I applaude Apple's inititive. I'd like to see the mozilla developers take note and speed up Firefox.

To give it a try go to http://apple.com/safari

Darlington Market Hall

I work in Darlington and on the walk from the train station to the office I pass this impressive work or architecture. The town clock was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who is best known for the Natural History Museum in London.

Whitehall

The view down Whitehall at noon on my recent trip to London. Looking at all the bustle around on this picture reminds me why I could never live in London.

Cool Graffiti

I've still not got the internet at home so I am unable to upload any new pictures leaving me with a choice of New York, New York or New York.

This wonderful example of graffiti really impressed me. The park in Downtown Manhattan would be very dull was it not for this lively work of art adding much needed colour.

NY Street

This picture illustrates the sheer scale of New York to me. The picture was taken on 57th street (I think) during 2006. I hope to return there sometime this year.

I haven't posted in a week or so because BT are crap. It's also come to my attention that people are reading this through Facebook. I added the import ages ago and I always forget that these things show up in the news feed. I really need to watch what I say.

Skiddaw

Just read an eye opening story on the BBC website which is from the Whistle Blower series. Reading it was an unusual experience. I'd never though that supermarkets would be that reckless when it comes to handling meat but at the same time every part of the story fits the way these big companies work.



The stores are managed by store managers who have a massive degree of autonomy and have one goal - meet the targets. It's very easy to see how they would be willing to look the other way if it means targets are met. Supermarkets also have an unfair legal advantage. If I ever got food poisoning I would not be likley to sue a supermarket beacuse my chances of winning are poor.



One part of the story rang most true:

Now, Tesco are proud of their training, but when I was tested I was simply handed the answers I needed and told to input them on a separate sheet.

While working at a similar organisation at Christmas I was handed the answers to the computer quiz just to speed up the process. To be honest I was more than happy to cheat because the quiz was badly designed and I could work out most of the answers regardless, but if someone who wasn't as bright were to do the same thing they may miss something important.



The photo is of Skiddaw from Keswick Rugby Ground.

London Morning (6)

After a long time on the Underground we ended up in the lovely suburb of Loughton. The campsite advertised itself as central (since updated). Well it took us near an hour to get there on the tube and then another hour and a half to get to the site.



When we finally arrived the friendly site owner was most accommodating and asked us why we didn't take the shortcut. The shortcut was less than obvious, basically it consisted of walking for 30 minutes through some bull filled fields and quite dense forests. Even when we knew the way we came very close to getting lost. Here is a short video of the trek.



The whole point of our trip to London was to see Live 8, which was really good though the atmosphere wasn't as good as I'd expected. More pictures of that coming in the next few days.



I've really started to get into Windows Live Maps over google maps. I'm a big google man but it's satellite coverage is far worse. Also the collections feature in WLM is really cool. I used it to show the short cut in this post. Here is a summary of our walking route in London.

London Morning (5)

This is the last of the central London Morning pictures. In the next post I will show where we were actually staying. Central it was not!

London Morning (4)

From Trafalgar Square it was down the Mall and a walk through St. James' Park. It really was a stunning morning. If we had known what the rest of the day held in store I think we would have thought twice about the whistle-stop tour of the sites.

London Morning (3)

11 Minutes away from Whitehall I took this shot. While perhaps not the greatest photo ever, the sparsity of Trafalgar Square in July illustrates the hour of the day.

London Morning (2)

The next step of the route through London took us up Whitehall. Picasa tells me I took this one at 7:31am a whole 9 minutes after the one of Big Ben. More of the route still to come.



Another exam this afternoon. Not looking forward to this one but once it's over I'm 90% done.

I Went Down To The River...

...and of the river i took a photo. This was taken on my D900 on the way back from my exam on Monday. Was a really clear day. Actually makes Stockton look bearable...well almost.

London Morning

This shot was taken at 7:23 in the morning shortly after stepping off a very long bus journey to London that left Newcastle at 11pm the night before. On that morning myself and my good travel buddy took in a whistle stop tour of many of the main sights. Will post more pictures from the morning in the next few days.



Second exam over today. Thats two down two to go!



A few other interesting posts today from the South Shields blog man and a really good idea spotted by the London blog man.