Floody Hell whats going on here?, Bust water main on London Road, Derby.

This was the scene on the morning of Friday 31st July 2009 at the end of London Road where it meets up with the bottom of Bradshaw Way and Traffic Street.
The water was emerging from the ground over a large area, several fountains. It was even comming out of the base of the traffic bollards and the traffic light control Iron cover. Most of the water was comming out of the tarmac near the lights as you can see at 0:15



There was so much water that all the drains were blocked and the water was going all the way down London Road and then down Liversage Road (See 2:25 ), Carrington Street and starting to go up Trinity Street. I left at that point as I don't have a boat and can't swim!

did not have my HD video camera with me so unfortunately the quality is not great as it was done with my old Olympus 5050 camera.

Face off - Derby Cathedral clock faces get a makeover

My photograph here show one of the two clock faces on Derby Cathedral as of 7.15am today.
The clock faces are undergoing a £13,000 revamp, the last renovation was back in 1964.
Both faces had been hand-painted last week and then the gold-leafing of the Roman numeral figures was being done but because of the extreamly poor weather (bucket loads of rain!) it had ruined the finish so they have had to start the task again.
Thats why the clock face looks like this.

The clock is being renovated by Smith of Derby, who also renovated the clock at St Pancras station.

Smiths contacted me a few weeks ago to ask if I had any old photographs of the clock face before the previous restoration as it was believed that the clock faces used to be blue. Unfortunately there are not many photographs in full colour from that era.

Derby Cathedral is part of the Cathedral Quarter.

My photographs in the Cathedral.

Photographs from a Tower Open Day.

Isn’t modern technology amazing – iPod wifi blogging

I grew up in the age of the ZX Spectrum computer, At school we had Commodore Pets and then at college it was BBC Micros, so in this day an age where technology is everywhere it amazes me at how far we have come over the last few years.

For example here I am in a car park near Friar Gate Studios, Derby using a iPod Touch and I am able to surf the internet.

I posted this message using an App called BlogPress which you can buy through the App Store on your Ipod.

The screen here shows an app on the iPod Touch called WifiTrak, Which costs 59p ! This is much better than the wifi settings panel that you find in Settings – Wi-Fi on the iPod Touch. The WifiTrak app can be set to Scan for wifi connections every n seconds and displays all connections using nice coloured icons that show you extra details such as open connections or ones that are open but auto-redirecting connections such as ones to The cloud.

I found while in London that the Maps app on the iPod works ok if you connect to a Cloud connection even if you don’t have an account with them. I guess this is because the app is not a web browser making http requests. So this is quite useful if you need a map but only have a Cloud connection available.

There are lots of unsecured wi-fi connections out there, its only when you have WifiTrak running on an iTouch that you appreciate just how many people have wi-fi connections. On some streets in Derby the iPod screen fills up with a list so long that you have to do a lot of scrolling to see them all !

The connection I used to post this blog was a 5Mb connection, I know that because I ran an app called Speed Test, again available from the App Store for FREE.

Note I don’t have the iPod Touch phone, it’s just a iPod touch so unfortunately I don’t have the option to surf the internet via a 3G connection so I always have to look for a wi-fi connection.


-- Posted From My iTouch

Auto-shutdown of Windows when you want.

I found a very useful bit of free software recently that I have used several times.
I don't like to leave my pc on all the time but often need to render large video files in Sony Vegas that may take a few hours, this ties up my pc for a long time so I wanted a way of leaving the pc on, with a way of getting it to turn off at a given time in a nice controlled manner (i.e. Not a mains switch timer!).
I have also used this utility when leaving my pc to upload a large video to YouTube, works perfectly.

After trying several programs I found one thats very easy and it works.

Visit the shutdownmypc website
As you can see its only 589 KB, it works on Windows XP SP3.
When you click the download link the file is actually 1.81Mb, run this and it self extracts two programs, just delete the repair-pro-setup.exe program. Run the manageshutdown.exe to install it.
(Passes Norton Antivirus, AVG8, Spysweeper, Ad-aware.)

It can actually do lots of different things from the action menu but I only use the shutdown option. If you click the Force Action box then it will kill any apps that have crashed too before shutting down.

If using this to shutdown Sony Vegas, make sure you have saved the project and also ticked the "close this box when done" option in the render panel.

Drive around Derby inner ring road before it all changes!

Here is a recent video I made of driving around the uncompleted Derby inner ring road.
The missing bit is currently being finished off as I'm sure you know if you use Abbey Street and Ford Street and go any where near the top of Babington Lane.



If you join youtube (its free and easy) then you will be able to leave comments about the video.

My very first blog post.

Hello and welcome to my new blog, I've not tried this before so its all a bit new to me.
What I like about this is the fact that you can post updates and bits of information about what I am doing on my derbyphotos website at any time any where in the world.
Normally I would have to use Dreamweaver and and ftp client to add such things to my website.

So we will see how this goes.
Thanks
Andy