Category: flickr

High

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Remember how I lamented not dragging my sorry ass out of bed last weekend? This weekend, I put all that right by dragging it (and the kids) down to Wynberg School field and taking the drone higher than I’d ever taken it before. 121 metres up in fact. That’s according the the flight log, which is part of the software that limits the drone to the 120 metres legal ceiling, so you do the maths.

It’s all rather academic anyway. While I launched from the flat field, I was sitting in the shade at the top of the steep bank (you can see me, at about 10 o’clock, actually), a good 5m up already.

I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t endangering anything or anyone.

The photo includes the kids, waving madly at a dot in the sky from the Jacques Kallis Oval, which as any fule kan see, are distinctly square.

My confidence in my ability, together with my knowledge of what Florence the drone can do, is growing all the time. It can’t be long now before I run out of excuses for taking kak photos with this amazing machine.

Keyboard

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With apologies to William Shakespeare:

Is this a keyboard which I see before me, the… er… the keys toward my hand? Come, let me type upon thee. I have thee not (actually, I do have thee), and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? (as I said, you are) or art thou but a keyboard of the mind, a false creation?

No. No, it’s definitely here. Though the radio signal from thee seems rather faint. Maybe that’s the source of the problems here. Perchance new batteries are required.

It’s nice to be typing a blog post entry on a computer for the first time in a few weeks. Sure, you can write blog posts from your phone, but the keyboard is small, the screen is minimal, the interface isn’t great and autocarrot plays havoc with your spelling. None of those issues here.

But no, very definitely back in Cape Town and with several or more tasks to catch up on before heading back to the lab tomorrow (where I am sure there will be even more tasks), at least I am now sitting in front of a real computer and typing on real keys, rather than pixels.

The reason I’m sitting here is because I’ve been uploading a few photos onto Flickr. And I mean a few. I mentioned somewhere on here that I had done very little photography over the summer break, but even I was surprised at just how little. The weather wasn’t conducive to any night time shooting – either because of clouds or the high winds – and when it was, there was a lot of light pollution around because of the tourists flocking into Cape Agulhas. And during the day, I’m happy to report that we spent a good deal of time chilling out, dozing and reading, rather than braving the heat of the day and getting some photos taken.

I see no problem with this approach to holidays.

Anyway, those images that were taken (all few of them) can be found here.

The Groot Upload

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I extracted the SD card from the camera to upload the photos from this weekend’s Cape Town 7s experience and was immediately confronted by all (or more) of the photos I took last weekend. These hadn’t been uploaded because the intervening 7 days were chaotically busy.

So, I sorted that, and you can see the results here.

From there, it was a fairly straightforward leap to yesterday’s amazing day out at the stadium. My photos are here.

Obviously, I don’t know what sort of show the Dubai or Edinburgh or Nuuk (?) 7s put on, but I have to say that what Cape Town does seems to be very well received by all those involved. (Although of course they’re hardly likely to turn around and slag the place off in these days of mutual ego massaging.) The atmosphere was amazing, the entertainment was superb, the rugby was absorbing and even the final was balanced upon a knife-edge right up to the final kick. This being my kids first 7s experience, it was always going to be that way – never forget Alex’s first footy match was a 7-0, and their first cricket match finished with an incredible SA win off the last ball after a missed run out opportunity.

This time around, England were the beneficiaries of the last minute miss, and really the only disappointment of the day was how few people stayed around to see the trophy presentation. ‘Bad losers’ might be a bit harsh, but after the phenomenal support and sporting reception given to all the teams throughout the day, that extra 10 minutes would have made a big difference, especially given just how tight that last game was. Sadly, all the photos of England’s presentation and celebration are against a backdrop of empty seats. That’s not how it was for the previous 9 hours, nor how it should have been for the last ten minutes.

As Tom Mitchell stepped up to take this second half conversion right in front of us, I remarked on how important it was going to be, and so it proved, being the 2 point difference between the teams at the end.

Road Trip pics

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As Gwede “Uncle Gweezy” Mantashe confirms that there are no plans for the ANC to recall President Jacob Zuma and the Rand responds with a now customary gravity-inspired trip downwards, I’m still enjoying the memory of a great trip back from Agulhas yesterday.

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Not the quickest journey back. In fact, at 8½ hours, definitely the longest. But definitely one of the most interesting too. Dirt roads, ostriches, tortoises, places that Google Maps hasn’t even heard of, two lighthouses (one of which we got all to ourselves) and some uitstekende scenery.

There are photos, obviously – I’ve put them in with all the weekend stuff here. But all in all, it was just great spending some time with my Dad and having the chance to see a few places that we didn’t even know we’d be passing.

Did I mention that we had a whole lighthouse to ourselves as well?