It’s not immediately after the DSEi but it is after. So here is the story of yesterday:
Arriving on the docklands light railway to the ExCeL exibition I was surrounded by serious looking people in suits. As we got off the train, a passenger on the train at the platform opposite shouted ‘YOUR WORK IS DEATH’ just as the doors on his carrige closed. There was an incredible police and security presence and that was all I saw of protesters all day. In the queue to go through the four levels of security checks, there was a banner advertising sniper bullets. It had a picture of a beer mat that had been shot four times at a distance of 1.2km. Seems the protester on the train was right!
So I wandered round the excibition for the rest of the day, checking out the competition and looking at pistols, knives, sub-machine guns, mortars, grenades, millitary swords, sniper rifles, cruise missiles, remote controlled mounted machine guns, all kinds of vehicles and many other weapons. Death certainly was the order of the day. There was some very cool communication and intergration technology on display too, which I really enjoyed looking at. I also got to heaft a sub-machine gun on the Heckler and Kosh stand, it was heavier that I was expecting!

The people there were almost as interesting as the stands, millitary looking people from all areas, Pakistan, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, to name but a few. People in uniforms too, navy, army, police and ambulance. All in all it was a combination of very cool and slightly scary.

The food wasn’t great either.

Today I am going to DSEi which is a defense exhibition in London.
That’s defense as in military not as in self.

Anyway, I’ve got mixed feelings about it, on the one had I’ll be excited to see all the technology and to see where my company fits in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand I’m slightly nervous because there will be people protesting the event.
I’ve checked the protesters plans and they are peaceful, which is good. Personally I don’t think they could be anything but really, if you’re protesting agains violence and war then any violence on your part completely destroys your point. Ironically I completely agree with the protesters, the arms trade seem to be a bad idea most of the time.
Anyway, I’m hoping that I’ll see nothing of it, seeing as their plans are to chain themselves to the carriges of the underground (inside of course). Given the terrorist bombings of not so long ago, I can’t really see the police allowing people to hang around on the tube chained up for ages.

Well we’ll see, I’ll let you know how it went when I get back.

Films have many amazing effects these days, but there are two (as of today) that are causing me concern.
The first one is people falling down the stairs. Now I’m lucky enough to have never actually fallen down the stairs myself, I don’t know anyone that has and I’ve never even been told first hand of someone that has. So my problem is: how dangerous is falling down the stairs???
The movie portrayal of it can vary wildly from being a bit of a cheap laugh to instant death. This bothers me, and has done for some time, but has never stuck me as being enough to warrent a post all of its own. Which of course brings me to…

The second, this is nose bleeds. Not the protrayal in this case, but the exection. How do they actually do it! There stands actor/actress (obviously they can be sitting or lying too), and then, a small trickle of ‘blood’ comes out of their nose. I can quite easily imagine that in some cases this effect is acheived by doing a close-up of a fake nose and then everything becomes easy. The thing that bothers me is when it’s not a close-up, I really can’t imagine that the actor/actress has tubing going up their nose. Do they just get some fake blood up their nose somehow and then quickly yell ‘action’ before it starts to dribble out again? Do the method actors go to the extreme of getting high blood pressure and taking up heroine to weaken the inner walls of their nose sufficiently so that they can have a nose blood ‘on cue’?
No, the problem is flummoxing me to the extreme and the more I think about it, the more I want to delve into the problem.
If you know how these are done, please sate my curiousity before I get angsty.

Do you have celulite, unsightly flab, feel like you should go to the gym more often (or even at all)? Hoping for a miracle cure? That magical cream that will do what that advert promises?

STOP

Thanks to recent advancements in technology you don’t have to do anything, simply use…

PHOTOSHOP!

Now every picture will look ten years younger, flatter stomach, fuller breasts, rounder buttocks, LOOSE THOSE WRINKLES!!

All this is possible with…

PHOTOSHOP!
*ding* (cheesy smile)

I have had, in my time, some pretty good ideas. At least in my opinion. Now seeing as I don’t have the drive or the inclination to actually follow them through.

So the idea is to release the ideas into the world in the hope that perhaps someone else will make use or take inspiration from these thoughts.

Looking at the ‘dashboard’ for my blog here, the number of comments I have is over double the number of posts I’ve written. While this does include comments that I’ve written this does make me feel that this blog, that started life as a random experiment, is successful.

Admittedly I don’t know the comment to post ratio of other blogs, if anyone does and wants to share, please do, I’d be very interested.

It wasn’t long ago that I was thinking that I’d like more to do at work. Just idle thoughts, thinking that with more to do I’d be less likely to get distracted. Probably more of an excuse to myself for every time that I found myself staring out the window thinking about photography. Needless to say I didn’t tell anyone about this un-natural urge to get more work.
Strangely though, by some mystical act of karma, it was only about a week later that I got more work to do, then more, then even more…

Now I’m in charge of writing the documentation, writing the software, and writing the hardware for the current project I’m on. If the idea of writing hardware confuses you then just be glad that I didn’t drop the acronym VHDL into the post! Then you would probably have to nod and smile, pretending that those letters actually mean something to you. You may perhaps start wondering why technical professions use acronyms so much and whether you can think so something amusing that VHDL might mean. It’s entirely possible that you’d have got as far as ‘Very Dangerous’ when you quickly tune back into my words to find that AHDL and RAM have also cropped up. At this point you will probably find it all too much, make some vauge excuse about a dog and leave. Quickly.
Believe me I’ve seen it happen, and that’s why I’m always a bit vauge about my job when someone asks me what I do for a living.

…It’s not that I’m complaining about having more work, in fact getting extra responsibility was one of the prominent reasons for getting a new job! That and finding a job where I actually understand what’s going on and don’t have to ask for help every day.
It’s just come as a bit of a shock!