web analytics

First real snow 2010 Winter is here!!!!

Today I awoke to look out of the window to see that there was a light coverning of snow. This was forcast so this was not a surprise 😉 However, it seems that this signals the start of winter. Last year, first snow came around the middle of December last year and then it lasted for some months! Last years snow arrival coincided with the start of my garage building project – which was unfortunate. You can see some of those conditions by looking back in my blog posts for the period December 2009 – March 2010. click here to see some photos of last years snow!

Meego Conference 2010

I am attending the Meego conference which is taking place at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. This is my first experience of atteding an opensource event. The attendance is amazing – approximately 1000 people attending. Most of these people are software developers. I hope to learn a lot about the Meego platform over the next couple of days. I will be posting more are the conference proceeds.

So far day 1 has been very interesting I have sat through two very interesting technical sessions
the first was about Banshee which is an application very much like iTunes but supporting other platforms and operating systems. It will also support Syncing of iPhone devices.

The second session was about location networking. Basically Meego has a built in capability to use location information and give the user a view of those people in their social network are physicall near by. It does seems that this it is early days as yet but this is very interesting and particularly that the Meego developers are in the process of working this into the OS.

It seems that Meego will work on a whole range of devices including TV’s and in car entertainment devices. So there is a great deal going on in this space which certainly needs to be watched.

Old friends – 2010

First Saturday of November 2010 – this is the time when we have a reunion meal involving a group of people who originally became friends in the 60/70’s back in the “Broch” ( Fraserburgh in the north east of Scotland ). As the years have past we have all developed our own lives, had families and careers etc. but this reunion event gives us all an opportunity come togather annually and catch up on news and developments of the previous 12 months.

I reflected at the dinner table that we do not seem to be looking any older as a group! In reality we are of course older, but with age comes experience too – so I hope that we are now also much wiser than we were back in the early days. It always engourages me how we are able to refect on so many good times! As a group we have had so many “good times” and it is remarkable to see how our friendship has lasted so many years. This has not been to the exclusion of developing new friendship of course 😉

There are also less happy things to recall of course – this is life ;-( .

Never far from my mind are the members of this group who are not able to present for one reason or another! For those who are otherwise detained I look forward to seeing them next year – for those who have “gone on before” we look forward to a much greater reunion when we all meet our Lord and Saviour!

It seems to me that friends are priceless and we should cherish these relationships and continue to hold on to them as time passes. Life will certainly consist of focus shifts as we move from one context to another but there are certain things which are consistent – I consider this group to be an example of this and I think for that reason we should continue our regular meetings.

Here are couple of photos of the group after the meal this year.



I have also provided an album of additional photos through facebook click the following link to view if you have a facebook account ( you need to be my friend if facebook to have access rights to see this album )

http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=244866&id=627696038

I did write a post about this group when we met back in 2007 – you can read about this here http://ruachonline.blogspot.com/2007/11/reunion-november-2007.html

Autumn Colours – Kemnay

Just wanted to share a couple of very nice photos from Kemnay in Scotland. The trees colours around here are simple spectacular at the moment. We have had little wind since the trees started to change so the display this year is excellent!

First an evening shot taken just as the sun was setting. This taken on Saturday evening before we changed back to GMT!

The following picture taken from my study window shows the same tree as in the previous photo but with the autumn sun shinning on it. I have posted photos of this tree in previous year too. It is ofter one of the first to change colour.