News Archive

Friday December 21st, 2001

I had the pleasure of visiting the National Star Centre for the first time yesterday, to attend the opening of their new Karten CTEC (Computer-aided Training, Education & Communication) Centre. Cool place... Was really good to meet up with people from the trek again - hi guys! Everyone was really encouraging about this site, and a few more people have offered to send me photos: bring them on, people! All welcome!

Apart from that, there's not much news. I'm on holiday from now until the 2nd of January, so no updates until then - sorry!

Thus, I'll just wish you all a Merry Christmas, and all the best for the New Year, and many thanks for looking at this site! :-)

Thursday December 13th, 2001

Still not much happening round here - sorry! I need to spend some time revamping the system I wrote for managing and uploading the photos. It does a lot of work offline (eg ensuring none of the images are too large, building the index pages, etc.), and because I knocked it together as quickly as possible, just to get up and running, it's not very efficient: it goes through all the photos, so the more I add, the longer it takes. Ack.

Thus, I need to spend some time making it more intelligent about the work it does, so it's quicker and more efficient. Until I do that, no more photos, I think. Soon, my friends. Soon...

Monday December 10th, 2001

Apologies for lack of activity/progress over the last week... I went down with something virulent and didn't really feel like doing anything - but I'm feeling better now so hopefully things will start moving again. I started writing up my diary last night, but haven't got very far, so there's nothing to see yet. Anyway, hi. :-)

Monday December 3rd, 2001

Still recovering from the weekend - an excellent time, brilliant to see people again, hope we do it again soon. Sorry I forgot to give you your birthday card, Laura... More trek pictures tomorrow, hopefully.

Friday November 30th, 2001

I've uploaded another film: Barracks & first morning's walk, but haven't had time to write descriptions yet. Sorry, it's been a busy day! :-)

Some of us are getting together in Cheltenham tomorrow evening to get drunk and nostalgic - really looking forward to it! Oh yes, and happy birthday Laura!!!

Thursday November 29th, 2001

I received a request for the medieval costume tips which used to be on this site, in the now-defunct banquet section. Always one to listen to my public, I've made them available here. :-)

Thursday November 29th, 2001

I've uploaded another film: Mutianyu section (and a few at Jinshanling that morning).

I've uploaded another film: aerial photographs (and a bit of Cardiff graffiti for good measure). Enjoy! I've also added another picture to the Simatai black & whites - I didn't think it was worth including previously, but last night Malc rotated it by 270 degrees and all of a sudden I liked it a lot more. :-)

Wednesday November 28th, 2001

One thing I've been slightly disappointed about, with regard to my photos, is that quite a few seem to have bits chopped off the left hand side (or bottom if they're portraits). A good example is the chain bridge at Simatai - notice the sign at the bottom? Well, there's no way I'd have deliberately framed it like that - I'm sure I'd have included the whole sign in the shot. Furthermore, this isn't the only example - there are quite a few on other films, which had me quite worried. The point of a "single-lens reflex" camera such as mine is that what you see is what you get. OK, so there's some room for error, but I was starting to think that my camera must be chopping off a good deal more than I'd previously thought, and that I'd have to compensate for this in the future, which was vexing - and why had I never noticed it before?

Now, I've got my pictures as both 7"x5" prints and CD-ROMs of JPEGs, and I'm using the latter to populate this site. Last night, as I was looking through the prints, I noticed that they didn't match the CD-ROM images. In fact, they were worse: in the printed version of the chain bridge photo, almost the whole sign was missing, and on the printed version of this shot the watchtower on the left-hand side is cut in half.

So I had a look at the negatives, and to my surpise and relief, they're perfectly framed - the chain link bridge sign is intact, the watchtower is intact, and other "chopped" pictures are also composed the way I wanted them. This is good news because it means I took the pictures I wanted to, and I can get reprints/enlargements OK - but it's bad news because it means the lab I used to process my pictures didn't take much care to ensure that what was on the negs was accurately reproduced on paper or CD-ROM... So I may have to complain, and I'll definitely have to find another lab.

Tuesday November 27th, 2001

I've added a link to www.wildwall.com, one of William Lindesay's sites, to the sidebar. There's another site which I thought was www.friendsofthegreatwall.com but that doesn't seem to work... Any ideas, anyone?

Interesting link from that site: www.gomongolia.com. I've always fancied Mongolia - aerial views here - and as a bit of a horserider, a holiday riding in Mongolia sounds absolutely fantastic.

Tuesday November 27th, 2001

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone from the trek who's emailed me - you guys are great... *sob* etc. :-)

I've put the best of my "evening" photos (taken with throwaway cameras rather than my A-1) online - you can see them here and here.

Monday November 26th, 2001

The first of my films is online: Simatai to Jinshanling, black & white. I've also added proper titles and descriptions to the photo index pages, and I've added copyright declarations to photo viewer and index pages. More photos tomorrow, I hope!

Sunday November 25th, 2001

I picked up my photos earlier today - all twelve films. Wow, that's a lot. As I expected, a hell of a lot are mediocre or simply throwaway, but I think there are enough good ones to make me happy, and just a few I really love. I'll sort the wheat from the chaff over the next week or so and put them up here - but for now, you're going to have to content yourselves with just one of my favourites: a portrait of Louisa.

Thursday November 22nd, 2001

Realised something else I want to do with the photo pages: the way it's going at the moment, I'll have lots of folders of photos, probably one per film plus some others (eg Steve's photos in a folder of their own). Now, that's all well and good, but it'd be cool if you could also browse them by topic - so we'd have, for instance, "Mutianyu", "people", "dinner", "Beijing", etc. I pretty much know how to make this happen, but it's going to be fairly complicated and I don't have the time right now, which is frustrating - so I'm writing this to remind me to do it when I do have time. Stay tuned.

Wednesday November 21st, 2001

OK, I'm pretty happy with both the photo index pages (example) and the individual photo viewer pages (example) - if anyone has any comments about how these look (especially on smaller monitors), please let me know. :-)

I guess the next thing to think about is the diary...

Tuesday November 20th, 2001

Lots of progress on the photo front. The photo viewer is up running (example), and the indexing system's nearly there (example) but this is still a work-in-progress so expect changes.

All feedback on this stuff appreciated. :-)

Monday November 19th, 2001

I put my photos in for processing yesterday - a mere £108 - ouch! Would have been cheaper but I wanted 5" x 7" prints and a CD for each film, so them's the breaks. Just gotta grin and bear it, I guess. I should get them back next Sunday, so maybe this time next week I'll be starting to get some of my photos up on the site.

In the meantime, I'm writing a system for managing the photos and getting them online with comments, etc. (can't do it by hand, there'll just be too many to maintain), and the excellent Mr Steve Church has sent me some of his photos, which I'm using as guinea-pigs for the process. There's nothing really in place yet but stay tuned for much flashiness.

I've written code which automatically goes through all the photos I've got, optimizes them, creates thumbnail versions, and uploads them to the site. At present it's only doing this with Steve's images but once I get some more (eg mine), it'll handle them without any more work on my part. Groovy.

The next things to do are an image viewer (which includes comments, etc.) and an index viewer (with the thumbnails in it), so people can actually see them!

Thursday November 15th, 2001

I'll be majorly revamping the site soon, and in particular, putting the best of my photos up, and writing up my trek diary. It's going to take a while though, so please bear with me. If you'd be interested in receiving updates when the site changes, email me at gimbo@ftech.net and I'll make it happen. Otherwise just keep an eye on this page.

In the meantime, I'd just to thank everyone who helped make the trek happen, and everyone who trekked with me. You're all fantastic people.

OK, first part of site revamp is now complete: I've replaced the old nasty frames-based layout with something more complicated to set up, but nicer to browse, at least that's what I hope. I've also removed some of the obsolete parts (eg the banquet information page). Will probably play with fonts, etc. like the neurotic fool I am, but the next thing is to get my photos developed and start writing up my diary - major tasks in themselves! Stay posted.