David: the blog

Managing the Oxfam stewards at Glastonbury

Skydiving at Hinton August 2007

Lake District April/May 2007

Silverlight gallery This is a demonstration of a page built using Silverlight 2. If this is your first experience of Silverlight content, the first thing that will happen when you click the link is that you will be invited to download and install the Silverlight plugin from Microsoft. The application was built from C#, XAML, and LINQ to parse the XML. Let me know what you think.

Silverlight gallery Here’s another Silverlight application, containing some images from Westonbirt taken in October 2008

Here are the links to all the photographs I have taken at the Jive+ busks and events:

Jive+ opening night at Banbury Town Hall, 2 October 2007

Jive+ busk, Banbury, 6 October 2007

Jive+ opening night at Woodstock, 21 January 2008

Jive+ busk, Banbury, 12 April 2008

Jive+ busk at Botley, 13 September 2008 in aid of Guide Dogs for the Blind

The photographs of Charlene’s graduation day at Bath University on 24 June 2008 can be found here

New pack of Ilfochrome arrived from Silverprint yesterday, faster than I thought. That’s the best part of £300 including the processing chemicals. Ilfochrome is the finest, most archival paper and it is good to see that it is still available for those people who appreciate quality.

One of the jobs I had been putting off for years was dealing with the woodchip wallpaper in the hall, stairs and landing. When I finally started a few weeks ago, I realised why! On its own a steam stripper is largely useless because the steam won’t penetrate the outer paint layer. The method I tried originally was a flat-bladed scraper tool to remove the upper layer, after which the base layer steams off easily. But it’s slow and tiring work. Then I discovered (at B&Q) the Stanley orbital scraper. This scratches the surface of the paper and allows the steam to penetrate, so I can now work about four times as fast.

The next job, after sanding and preparing the surface, will be to apply Zinsser B-I-N sealer primer. When I asked about it at B&Q etc I just got blank looks so I will buy it from the internet - decoratingdirect.co.uk. I’ve never used the stuff before - watch this space for a report.

For the final paint job, I have narrowed down the colour to a choice between Auro’s “Hessian” and Farrow & Ball’s “Pointing”.  Auro paint (auro.co.uk) is a new name to me - you won’t find it at Homebase, for example. The sample pots showed that it a high quality product which is produced in a very environmentally-friendly way. Hessian is slightly more neutral than Pointing and looks good when contrasted with the pure white coving and dado rail. I think it would be a good colour against which to display my Artweeks photographs.

Only one week to go to the Blues competition at Utopia.

I suppose that Hello World is an appropriate way to start a blog. I have to say that rarely have I come across an application that is as straightforward to install as WordPress, especially one that uses MySQL. So well done to the authors!