Monday, October 5, 2009

Misty Roman Roads and Fruity by-ways

We have rain coming in and the weather has turned quite dull and misty. It also turned out that when I had to re-install my off-line Blog Editor (Zoundry Raven) I had set up the wrong location for image storage. I had not noticed this until I had some problems with images being re-loaded every time I re-published a post. In the end I have re-published the relevant posts (about 5) having reset the Image storage to point at my Picasaweb account. I also worked out how to move pictures around between Albums. (Which does not affect the Blog postings as their storage links do not change with the Album name. Also I worked out how to point Zoundry Raven at different Albums so as they fill I will be able to control them more easily.) In effect the Albums are really views on the sea of photographs stored - I assumed that was the case, but experimented first to make sure I did not cause problems with the Blog.)


What alerted me was when checking out where the photographs were ending up and what Google limits there were I could not find my most recent pictures. Currently for the standard service (free):



  • Maximum No. Albums - 250

  • Maximum No. photographs per Album - 500

  • Storage - 1Gb

  • Maximum picture size - 20Mb


For Upgraded Storage (paid for)



  • Maximum No. Albums - 1000

  • Maximum No. photographs per Album - 1000

  • Storage - 11Gb

  • Maximum picture size 20Mb


I use the paid for service as I exceeded the free limit a while back as I have around 1500 pictures downloaded. Unfortunately when using off-line editing tools the error message do not always get returned, it just stops down-loading, so it took a while to debug that problem. Mind you I think that the benefits of the off-line editor outweigh the occasional hiccups. As I was re-publishing the posts I had a couple of problems one post kept stopping before the end of the post on a composite picture (one I had stitched together from 3 others). It turned out that this picture was around 25Mb in size and so causing the posting/storage to fail, no error message though). In the end I used Photoshop Elements to save a slightly more compressed image. One advantage of using the Jpeg format is that it allows different levels of trade-off between quality and compression.


Having sorted out the Image storage I have been checking out some of my old photographs - it is wonderfully evocative, it reminds me to re-visit old routes. Which is what I did after cycling along a small part of the Cambridge Roman Road (Cambridge to Balsham) I decided to re-visit it and cycle along the other way towards Balsham. Unlike at the weekend there were no other people on the path today although I did see a few farmers out in the fields working. The path itself was pretty much solid mud, flanked by ploughed fields as you can see here.




P1000136.JPG


I liked the tree in the distance so much that I took another picture of it - this time zoomed in.




P1000134.JPG


They get some pretty big moles out here in East Anglia, actually I think that they use re-cycled human sewage. It has a slightly different smell to animal sewage but not very strong. Here is an article and here another, referring to the practice - it is apparently around a fifth of the cost of animal fertiliser produces.


P1000139.JPG


The mistiness gives a layered look to the picture I think.




P1000145.JPG


Later on I took a by-way that I don't think I have cycled along for around 8-10 years. How do I know that, well it was a route that a Scout cycle ride took and it has been that long since my son was a scout. There was a fruity smell along this by=way caused by several apple trees having dropped their apples. It was quite pleasant and of course is a source of food for the wildlife. There were small apples, I did not taste them but the sort I would call crab apples. I also passed a tree with bigger red apples. I like to think that the trees were seeded by passing by-way users eating apples and discarding the apple core.




P1000150.JPG


The by-way led to this Ford, which was running when I last went past. This time it was as dry as a bone, with absolutely no need to use the small wooden bridge provided for walkers to avoid getting wet!




P1000160.JPG


After the problems with my Blog/Image storage I did some Google Image searches, here in the UK a Google Image Search of "Bath" and "Bradford upon Avon" gives two of my Blog pictures as the first two images.

No comments:

Post a Comment