Wow, I saw this on the bus yesterday morning.

Yes, it’s an origami ‘swan’ made from a bus ticket. Someone was board (it’s a bus after all!) and very good with paper.
The new style bus tickets in Bristol are 7 by 9 cm. To make something like this from one of these seems an impossible feet. It might have been made from 2 or more, tickets, I don’t know, I wasn’t going to take this work of art apart to work out how it was done. And yes I left it there for the next passenger to enjoy! It certainly brightened an otherwise grey and dull morning for me.

Over the last few months, the facilities department, at our studio complex has been reworking the telecoms patch panel.
This panel happens to be located in the IT office, so I’ve been able to watch grow and evolve (hopefully not in to a new life form!) I was (unexpectedly) at the studios yesterday and the project was finally done.
So here is the evolution of the panel over many months.
The rack in the early testing phase (way back in June)

Nothing happened after this for a long time, but then come early December and all of a sudden we have this.

A day later, the growth has gone exponential and chaotic!

Two weeks later, finally it is done!

Looking at this, I have just one thing to say, I am sorry very, very glad that IT doesn’t manage the phone system!

No, I’m not talking about the children’s TV program from the 70′s here , although I do remember watching it!
No this is a rainbow I managed, just, to capture on my phone a week or so back
I was a much brighter and complete double bow, just moments before I took this shot. However I hesitated to try and get the photo because I wasn’t sure I could get the whole thing in the frame, but then I decided I could use Autostitch, the panorama making app I have my iPhone to get the complete rainbow. However I the few moments I spent thinking about this, the next shower was moving in behind me and the sunlight faded, so this was all I could get of it. Maybe 20 seconds before this was taken the primary bow was bright and complete and the secondary bow was about 60% and as bright as any secondary I’ve seen before.
This was a good lesson to me, that when it comes to photo’s, take the shot as soon as you see it, don’t wait for a better one, there maybe nothing better coming, and if there is you can take as many shots as you like and pick the best ones.
And in fact generally in life, you should grab and hold on to what you have here and now, don’t wait for something better coming down the line. It might never arrive!

We have a large delivery of new Dell machines at work in the last few days and these new machines come from both ends of scale as far as size goes!

An Optiplex 980 next to a Precision T5500 workstation, which is probably the fastest ever machine we have ever had, with twin SSD’s dual quad core i7 processors! It’s also huge, to give you some idea of scale, here is it next to a ‘normal’ sized workstation.

See, huge. The Optiplex 980 is a particularly tiny machine, only slightly bigger than a Mac Mini.

Here is an example of a truly great name.

Borg and Overstrom. Fantastic!
And what does this great name belong too?
Okay that’s not quite so exciting. It’s an builder of office water coolers. Still it’s a very cool name.

It looked, bad. An old friend, badly wounded, perhaps fatally in the course of action. Here is the horrifying photo

Yes, it’s my tea pot and the spout is chipped.
So what I here my non-British readers say? Well there is a very special bond between a Britton and his tea pot! It is the source of one of the very things that makes us British, tea!
But in any case it turns out the injury wasn’t that bad. It’s the second time the spout has been chipped and last time I repaired it, it make the pot dribble. But as you can see it would take more than a little dribble to make me get rid of this pot. Yes it is old and cracked and I think it is only the limescale that has leaked through the cracks which is holding it together, but I’ve had this pot as long as I have lived in my own home (it was a moving in present from my parents). So I was ready with the epoxy to repair it (again), but before I did, I emptied the pot and discovered the newly chipped spout actually poured much better than before.
My wounded tea pot is now a mutant, but like your classic comic book mutant, it’s much better than before!
Yay!

What on Earth am I taking pictures of now?
Good question. In fact this rather ‘arty’ looking shot was taken for a very practical reason. A water metre under a manhole cover was leaking and I was trying to read the metre number of it, partly to tell water company, but mostly to check it wasn’t my metre leaking (and therefore boosting my bill!) I couldn’t read the number through the ripples on waters surface, so I figured take a few shots and see if I could read the number from these.
It worked, I think and told me it wasn’t my metre with the problem, but I reported the leak and a few days later it was repaired.
But the resultant photos a very strange looking and I think pretty cool!

Remember way back in January I took a photo of a sign tell us about the work on Netham Locks in Bristol?
It said the work would take 12 weeks. Well when I took the photo below Tuesday of this week, I reckon it’s been 26 weeks.
Of course the inner gates wen’t in late March, but since then nothing has seemed to have happened here. Till this week, that is! Here are the outer gates finally getting lifted ready for fitting. As I write this post, we have a fully working set of lock gates again!