I knew it was a bad sign. I mean that literally. As I got on a busy northern line train this evening I saw a dark, bearded man in a long, brown coat with yellow sign hung around his neck. It was too packed to actually read his message but I suspected that I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Where is the love?”

As the train doors closed, with all us commuters trapped, he started. He was here to tell us about his god. He did well to raise his voice above the level of the tube train; holding a conversation with the person next to you can be a challenge but he made himself heard by half of the carriage.

If you’re subscribed to my RSS feeds you may well have noticed already, but I have started, as an experiment, adding interesting links to my del.icio.us account and syndicating them from here. Is that a good idea? What do you think?

If, on the other hand, that first paragraph made no sense, read on.

First, let me explain terms. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way to get your web browser¹ to tell you when a website changes. If you have Internet Explorer 7 you should see the feeds icon (an orange square with white lines) next to the home icon on the top right, just below the search text box. In Safari the bar with the URL will have a blue RSS icon to the right. And Firefox has “Live Bookmarks” which do the same thing. Simply click the appropriate button and see what happens.

Back in November I wrote about my then-new Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype. At the time I was fairly pleased with the concept but less so with the actual implementation.

The phone’s hardware was fine. The unit as a whole was reasonably solid. The buttons were a bit wobbly and the screen was smaller than you might initially think, but there was nothing to complain about too much.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Addiction.” The above image was taken after a cigar making demonstration in Trinidad, Cuba.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks contest. I’m entry number 333.

The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Sky. My entry was taken a couple of years ago on a walking holiday in Tuscany. I used my EOS300 and Fuji Sensia 100 slide film.

For those that got here via Google and those other people that don’t know me, I’ll start with a confession: I am not a wedding photographer. I am keen amateur photographer, mainly concentrating on travel and occasionally branching out into portraits. However having a reputation among friends as “the photographer” has resulted in a number of people asking me to take pictures at their wedding.

It’s something I have generally resisted. It struck me as just too high risk. Wedding pictures will, hopefully, last a life-time and I didn’t want the pressure of needing to get everything right on the day. Even if you discount all the variables around the camera, computers and memory cards, there are so many other things that could go wrong. The weather; missing shots¹; people blinking or looking on the wrong way; people inadvertently missing²; annoying things in the back-ground³. And then, since neither of these were commercial ventures, I would have to take all this into account as well as actually trying to enjoy the event as a guest, and, in one case, as a best man.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Brother and here is my entry. It was taken in Vietnam on a boat trip down the Perfume River. Ordinarily you’d be worried about two kids piloting a boat, but they seemed to know what they were doing…

Please vote for my entry in last weeks competition. I’m entry number 356.

This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

The Catholic Church today caused widespread controversy when it issued a statement urging the Government to overturn a law made two hundred years ago.

Clive Adams, standing outside Saint Johns Cathedral in Norwich, read the statement: “The Catholic Church is unable to comply with the Slave Trade Act, the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. This law is incompatible with the teachings of the Bible and we cannot in clear conscience operate under such restrictions. We ask the government to consider an opt-out clause in revised legislation.”¹ Adams, an unpaid volunteer reporting to Cardinal Michael Osborn, denied that he himself was a slave.