grasshopper
A grasshopper that stayed still long enough for me to get the snap. (Click for a bigger image).
This shot was taken in automatic mode with my new idiot proof camera.
« June 2006 | Main | August 2006 »
July 23, 2006
July 21, 2006
Hugh Thomson
You learn something new everyday. Hugh Thomson a Coleraine lad was responsible for many beautiful book illustrations, but unknown to me, also the original artwork on the Quality Street tin.
http://www.colerainebc.gov.uk/news/shownews.php?id=482
He did his time with Marcus Ward & company before heading to London.
July 19, 2006
Nomadic
The obligatory SS Nomadic photo. She smells a bit manky at the moment, but a grand looking ship altogether.
July 18, 2006
Canberra PR9
The Canberra PR9 makes a final flight over Shorts and Belfast City Airport today at 10.40 am. After which the three remaining planes are put up for sale.
I heard an interview with the Belfast born pilot on the radio this morning, he explained the decision was purely an economical one. It's no longer viable for Rolls Royce to keep the jigs for 6 engines currently running, and the hydraulic pumps and related equipment are becoming increasingly expensive to recondition as second hand parts are hard to come by.
He also mentioned that these aircraft are still some of the highest flying aircraft in operation capable of reconnaissance flights at 70000 feet.
July 17, 2006
a tree fire
Out for an evening stroll, notice a wee bit of smoke up ahead and 3 wee street urchins standing beside the blazing bowl of an old tree.
"Here mister, this tree is on fire. We never done it, we just found it like this. It's classic isn't it?"
The same walk last night finds a pooper scooper bin and two pallets also spontaneously combusted at some point over the evening.
He was right though it did look classic.
July 04, 2006
bless you my child
Hat tip to StrayTaoist over on #cabal for not only fixing my inheritance problem but for also showing me a nifty alternative for getting a database handle in my object.
I always have a connect function, which I accessed very simply in my other functions via
my $dbh = myconnect(), killing the database handle on exit on that call.
The suggestion was to cache the handle in the object from the connect function, something I didn't think of doing, I always thought the handle should be disconnected after each function call.
So my connect function returns $self->{_dbh};
The final code, which is much improved, makes the handle available during the construction of the object.
bless { _dbh => $class->myconnect }, $class
so $self->_dbh is available immediately on construction of a new object.
I always constructed objects with an empty bless, I had no idea you could pass bless a call to a function as it's first argument, but it works and it's fast.
July 03, 2006
The Beast from the East
Not far from where I live near Inverary Community Centre this tin man has appeared. I must admit, although he does fit in to the sculptures by numbers category, that I do like him. Now Dublin has the Stiletto in the Ghetto or the Stiffy in the Liffey, aswell as the floozy in the jacuzzi. We really need to come up with some names for our pieces of art. This tin man could be a good starting point with his homo-erotic bulge in his trousers and anchor tattoo.
