Winter weather now turns to spring..

The UK has had a very wet winter, especially January and February with serious and extensive flooding and coastal storm damage hitting many regions (includes northern areas, the south west especially Somerset and along the river Thames). This has brought misery to many people and although the rainfall in this month of March has reduced it will take a long time for the flood affected places to be cleared up and the damage done by the flooding, repaired. Here in Bury St Edmunds Suffolk it has been wet but with only patchy and localised areas of flooding so the town has not suffered too badly overall.

Spring is on the way and the evenings are getting lighter and the daffodils are in flower.

My digital computing pursuits over winter..physics,photography and email!

I have taken up some new activities this year. I started a physics course at Georgia Institute of Technology, but I have not been able to keep up with the course work and I’m not sure whether I will be continuing with this. I became sidetracked with taking up an interest in astrophotography!

Photography

Well, I have taken up an interest in photography and especially astro photography. This arose after watching the International Space Station in orbit above my back garden about a month ago and recently the Northern Lights were seen by some lucky people in town (sadly I missed seeing and photographing them).

I have been out in my garden at night trying to photo the moon and stars with my DSLR Canon G15. This camera is a “family” camera (bought by and used by my wife and my daughter also, and I am just starting to use it). There are many settings to get to know with it (as it has several optional modes other than AUTO including full manual mode) and also to know post production editing with Lightroom GIMP/Photoshop and RAW image files to name a few new concepts and techniques I am learning). I shall be adding a “Photography” category to my blog where I can outline my photography and astro photography experiences.

The moon image shown is one of my first and so far better image results but I am not certain what the camera settings were! I will need to try and record these accurately so I can learn how to be most effective with the camera.

HTML Email templates

This is my most recent activity. Someone asked me last week if I could help them make a company email for them and I said I hadn’t done it before but I was confident I could do it easily with all my webdev experience. Well it was interesting to say the least researching html email templates and signatures!
I have spent some time with this and am making my own designs. Like webdev, a large issue is that there is no HTML Email standard across Email clients (eg Webmail, Outlook, Windows Live Mail etc).
So as ever getting a design that is fully compatible with every email client application is the holy grail challenge!

I shall add a html email category and do more posts on this later.

Well that is all for this post and I hope all readers are looking forward to Spring (whether to get gardening or just get outside more in milder weather) and enjoying your own digital pursuits! Best wishes…