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I'm just back at work after a couple of weeks off, ten days of which was spent in Edinburgh during the awesome Fringe Festival. And awesome it was, in the oldschool "overwhelmingly huge" meaning of the word. Hundreds of venues and thousands of shows; I don't know how I thought "play it by ear" would work at all! Juggling seeing the shows and doing touristy things in the city and drinking with friends and catching up with the family was just too much, it would have been so much easier if I'd planned out more what I was going to do beforehand, or at least read around the subject some more. By the time I'd worked out that I wanted to see some revue comedy it was almost time to go home!

Still, we pretty much managed. My highlights for the holiday went a bit like this:

• Show-wise: easily the stunning Le Gateau Chocolat and the adorable Mae Martin
• Drinking highlight was accidentally meeting the owners of an actual good gay bar in Edinburgh (IKR!?) called The Street, followed by more shots and dancing and the hall of mirrors that is CC Bloom's.
• Family-wise was chilling out, dog-walking and the unexpectedly delicious vegetarian cooking. Also they loved Dom which is nice.
• Tourist-wise we didn't get a lot done, so the highlight was probably napping in the short-lived sun in Princes Street Gardens.

I'm not sure how to categorise the extremely surreal dinner with a Harry C-W and a bunch of comedians including Scott Capurro and Margaret Cho, so I'll just file it under "lolwhat".

Dear dead Bizzy Wizzy. You were seriously unhinged, hated and tried to attack strangers and had a really stupid name, but I'm going to miss you scaring the dog four times your size and getting hair on all my things. You'd totally mellowed out in your old age, which was nice, though it's sad that you passed just as you were finally about to get your own garden.

Hope you had a nice life of sitting on plastic bags and purring. Rest in peace, old cat.

I still don't know how to use my new camera. While I understand the basics, they way they all interact is tricky, the layers of jargon impenetrable and the automatic functions of the camera add more complexity. I'll get there eventually... Meanwhile I'm mainly using automatic mode and continuing to progress with nifty post-processing. My free copy of Lightroom arrived yesterday so I should be able to advance to taking pictures in RAW which is exciting

I got to thinking about the EXIF meta data embedded in my photos last week, and wondering if there's anything interesting I could extract from it: with a bit of work and number juggling I put together a graph of how many photos I've taken and how many I've kept with my various digital cameras, since the start of 2004. It's pretty nifty, and far too much effort for a single blog post so I've also used it the new photography info page I've written. (That's a demo of deeplinking which is also new. Woop!)

Pics taken per month

Realising I've taken fourty thousand pictures in the last two and a half years is a bit scary. It also doesn't count the hundreds I took at uni with my uber-retro film camera, but that's a story for another time.

In other news, I'm off work for the next 17 days, including 10 days in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, which is AMAZING. Longest non-Christmas holiday since uni. Yes.

As you might have heard, I bought a shiny camera last week. It's a lovely CSC, like an SLR but smaller and a bit more techy. Here's the pictures I took with it this weekend, with Flickr's awesome slideshow viewer that I don't use often enough.

It's my first "real" camera, and with a few tips from photographer friends I'm quickly learning how to work it, but I'm still only scratching the surface. It's exciting. Maybe I should get a book or go on a course, but I'm totes poor now.

You know what else is exciting?

I BOUGHT IT WITH A CREDIT CARD. AND THEN I INSURED IT. What with the pension I started earlier in the year I feel so very grown up now.

I've never really been one for getting the latest gadget to hit the highstreet. I never had games consoles growing up, I shunned iPods for years before eventually getting one (and I didn't really like it when I did) and my phone was always been laughable. I don't know what's changed but last November I got a top-of-the range (albeit the blackberry range) smartphone, in March I upgraded my computer, and yet already I really want a Kindle (new relases of books only come out in annoying tome-like form) and I'd quite like a chromebook (my very flawed but free from work laptop has gotten me used to the luxury of reading long webpages in bed), but most of all I find myself seriously considering a £600 quid hybrid/SLR camera. It's not entirely stupid; I think my pics have seen some real improvement lately as I become accustomed to post processing stuff, and it would be really nice to have a choice of which camera to take out.

Feels like I've been taking pics forever (though I actually took a two-year break around 2005). Here's some old collages of uni friends I must have put together in about 2002.

Ciaran

Darren

Mikey

Seldo

Will

Matt

giles

Jamie

Carly

James

Alex

Someday I should take a scanner to my hardcopy collection of oldschool photos. Not that they're very good, but might be lol.

No, probably not. But then Hotmail isn't dead either, despite being demonstrably shit (I mean they send an advert with every email, it's that bad), ditto Myspace; sold last week for only 6% of what it was supposedly worth six years ago. They're slightly laughable, outmoded, archaic, past it, but far from dead.

Back in 2004 everyone used Hotmail (*cough* and Yahoo!); it was the most widespread and accessible browser-based email, nicely tying into messenger and all the rest of it. You could only hold 1 megabyte in your inbox though, and if it got full you had to start clearing stuff out. On top of that it also seemed to attract spam like flies to shit. It sucked, but we really didn't know any better. When gmail came out that year with a flawless spam filter and a 1 gigabyte(!!!) inbox limit, everyone who cared about these sorts of things said "LOL BAI!" and promptly jumped ship. Microsoft Hotmail scrabbled around to increase their storage, and even amusingly blocked gmail invites but the damage was done.

I feel like we're in the same place now with Facebook. It's obviously got huge traction, with half the country having an account, but I don't think anywhere near that proportion actually likes it. Lets be honest they seem to delight in dicking around its users; changing layouts and features for some users and not for others, not telling anyone about it in either case, not always for the better, and always needing yet another set of notification boxes to unclick. All the message threads that once started are impossible to add or remove people from. The number of times I've attempted to upload a bunch of pictures only to have it say "upload failed" after an hour, or spent an hour using its purportedly nifty tagging systems only to hit submit and find only about a dozen of the hundreds of tags actually stuck... It's glitchy, to put it kindly.

So now Google Plus is suddenly on the scene, the interweb giant finally answering Facebook's gradual encroachment on Google's "we are the web" turf. I was sceptical after their lame Buzz and Wave efforts, but it really looks like they're going all-out on this one. It's already pretty comparable to Facebook, who actually made the news yesterday when it announced video chat, something that's already available on Plus. And Skype, and Messenger, and whatever else.

Plus minuses:

• No walls. It's debatable whether walls are needed but it does mean no birthday spam which kinda sucks.
• No direct messages. I guess they'll integrate it with gmail at some point, which makes a lot of sense, but at the moment it looks like something is missing.
• Ditto events. This could be a killer feature if they sort it and integrate it with Google calender. Here's hoping.
• Paucity of invites. It's still in beta (whatever that means thse days) so not everyone who wants to get in, can get in.

Plus pluses:

• Circles. Some people don't like the overt social stratification but only you can see how you're categorised your contacts, so I don't think that matters. For my part I like that it's not hidden under several sub menus a la Facebook, and the interface is much, MUCH better.
• Speed. Everything's faster. You only really notice when skimming through photos but it makes Facebook's theatre viewer thing look like it's grabbing everything by dialup in comparison.
• No adverts. They'll probably change this eventually but frankly I think they're much more interested in uptake than revenue for the moment; Google have deep pockets. Besides this is all about how it is now, not how it will be, plus Google ads are always less obtrusive and more relevant than Facebook ads. Fact.
• Integration with googledocs / gmail / gcalender. In the top bar for these sites you can now see how many "red squares of joy" you have pending on Plus, and not only this but when you click on it you get a dropdown that shows you the relevant content and allows you to add comments as if you were on the page. You can also use the chat function on gmail too, so basically you can stay completely uptodate without leaving your email page.
• I'm told the web app is outstanding from everyone that's used it.
• Picasa: Google Plus images is essentially picasaweb, which is already integrated with a desktop version. Things tagged on the web are tagged on my computer, and I'm pretty sure I could upload all my 19k photos onto Google Plus (at no charge), something I wouldn't dare even think about with facebook. In fact yesterday I deleted 50 photo albums on facebook. It took 45 minutes, and I left ones that were either too epic or too recent, but I want to do a little bit to wean myself (and my friends) off it.
• You can delete. Completely. Sounds silly but you can't on Facebook. I think that speaks volumes about their relative ethoses. Is that a word? We'll go with it for now.

Either Facebook stays rubbish and all but the blissfully ignorant bail to Plus, or they up their game in response to their first real competitor. I know which one I'm betting on, but either way we win. I'm excited.

I really need to stay on top of my photos. I whittled 1000 pics down to 200 and tweaked them within an inch of their lives last week. Exhausting though it was I’m kinda chuffed with the results, though it does make me wonder what I could achieve with a “real” camera. My new favourite thing when I’m working on a pic and it still looks a bit rubbish is to make it black and white and whack the contrast and clarity up. I SO ARTY. Good times. Anyways this week it’s getting a bit silly as I’ve been trying to do the same with another 600 pictures, including ones from Dom/Dolly/Chris’s birthday night out which was amazing. Any night out that features a lot of facepaint or makeup is amazing, it always improves the vibe, I don’t know why.

I’ve updated my set of favourite pics and made it so those are the ones that appear on the front page of this site, which is pretty nifty. The portfolio section is complete too, with improved navigation that I’ve extended to the other pages, and the CV page is ACTUALLY up to date for the first time in years! I’ll probably trim and prune at it like an errant bonsai for weeks yet - the compulsive editor that I am - but it’s nice to have something done that’s been “pending” for so long. Added to the recent work on how the site looks at varying widths, and the whole thing’s kinda finished! It’s a slight embarrassment really, I’m going to have to think up more things to augment. Perhaps a bit of jQuery.ajax shenanigans next?

But for a brief moment the site is done. It’s been a long road and shit. Here’s some of the Best Bits! I.E. some mercifully low quality screenshots of what my site used to look like in its previous iterations. Also my first use of images in the blog for an age, I should do that more. It’s not like I’m short on jpegs.

Mynciboi: done in dreamweaver. Sorry. To be fair it was 2002 and I had no idea what I was doing.

Mynciboi 2.0: don’t remember how I coded it but it was a Blogger back end.

Mynciboi 3: Ugly.

Mochaholic I moved to Movable Type coz I was a GROWNUP.

DanGovan 0.5: never actually coded up! Shame. I liked it but most people said it was awful.
They were wrong, right?

DanGovan 1.0: Simple, classy, ever so slightly plagiarised.

Cya next month for more stuff you don’t care about! AND OMG STOP JUDGING ME.