Pictures of funny things from my phone

Like any other mobile phone owner, I occasionally take photographs of things that I find amusing. Often, like other irritating pedants, these are linguistic mistakes. More often than not, they involve things in quotations. These just languish on my phone… when I get a new phone, I copy them to it, and then they languish there instead. Occasionally after a few beers I get into one of those “everyone show each other the funny pictures from their phone” sessions, which is the only time they get an outing. Well, not now. Now I’m giving them to the world!

And, well, here they all are. They’re from a mixture of countries and date back to 2000 or so. Perhaps I’ll start a brand new collection, and blog about that in 2020.

There's cost cutting, and there's cost cutting.

For when the police coffers get low.

When autocorrect doesn't help.

It's like beer, but without the uncomfortable wetness.

The most important thing about goals is that they're attainable.

Honesty is the best policy.

No coming in here unless you have permission from the managing director! Or some excuse.

This never normally happens...

If you have to ask what's in the grog, you don't want the grog.

Sore cock? Try some nice wine.

When picking a web site URL, make sure it works in all variants of English.

A straightforward misunderstanding, I think.

It's on us!

For when you've had one of those days.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but I still "love" it.

A bag for my paintbrush? Yeah, sure, I'll take a bag. Oh.

45 days into the project, eight builders were fired.

Sure, you can cook. But can you name a restaurant?

Football scarves on sale on Basle, Switzerland. It's not so much who you support...

It wasn't so much a year as an emotion.

That’s all, folks. Get back to work.

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A pledge to the world: I will get a photo on Flickr’s Explore by the end of the year

Mount Rainier

As some of you  know, I’ve recently started taking photos more enthusiastically. I’ve always been half-heartedly interested in this stuff, but eventually I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon D40 for $260 and a couple of lenses for another $400. Those of you who have already looked at my photos will be aware that they’re not, by and large, very good. Hey. I’d probably have spent the money on beer otherwise.

Honda S2000 at Pacific Raceways

One of the more fun things about getting involved in photos has been getting involved in Flickr. Whenever I look at my photos on Flickr I can see how many views they have had, who added them as favourites, et cetera. As always with new hobbies (or dental mouth guards), I discovered that everyone I knew was already doing this Flickr thing.

Moorgate tube station

And what was the great achievement that a Flickr photographer should aspire to? Ahah! That will be getting on “Explore“. Explore is a collection of the most interesting photos on Flickr – they take a thousand per day, I believe. The picking algorithm is kept a closely-guarded secret by Flickr staff. Of all my photography-enthusiast chums, I believe only two of them (Dougerino and AlexBrn) have gotten a photo onto Explore. There’s no way, therefore, that I am going to get into Explore by using my raw photography talent.

I decided, instead, to work out what the algorithm was. That seems like something I’d be better at. Well, after nothing more scientific than a couple of hours of buggering about refreshing the Explore page, I can officially announce here that I’ve got it sorted out. I am going to go out and deliberately take a picture that will get on Explore. I even have a pencil drawing of a couple of possible variants, and a prop set aside.

Why haven’t I done it yet? Well, obviously I wanted to make the prediction first, dimmy, as it otherwise wouldn’t make any sense.

Also I am not going to take it until the end of October, when I will have two more required props at hand. I will post this photo on Flickr sometime around the 5th of November, after which it will get into Explore. If it’s not in by the end of the year, I will be willing to call this prediction a failure.

More to come, of course, but the gauntlet is laid down. It’s on, Flickr. It’s on.

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Free books for Facebook fans!

The sun has arrived here in Seattle, and I spent some time out in it this evening. Why do you care? Well, the heady combination of that and the beer I just drank has driven me to introduce a scheme that cannot possibly do me any good at all.

Every month, I am going to give away a book to a Facebook fan chosen at random. The first random drawing will be this Saturday evening (July 10th). You have until then to become a fan, and you may get a free book! In fact this particular month it’s even better than that, because I’ll give away two books if the fan count is more than 1,000 when I do the drawing (it’s 988 right now).

Of course, if you become a fan after that, you might get a free book the following month. If you do not become a fan at all, you will probably not get a free book. The rules are quite simple. All you have to do is go to the Septic’s Companion Fan Page on Facebook and click “like” or “become a fan” or whatever Facebook have decided the button is this week. Good luck!

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No more nonsense from my .com here

Spurred on by the news that Apple is now bigger than Microsoft, I’m going to invest some time in doing more blogging for my fledgeling nest-egg, Beta Minus. I’ve started a blog on http://betaminus.com/, and migrated a couple of posts I had here about mobile app sales. Just to tempt you over there, I’ve written a brand new post about using my Proximity app whilst skiing.

I’ll try and keep this blog for things marginally more funny. Once I think of them…

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