Ben Francis

76.8% average.

w00t.

This is an experiment with the camera(s) on my new Nokia N70 smartphone and with Flikr.

Since the end of my exams I’ve been partying like there’s no tomorrow. Unfortunately the partying is coming to an end now that it’s time to find a summer job and the money is running out. Here’s a (not so) quick update on what I’ve been up to.

On the Vale

After my exams Laura came to Brum to meet me, this is us sitting outside my flat sunbathing, this photo was taken with the lower quality VGA camera on the front of the phone (meant for video calls) so it’s a bit grainy.

I’m going to miss the Vale next year. This image onwards were taken with the main 2MP camera on my phone.

Bullring

We spent a day in the Bullring looking for a dress for Laura for my ball. This picture of the Selfridges building (and neighbouring church) shows that the camera isn’t great in low light conditions. On some of the indoor pictures below I’ve adjusted the brightness and contrast in the GIMP.

Festivale

The Vale Festival or “Festivale” is now becoming an annual event. All proceeds from the festival went to Aids charities and the whole event is about students uniting against aids. This is the entrance to the festival with an archway setting the hippy-like theme for the festival.

This is the main stage for the festival before it got busy, apparently this stage was used at Glastonbury. The acts were all of brilliant quality and I’d heard of none of the bands before.

Here is the lake looking lovely and people starting to arrive.

By late afternoon the festival was getting busy. It was soon realised that the recycling policy with separate bins was a brilliant idea but the bins provided were completely inadequate, lots of people produce lots of rubbish! There were places to eat including an awesome stall selling organic Indian style meals with bio-degradeable packaging and cutlery.

And then it got dark.

There were several stages at the festival. This is the “Small World” stage with the University of Birmingham Jazz Band playing. There were rugs and cushions and a waft of narcotics in the air.

The battle re-enactment society and circus society took up residence at the festival, playing with dangerous things like swords and axes and fire. This was a group of circus people with fire staffs being artistic.

At 11pm there was an outdoor cinema showing “The Constant Gardner”, continuing the Aids theme. It wasn’t a film I would have chosen from a list to go and watch but it was an excellent and very moving film. You can just about make out the screen and streetlights reflecting on the lake in the background, not a bad setting for a cinema screen.

Summer Ball

Here’s me and Laura all dressed up for my Summer Ball. The ball was at the Birmingham Botanical gardens with a garden party theme.

The £20 ticket included a coach to the venue, Pimms reception, three course meal (with a party bag full of sweets, bubbles and comemorative condom!), jazz band playing during the meal, four free drinks, casino chips, giant connect-4 and jenga, air hockey and arcade games, free photo and performance from Bodger and Badger and Pat Sharp from Funhouse! What a deal. This was the room where our meal was served by a small army of waiters.

Here’s Laura, just having stolen a rose from the display on the table. I like this photo.

The £20 ticket included a coach to the venue, Pimms reception, three course meOh the hilarity, mashed potato all over the place. I’ve never been so entertained and patronised at the same time before. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

This photo didn’t come out brilliantly in the low light but it’s Pat Sharp from Funhouse hugging Laura. She also told him he was a legend, that he should grow back his mullet and pinched his bum.

Back Home for Mr M’s Leaving Do

Back at home in Bourne I first spent a lot of time sunning myself in the garden, this is my daft cat Rue.

Me and Laura captured a live Blue-footed Booby in my garden in this cage.

We then tamed the creature so that it wouldn’t run away. This is actually a bizarre creation we came up with as a leaving present for Mr M’s leaving do. We had a meal and went back to Mr C’s for drinks, I had a brillant time and it made me realise how much I miss everyone.

Bourne Festival

Next was Bourne Festival where I spent time with family, met cousins I’ve not seen for years and caught up with schoolfriends.

My crazy mum went on this ride at the festival.

The lineup of bands at the festival wasn’t as good as usual but much local real ale was drunk and much fun was had. This is Legend, one of my favourite local bands, who finished off on Sunday night.

Exhibition

Before coming home I went to a public exhibition at my brother’s college to see his “sensory room” and to look at everyone else’s work. I don’t have any photos of his work, they may come later, but I particuarly liked this picture by another student.

Back in Brum for more partying

Back in Brum I chucked on some gladrags and walked to Broad Street, found Tom, went to a couple of pubs, got lost for a bit and then went to Snobs nightclub on my own. I got talking to some people in the queue which was good beacuse the 30 minute wait would otherwise have been very dull. I met people from my block and made some new friends and basically had a brillaint time.
Tomorrow is results day, probably shortly followed by more pubs and partying until the early hours. My family are coming to Brum for the weekend for me to show them around and then it’s back home for the summer.

Btw, in conclusion, the camera on my phone is amazing but struggles in low light and suffers slightly from its fixed focus. Flickr is OK, but the blogging feature is rubbish because you can only blog one photo at a time so I ended up coding all this by hand.

tola: well I went to see the cookie monster and he said he marked them three weeks ago
tomleech: i dont think the cookie monster is one of our lecturers
tomleech: you may be confused between real life and a childrens program

Today in an exam when asked how to increase the range of a transmitter given certain conditions, I wrote “hold on to the antenna and wave your arms around in the air”.

You can tell its towards the end of the exam period, I may be joining bouncykaz in a padded room shortly.

Argh! I’ve so far managed to almost completely avoid talking about exams on my blog, but no longer.

It will all be over by 3:30pm Thursday, and that’s what worries me.

Where does all the time go? I seem to have lost three days to some freak illness during which I have slept lots, sweated lots, dreamt lots of weird dreams and achieved very little.

It doesn’t help that I have a paper deadline, job seeking, late student loan application and house contract signing looming over me.

Must stay focussed. Not sure what to do about my messed up body clock. Do I give in to it and work until 4:30am another night or try and fight it into some kind of sane rhythm which actually involves seeing daylight?

My applications:

• Drupal Admin Client
• MediaWiki Exporter
• MythWeb UI Redesign