Looking ahead

This pretty much sums up Scotland on 1 January...

We had a lovely New Year's Eve with some friends in Marchmont, including an outstanding view of the Castle fireworks from their living room windows and then a number of "turns", including a group Auld Lang Syne led by a neighbour who plays the accordion. Streak came in useful for finding the lyrics of songs on the internet so I could join in with the chorus!

And best of all, we had no trouble with taxis. The one we ordered to take us there turned up two minutes early and to come back we wandered out onto Bruntsfield Road and found one immediately. In fact, there were fleets of them heading back into town to collect drunken revellers. A wholly satisfactory evening only slightly marred by the fact that yet again my knee prevented me from sleeping well.

Just back from a (very slow and quite painful) wander around the paths of North Edinburgh. Saw a number of apposite images such as SOS graffiti on a post, and a long straight (ice covered) path leading into the distance. But this one seemed the best of the bunch on the day.

I have been playing with the iPad again. I downloaded the Guardian Eyewitness photo app. One of the few things that I miss about not reading the Guardian in its paper version are the centre spread photos capturing the Zeitgeist. This gives you them anyway, for free. Am still toying with buying a subscription to read the Guardian everyday on the iPad in its paper format, and also with buying an online subscription to the Economist. I've also been experimenting with Flipboard as a reader for Facebook, Twitter and much other (customisable) content. We are also thinking of getting the camera connection kit for the iPad and a number of other accessories which will make it a much more usable gadget (and obviously photo editing software).

Today, I have been old fashioned and done my blipping on the laptop, largely because I wanted to do some cropping and also turn the photo black and white using the blip photo internal editor.