CallMeAlan

Yes, as it says above, this is CallMeAlan.uk, the personal website of a guy called, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, Alan.

alansworld {at} [gmail.com] will find me, should you care to discuss anything I've written about. I welcome any feedback.



I am a Taphophile

Let's talk about my incurable chronic mental aberration, taphophilia, and have a look at some pictures which explain the condition. Hint: a taphophile is a grave hunter and photographer. If you don't need to read about my taphophilia you can hop straight over to
My catalog of grave photography albums

This is an extra album: The Parched Cemetery Pictures of a cemetery baking in the drought and heat


All About Photography




§   Sterling Cables: A piece of Newbury History
This is my look at a piece of Newbury history - an illustrated look at the old Sterling Cables site, which featured the derelict cable building, once the tallest building/eyesore in the town, now demolished

§   Greenham Common
This is a series of my photograph albums about Greenham Common, near Newbury, Berkshire, in central south England. I live in Newbury, and the Common is where I'm often to be found, invariably with one or more of my cameras slung around my neck. It's a wonderful and often quite surprising place, and my intention here is to give you a flavour of what it was, by looking at how it looks today.
Greenham Common used to be an American nuclear airbase, until that closed, roughly at the same time as the Cold War was called off, and they ripped it up with big yellow tractors and things. But they left behind many many enticing clues and photogenic reminders of its past. So this is my acknowledgment and thanks to those who, when ripping up the former airbase, left us those reminders of what it was.

§   Greenham Common from a Drone
A series of DJI Mini drone photographs, showing some features of Greenham Common from above.





Thoughts, Comments, Opinions



Donald Trump:- why? What on earth do you Yanks see in this deeply unpleasant and repulsive orange criminal, and why do you keep voting for it? It's a further example of why I detest you Yanks. For the love of God, PLEASE don't make it president again. (And as a matter of interest, the word "trump" is a somewhat archaic synonym for "fart" in England.)

The US Presidential Election So here we are, the second week of March 2024, and it now looks like two presidential hopefuls remain in the running: the deeply and extraordinarily unpleasant criminal Trump, and the bumbling stumbling old fool Biden. What the hell is the matter with you Yanks? How could you possibly find yourselves with only these two idiots in the running? On the one hand we have the Orange Man, a proven criminal, and on the other hand an old man who should be at home with his feet up reading an easy book; a man who cannot even handle the reasonably simple task of training a dog (his dog has bitten White House staff 26 times). How can you contemplate voting either of these awful creatures into arguably the most powerful position in the world - a 77 year old and an 81 year old? Words fail me.



So my old 27" iMac, faithful servant for almost ten years, had started to make strange crackling noises from somewhere deep inside, and I thought, hello, this old guy is on its way out! So two weeks ago I received my brand new 24" iMac M3, purple. I went for the 10-core GPU, as opposed to 8-Core, complete with Magic Mouse and Magic keyboard. (The Magic Mouse has gone straight into the drawer as I hated it, and installed a wired traditional mouse.) Wow! First off, I really do not see much difference in screen sizes, and don't regret the loss of three inches. But the speed!! I had prepared a few tests before it arrived, in particular an export of a handful of clips from Final Cut and timed the export at 7 seconds. New iMac: two and a half seconds! Rendering of edited clips is almost instantaneous. In RAW photo development software (always searching for the best) various applications which I had previously dismissed as just too slow, I'm now re-testing and I'm staggered by the speed of export (apart from Luminar, which is still too slow.) I've discovered the very nice Pixelmator, which exports in milliseconds. This has been a good move! Love it.



Your parcel cannot be delivered ... etc For maybe the last 3 or 4 months I've been receiving countless emails advising me that my parcel was unable to be delivered, due to wrong address, nobody home to sign, etc, etc. I estimate that right now, March 2024, I probably have about 500 parcels awaiting my collection or delivery. Of course, these emails are pure spam. Fortunately Gmail recognises them as spam and dumps them into my spam folder, where I can review and delete them. It seems that people like UPS, DPD and Amazon, to name but a few, are holding my parcels. My question is: why are these mindless morons, imbeciles, idiots and cretins, squatting in the gutters of Calcutta, Bucharest or Beijing or somewhere, still sending them after such a long time? Surely they have already realised that, the scam having gone on for months, recipients cannot possibly believe them? And who, for heaven's sake, clicks on a link in a (usually very ungrammatical) email?



Yanks eating:- Why do you Yanks take the knife and fork in right and left hands respectively, cut off a piece of steak, then put down the knife, swap hands with the fork, and eat the piece of meat right-handed? Then repeat the whole routine? Are you quite so unable to use your left hand?? Here in the UK I suspect we are closer to ambidexterity than you lot. (Personally, i am completely ambidextrous, which is possibly why I sneer when seeing your strange eating habits.)




Ebay Silliness Recently I needed to sell something I didn't need. Brand new, surplus to my requirements, should be worth at least 50 pounds, I thought. So I listed it as I normally would and sat back to wait for 7 days until the end of the auction. Blow me down - an email arrived not half an hour later saying it had sold - for the silly little minimum starting price of about 4 pounds. Why? Turns out that the listing said "'til it sells". And sell it did - instantly. How very silly - Ebay lost out on commission and I lost out on my earnings. What happened to the usual 7 day auction? God knows.