Colcam

In England-shire (that's the bit joined on to the bottom of Scotland).

This is bad news for the four wheel drive urban tractor brigade, who are discovering that their extremely expensive, all terrain, global warming gas guzzlers, essential for school run road humps and August bank holiday trips to Scotland, slide off the road just like any other vehicle.

It's also bad news for school kids. Stupid teachers who are more interested in health and safety than the job they are supposedly employed to do, are banning the throwing of snowballs in the playground, in case one should contain a stone. Pupils have actually been excluded from school for no more than chucking a lump of white stuff, and that's without the stone in it.

I was in Glen Spean today, on the road from Spean Bridge to Dalwhinnie, to shoot some images. It was a bitterly cold day, and the mountains had a good covering of snow, so the hillwalkers were out in force.

Judging by the number of cars and minibuses parked below one mountain alone, there must have been upwards of a hundred people on that hill, wading through snow, all aiming for the same summit.

Hardly getting away from it all!

I have been up hills in winter in Scotland, in the snow, in sub zero temperatures, where the wind is always bitter. It's dangerous. You can fall off things, slip down things, get lost, get stuck and just plain freeze to death.

But at least I was only ever up there because I was getting PAID for it - and because I never had to go right to the very top.

The Oban Times, a newspaper renowned for its fearless and unbiased reporting of current affairs and world events, has again shocked the nation with the news that someone has written words critical of Fort William in a travel book.

Giles Gordon, in a book called Scotland From the Air, states that Fort William has little to offer in the way of culture, and that it rains all the time. The paper accuses the author of "putting the boot in" by including photographs of a packed car park, and log trucks on the bypass.

The bypass? I presume they mean the ugly dual carriageway that cuts off the town from the shores of the loch, where visitors might like to walk in the pissing rain if they could find the way over. Log trucks? How unreasonable they should use a road. Perhaps they should be banned. Why not ban the trucks that bring in the overpriced, tasteless trash the shops sell the tourists at the same time?

As for culture, musical, sporting and historical that the Oban Times say they can defend.......

C'mon boys and girls! You mean the busker in the underpass between that horrible main street and Morrisons supermarket? All right, that's the musical culture. Now the sporting. Is that people falling off Ben Nevis? Maybe the mountain bike championships count as "sporting culture". Frankly, after the traffic chaos it caused last year it should be banned from the area until the authorities do something about that disgraceful B road they have the cheek to call the A82.

Historical culture? Giles is spot on. It's a railway station on the West Highland Line and not much more.

The article concludes by offering to show the author a good time if he comes back to Fort William. How? Are they going to take him to Glasgow or Edinburgh, maybe Perth or Dundee?

Flying over Fort William was probably enough for the poor man, and at least he would be dry up there.

I forgot to mention Cinepaint when I was blabbering on about software for the Mac (see An Apple a Day).

Mac Cinepaint is similar to the Gimp, but designed for working on motion pictures. It has been used in the production of several Hollywood movies - The Last Samurai, to name just one.

I use it for re-touching fotos. I don't really manipulate or alter my images, like, I wouldn't stick a 12 inch prick on George Bush's forehead or anything like that.

Mac Cinepaint is free to download.

Spent most of the day working on the computer. Processing fotos, and trying to find LOST fotos.

I only use a Mac laptop these days - Powerbook G4. I ran for years with Linux on a PC and loved it, but finally got a bit soft, discovered the joys of iTunes and started to want to watch DVDs and stuff like that. OK OK I know you can configure Linux to play movies, but damned if I could ever get them to work! Still, even if I never saw another movie, and never heard another CD in my life, it would have been worth it to just avoid WINDOZY!!!

As a photographer, I get the best of all worlds with the Powerbook. Raw images were nearly impossible on Linux, and that was a huge problem with my Canon digital SLR. Downloading Raw to the Mac is a doddle, and I can do it anywhere 'cos the little laptop goes everywhere with me.

I don't buy much software. So much open source stuff is available and most of it is so superior to the grossly expensive Windoze equivalents. Openoffice.org replaces Microsoft Office - and doesn't crash, The Gimp replaces Photoshop and, in my humble opinion, does just as good a job. Abiword is a fine little word processor when you want to do more simple tasks and can't be arsed opening a huge office application. The price of all these and more is perfect. FREE.

Because these are basically Linux programs originally, I can sneak my favourite little friend onto my desktop. The Linux mascot TUXEDO T. PENGUIN.

Forget it. It sucks!

It's been raining here for months. West coast, very near Ben Nevis, not too far from Loch Ness and Nessie, that fearsome monster that causes us to be swamped with tourists all summer, when it will still be raining. At least the locals here will be happy as they rip off visitors and each other in the most blatant acts of daylight robbery I have ever witnessed in my life.

The Loch Ness Monster? Yes folks, I believe in Unicorns too!



Drawing by Colcam.