There's a house at the top of Cobden View Road in Sheffield that has some very fragrant flowers in the front garden. You get a huge noseful every time you walk by in the spring and summer. Imagine my olfactory confusion when I walked down there a couple of weeks ago and got a huge noseful of something… different. The sort of smell you get when you (used to) walk past a particularly dodgy pub or a student's hall of residence room (or at least was the case for a lot of doors on my first year corridor!) My friend who was accompanying me at the time agreed that it smelt dodgy but we thought nothing more of it…
…until I saw this story on The Star website today…
Detectives who raided a Sheffield house after neighbours complained of a strange smell discovered a full-scale cannabis factory.
They entered the house on Cobden View Road, Crookes, and found the remains of around 500 plants, believed to be cannabis.
One man who lives on the street said: "A lot of people on the street had commented about the smell for some time and we all suspected what was going on, so somebody must have reported it. We used to see the police driving along the street quite regularly, so it looks like they may have had it under surveillance for some time."
A British Airways 777 has crash landed just before 1pm today at Heathrow Airport. The BBC News pages covering the story (link) indicate that there have only been a few minor injuries, thankfully, but the plane is in a bad way. It landed about 500m short of the start of runway 27L, ripping off part of the undercarriage and severely damaging the wings and belly.
This is the first major incident in the 14 year history of the Boeing 777, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
The breaking news (at 1535 GMT) is that a BBC reporter who had spoken to an airport worker who had spoken to the captain says that the plane lost all power and avionics and had to glide in…
I await with some anticipation the AAIB's findings, although that will take months. The main thing is that everyone got off safely - if the plane had landed 200m earlier it would have been the wrong side of the perimeter fence and the result could have been much worse.
At the weekend I found out about a new add-on ticket for your train ticket called the PLUSBUS. If your city/town is participating (like Sheffield is) then you can buy e.g. a 'Sheffield PLUSBUS' when you buy your train ticket, provided your journey starts or ends at Sheffield or Meadowhall and the other end of your journey isn't in South Yorkshire. You can buy a PLUSBUS for one or both ends of your train journey and, even better, railcard discounts apply!
The PLUSBUS ticket gives you unlimited bus travel in the area and, in many cases, use of the trams. The Sheffield PLUSBUS is £2.20 (£1.45 with a railcard) and gives you unlimited use of all buses and trams… by way of comparison, a FirstDay ticket and a Stagecoach DayRider ticket to give the same effect would cost a total of £6.20!!!
As an example, on Saturday I paid a total of £8.75 for a return train trip to Leeds, use of Leeds buses all day and use of Sheffield buses and trams all day - I'd call that value!
I had another go at star trails photography tonight, although conditions were little better than last time. For the first time I tried setting my 350D to save both a RAW and a JPEG file, so that I could have a go at playing with RAW files. These are effectively direct data dumps from the image sensor without any post-processing. You can take this file and "develop" it on your computer with your desired settings for sharpening, white balance, colour temperature and other things. I downloaded (for free) and used RawShooter to manipulate my RAW file as, although my usual photo organiser Picasa can handle RAW files, I wanted to have greater control over the development process.
I think my decision was vindicated, given the pre- and post-processing shots below.
Before…
…and after
Clearly my lens had some marks on it, but I was amazed with the image I managed to rescue/create from what on first glance appeared to be a total write-off.
If you were ever in doubt about the strength of an aeroplane's wings (e.g. during a bit of light turbulence…) then take a look at how mangled and twisted the wing of this South African 737-800 became after an encounter with a box lorry…
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