In the midst of all my end of year best of the blog malarky, I seem to have left off one of most important year-end wrap ups: my photography.

So today — a few days late, and in no particular order — I bring you the eleven photos (of mine) that I like most from 2011:

The miniatures

As regular readers of the Big Bad Blog will know, roleplaying is a hobby of mine, and I play D&D on a semi-regular basis. I often take my camera along, to take photos of the minis in action.

Here’s an example of minis in action:

Engagement

Two friends of mine got engaged (to each other) early in 2011, and so I took the opportunity to have an “engagement photo shoot”. A number of the photos resulting from this can be found at this post in April.

My favourite photo from the shoot is this one. The epic feel just feels right.

Greenwich foot tunnel

For most of 2010, Karen and I lived in Greenwich. There’s a tunnel there, that crosses the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. We didn’t use it at all.

When we moved back to Wapping, however, it started to get regular use — we would walk or jog to Greenwich, to spend time in the park or one of their many lovely pubs. The tunnel is quite picturesque, but usually the pedestrian traffic is too heavy to make for a good photo opportunity.

One day in March, however, I found myself in an uncrowded tunnel with my camera. I like the result.

Bubblehead

Summer, a visit to a friend’s, bubbles in the garden. A beautiful day.

Maggie

The Maggie-a-day project is an endeavour in which your blogger attempts to add a photo of his daughter to his Flickr stream every single day.

The project has met with partial success — I certainly do not take a photo every day, and I seem to miss posting a photo approximately one day in four (she’s about 450 days old, and there are about 350 photos in the stream). But with so much of my energy spent on photos of Maggie, it should be no surprise that they make up a significant portion of my top eleven.

Reflections on a nephew

All that practice taking photos of children comes in handy when I get to take photos of other people’s children. These stand out to me, as they are different from the Maggie photos I take daily.

My favourite of these is this photo of my nephew, taken while in Canada:

The green wood

I don’t get out hiking or walking much — while London has a fair bit of green space, none of it is “wild”. And it’s tough to drag a child who isn’t up to walking along with you.

Exceptions are made, however, and one such exception led me to find this little green gem:

The road to the sea

This summer featured our first family holiday — we went down to the French seaside. It was gorgeous, and filled with a dozen photos which would all be featured were this “the top 25 of 2011″, and I did not have an aversion to filling such a list with a group of photos taken in the same short timespan, in the same place.

Out of these photos, two made the cut to the top 11. The first is the final photo in the Maggie sequence above. The second is a black and white photo I took of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something special about photos of water in black and white.

All photos are CC licensed by Mr. Topp, and can be found in my Flickr stream. Alternatively, just click on the photo to go to it on Flickr.

When Karen, Maggie and I boarded the Eurostar for Paris — and then destinations further south and beachlike — little did we know that we would not only be enjoying a relaxing week in the sunshine, but we would also learn some valuable lessons along the way.

Now that they have been learned, and we are safely back below the cloud cover here in London, it is time to share what I have learned like all good boys do.

Think of the Children

Every country has them. Children. And parents. And politicians who want to show parents that they’re thinking of the children.

Good, you might think. The world needs more sensible things, like majestic water parks with free entry, or government mandated popsicles. And you wouldn’t be wrong — we could do with politicians approaching life more like children, and less like parasites. But that’s unfortunately not the world we live in.

No, we live in a world where politicians want parents to think they are making the children safer. And so they create a minefield of strange, unpredictable regulations which make life a hassle for the traveling parent. These regulations in no way make children safer.

For instance, in France, a young child in a hotel is required to have her own cot. Even if she is going to sleep in the same bed as her parents. It’s the law.

So your unsuspecting parents arrive in Paris. They are only staying the night — they have an early train to catch in the morning. They have rented the smallest available room to sleep in.

No good, they are told. You have a baby. The room is too small for the cot.
But she’s going to end up sleeping in the bed with us anyways, say the parents. We don’t need a cot.
Sorry, says the — incredibly polite, despite being Parisian — hotel receptionist. You have to have one. It’s the law.

Lucky for the parents in this story, there was a vacant larger room. A cot was prepared — a completely unsafe cot, piled with comforters and pillows — to be unused in the bigger room, which was actually smaller once you took away space for the cot. But it was certainly more expensive.

Of course, had the hotel been booked up, we would not have been allowed to stay there and been without a place to stay. I’m sure that sleeping on the street is safer for a child than being in a hotel room that lacks a deathtrap cot, though. Paris has lovely streets.

Lesson learned: Before you travel, find out what bizarre laws and regulations exist to keep your child “safe”. It could save you from scrambling around a strange city looking for a hotel while carrying a baby and a giant bag at ten in the evening.

Tell them about the Children

The second lesson we learned was that you need to make sure that people know about your children before you arrive.

This was, we suppose, part of the problem in the hotel incident above. But the fact of the matter is that, if your child is sufficiently young, they are invisible to the corporate interests to whom you have trusted your vacation. Maggie doesn’t need her own bed in the hotel. She doesn’t need a seat on the train. She even gets free entry to the zoo, even though the only reason we go to the zoo is so she can see the animals.

So when we book, Maggie is invisible.

This backfired, on the train, where we were put into the quiet car.

For those unaware, the quiet car is the one for people who like to meditate (or read or sleep), and would like to do so undisturbed by cell phones ringing, people talking, music playing, or babies laughing while they pull the glasses off their father’s face and bang them on the table.

We did not ask to be in the quiet car. But we did not ask to not be in the quiet car. (Actually, I don’t think that it’s even an option to request not be put in the quiet car. But telling them that you have a baby makes you automatically not-quiet. I would suggest claiming that you have a baby with you if you want to have a conversation on the train. If they ask you where she is when you show up without her, just say that you sold her. They’ll understand.)

So they put us in the quiet car.

We didn’t even realise that it was the quiet car at first. We just wondered why people were giving us such disgusted looks.

But we were in Paris at the time, and the worst offender in the “evil looks” department was wearing loafers and no socks. I figured he was just upset that somebody burgled his socks.

Then the train began moving, and the conductor announced to us that it was a quiet car.

Again, we were lucky enough to be on a not-full train, and moved to a different area where we were permitted to be noisy. It was wonderful.

Lesson learned: Always claim you have a baby with you when booking train tickets.

Don’t trust them after you tell them about the Children

So, we had problems about not knowing the rules, and about not telling people about Maggie. But part three of our journey, in which we rent a car and drive the rest of the way, should have been fine.

We were aware of the think-of-the-children rules: Maggie needed to be belted into a carseat that meets European regulations and is properly installed. (One of the few areas where the rules actually do something to keep children safe.)

We let the car company know that a small child was coming.

We asked if they had a car seat. They did.
We asked if we could rent the car seat. We could.
We booked the car seat. They said “done”.
We confirmed the car seat. They said “enough already – it will be here!”

And so it was.

We had heard all the warnings about renting car seats with your rental cars. As warnings are wont to do, they warn against the practice.

Car seats from rental companies aren’t properly cleaned!, they shriek, under the strange impression that their children would be clean, if it only weren’t for the car seat.

Rental companies don’t remove car seats from circulation after accidents! They cry. OK. That makes me nervous. But it sounds a little improbable.

Rental companies don’t pay attention to manufacturer recalls! That actually sounds likely. And worrying.

So we were a little nervous about using a rented car seat in the first place. But the real world practicalities of taking a tin can through a tube under the English Channel, and then a second tin can (from a different train station) across an entire fucking country had forced our hands.

A problem was not unexpected. But the problem was completely unexpected: the car seat was the wrong size.

And so Karen plunked down in a cafe while an appropriate car seat was procured.

Lesson learned: I have no idea. A boy scout-ish “be prepared”? A dire warning that the Rent-a-Car in Dax is not one to be trusted?

Whatever the lesson, it was an adventure, so I claim a lesson. We had a bad guy (the lady at the rent-a-car counter), a goal (find and purchase a car seat), and obstacles (rain, no idea where to find a car seat). It was a lesson in bizarre child seat video game battles.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I learned on my summer vacation. How about you?

Photos are by me, but not from the vacation. You didn’t think I’d have photos from last week off my camera already, did you?

There are many things to confuse a Canadian who finds himself living in London. The cars drive on the other side of the street, the language — despite being the same language — is entirely different, the accents can be hard to understand, and the names of too many places are either not pronounced in the way they are spelled, or a bit too full of innuendo.

All of these things are easy to deal with. If you fail to die in the first week, you grow quickly accustomed to cars coming at you from the “wrong” direction. Your ear tunes to the accent, your vocabulary embraces the local dialect, and you learn not to giggle every time you hear “Cockfosters”.

And then there’s the holidays.

The United Kingdom has most of the same holidays — both official and unofficial — as Canada does. They do Mayday instead of Labour Day. They do not have the “family day” in February, or Canada Day. Their August holiday is at the end of the month, rather than the start.

New Year’s, Easter and Christmas all happen on the same dates as in Canada. The unofficial ones — Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween — all happen on the same date as in Canada. As you would expect. Father’s Day is always the third Sunday in June.

And then there’s Mother’s Day.

In Canada, it always occurs on the second Sunday of May. But in the UK it happens … on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Let’s let that sink in for a second here … the fourth Sunday of Lent. When is that?

The answer, after some deliberation, is two weeks before Easter. But who came up with this system? As an atheist of Jewish upbringing, I do not have a strong tie-in with Lent. I know that Easter is supposed to align with Passover, but occurs on a weekend, and that Mother’s Day is two weeks before Easter, and … you may note that the logic to determine Mother’s Day is getting a bit convoluted.

No matter, though, because the card shops certainly give one plenty of warning that the most card-worthy of all holidays is approaching. The question then becomes what to do about it.

Do I call my mother and grandmother on the UK Mother’s Day? Won’t they then be a little bit confused when I wish them a “Happy Mother’s Day”? I would think so.

Do I then wait until mid-May to make that same phone call, and hope that I realise that it’s Mother’s Day when the day arrives?

Do I attempt both?

When I first moved to the UK, I was caught unawares by the early Mother’s Day. I made the assumption that I had forgotten when Mother’s Day was, and made the calls on UK Mother’s Day, surprising my Mom in the process.

The second year, I decided to call on both days. The logic goes that I am reminded by my environment about the UK mother’s day, but not about the Canadian one. So I am likely to forget the latter, but unlikely to forget the former. So I would try to call on the Canadian day, but if I forget to do so I have already called.

I am a sneaky, sneaky child.

These days, thanks to Twitter (and too much time spent on Twitter), I am certain to see the bazillion “Happy Mother’s Day” messages on Canadian Mother’s Day. It coincides with the American version, so it will be a trending topic. I will know, and will be able to make the calls.

But now Karen’s a mother too. And she has a mother. And they are both French. And their Mother’s Day is on neither the British or Canadian days, but on the last Sunday in May.

I just can’t win.

You know that “why?” game that children like to play? Parents can win it sometimes — all it takes is a PhD?

(by Kate Bernauer)

It looks like France is about to lose the Internet. The Hadopi (“three strikes”) law came into force last week, and ISPs are already receiving tens of thousands of requests per day — expected to increase to approximately 150,000 per day shortly.

For those who are not caught up (rightly or wrongly) in this deluge of due-process-free banning from the Internet, US ISPs do not have to comply with more than twenty-eight such requests a month, due to the workload involved. And French law fines the ISP 1,500 Euros per day for unidentified IP addresses.

Assuming French ISPs can process numbers similar to US ones, that means they will likely be fined (as a group) approximatley one million euros every day under this law (and current conditions). A cost certain to be passed on to customers.

And that cost will grow with the backlog.

Which means that for those few Internet users left in France, their internet bill will skyrocket. Enjoy your 1,000 Euro/month Internet bill, if you can afford it.