Castle Party Photo

A number of people have put such stunning photos of last Saturday's party at the castle on Facebook, that I do not feel I can compete. However, here is one photo just for now as a place holder, showing the wicker man in mid conflagration - just before bits started dropping off. Next to the castle is the small Glastonbury-style tented village of mid-summer revellers. Thanks to Hew for the photo.

Balintore Castle Point Cloud Coordinates Extracted

I managed to extract the coordinates of the Balintore Castle PhotoSynth point cloud, using a program called (unsurprisingy) SynthExport. Download from:

http://synthexport.codeplex.com/releases/view/45675

This can export to a number of formats.

I used FreeWRL to visually verify the output. Download it from here:

http://freewrl.sourceforge.net/download.html

The X3D output failed for some reason, but the VRML output is shown below:

This proves the data was successfully extracted from PhotoSynth - hurrah!

Postpartum !

Phew! I have just about caught up on my sleep after the Bacchanalian excesses of the Balintore Castle Midsummer Party. Many thanks to everyone who make the effort to attend - it was fabulous to see old friends and new. In fact it turned into a mini reunion of ex-employees of Realtime Worlds (RTW), which spectacularly went into receivership last year. Indeed, I described RTW to another guest, in a moment of expedicious precis,  as "the games company which went bang".

I must also say thanks to the "friends of Balintore" who helped with the setting-up, the cooking and the clearing up afterwards. You know who are.

Incredibly. we were blessed with good sunny weather on the day. The day before and the day after were wash-outs, so those that camped overnight headed off fairly promptly after breakfast on the Sunday morning.

The attached 3D point cloud image was created on the day of the party by Flying Scotscam, a aerial photography company.based in Kirriemuir. This is created, by some IBM software called Photosynth, from multiple photographs taken by a small remote controlled helicopter. For more see:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=a133b355-2c20-4686-9232-bdceae79a57a

Does anyone know how to obtain the raw point cloud data from Photosynth? As a 3D graphics programmer, I would love to play about with the data set of point coordinates. :-)

Should post-party blues be called post-party-um? :-) In fact, after recuperating from the sheer physical hard work of organising the party, the event has left me really motivated to redirect the same level of energy towards the castle restoration after many days of  not being able to.

Balintore Castle Party Wicker Man

I thought you might like a preview of the wicker man, my friend Andrew and I constructed for this Saturday's party at Balintore Castle. How Andrew managed to find the strength to get the head on, I shall never know. I am deeply indebted.

A Poem For Today

While stationary in the Edinburgh rush hour traffic today, after picking up items bought on gumtree for the castle, I composed a poem in my head, Here goes ....

Kincardine, Kincardine, Forth, and Tay
These are the bridges I have crossed today
"Kincardine twice?" I hear you say
Yes, my GPS led me astray!

I have no explanation of why this popped into my head, but I do offer my humblest apologies for sharing. :-)

And Then It Was Gone

In the Balintore Castle laundry, there was a "copper" - this is a large copper bowl, situated above a coal fire, in which the clothes and sheets are boiled. When I first saw the castle, the copper had disappeared and the brick structure holding the vessel, had half collapsed with the remainder being extremely unstable.

Today, my roofer Andy and myself undertook to remove the final remnants of the brick structure - some friends had removed a large chunk the day before - but I stopped further progress because the flue above the boiler looked set to collapse and I didn't want my friends to be in any danger. I was hoping that the flue built into the wall would support its own weight, whether the boiler was there or not ...

Anyhow, I took a picture of the scene, left with a barrow of rubble - but stopped in my tracks and rushed back when I heard a noise like an earthquake accompanied by a "Whoa!" from my roofer. My roofer had removed one brick from the top of the flue, and the whole structure had detached from the wall cleanly in a one-er - looking, apparently, like the collapsing twin towers.

BEFORE

AFTER

Thankfully my roofer was on the top of a ladder and I was out the room - the flue was obviously NOT built into the wall and would have had to be removed in any case for safety. The after photo is 12:43 - little did I know at 12:40 when the before photo was taken that the transition would be so immediate. It was only a few seconds. the delay of 3 minutes is largely me regaining my composure.

Blogging this from a friend's house :-) still no InterNet at the castle. :-(

  

Normal Service Will be Resumed As Soon As Possible!

Sorry folks - the Internet went down at the castle after just 3 days of the blog. :-( That's why there have been no more blog entries. It's not due to lack of  blog dedication!

I'm currently using the InterNet at a friend's house.

Talk Talk refused to sort out the problem with the castle's InterNet unless I bought one of their modems. I pointed out that the problem was not related to the type of modem, so they could still proceed with their initial investigations at least i.e.: the ADSL signal was missing on the line. Being a computer type, I had run the diagnostic S/W on the existing modem. However, the technical support chap said "If I do not do as I am told. I will get into trouble", so pretty much an admission that the company is more dedicated to ripping off their customers than helping them.

It is a noticeable trend that all big companies have an operations procedure designed to extract money from customers unjustly. I would NOT be able to sleep at night if I was one of the business analysists that designed these systems.

Anyhow, the blog will resume when I get online again.