The weekend after our last set of exams, I went off to Dublin for a few days to celebrate taking the last exams we'll take in our academia (for now at least - who knows what will happen in the future). We had a great time, enjoying the Guinness and Bulmers Irish cider, and I even managed to find a little time to take some photos of the city.

The weather wasn't the best whilst there so a lot of the nicer photos (outside of the pubs) were taken within about 10 minutes of each other, with a sunset-coloured sky over a relatively calm River Liffey.

You can see some of the photos in my Dublin photo gallery.

Despite the fact that somebody seems to have hacked into my server this evening and deleted all of my photos, I have been working on a way of mapping all of the photos I've uploaded to the website over the past few years.

I had the idea of mapping them a while back but didn't progress further than showing roughly in the world a place is located. Recently, however, online mapping services have improved in leaps and bounds. As part of this, Google has just opened up their system for anyone to add their own data to as well. Tonight, this is what I have begun to do.

Each of the towns and cities in my gallery has been 'geocoded' to a specific location and is now pinpointed on a map of the globe which you can click, drag and zoom to your hearts content.

I am still experimenting with the opportunities here, but features you can expect from the site soon will hopefully include photos in the popup bubbles and maps on each town and city page to show nearest neighbours. Mapping travels would be something I'm interested in trying out as well.

I was in central London earlier this evening and so took the opportunity to capture some photos as the sun was starting to go down, lighting up the Centre Point building by Tottenham Court Road tube station with a nice warm glow. After taking the first I was almost hit by a bus coming up Oxford Street from behind me - but at least I got a nice photo from it (after altering the lighting on the bus slightly).

My first full day back in London was blessed with sunshine so I decided to take a walk around Bloomsbury - the area around my university - to enjoy the weather and take some photos with my new camera.

I've put seven of the photos into my London photo gallery.

A personal blog wouldn't be a real blog if I didn't post some photos of my pets, so over the past few days I've been taking some photos whilst experimenting with my new Canon EOS 300D camera. I have three dogs who live with my family - Lucy, Willow and Buster. They're all lovely but ever so slightly hyperactive. All the time.

Here is a photo of each of them in turn:

The cats may be next, if they'll pose for a photo. Like true cats they enjoy their sleep, and I rarely see them awake!

Last week I decided to upgrade my camera. Having had my trusty Fujifilm S602 Zoom for almost two and a half years, I decided I really wanted the flexibility of a digital SLR camera. I chose to upgrade to a Canon EOS 300D which is a camera that has come highly recommended for a while but is also on offer for an unbelievable price right now. It offers the flexibility I'm after, with the ability to change lenses and upgrade where necessary. I've had the desire to upgrade for a while now but pricing has been an issue - being a student I don't have too much money available, although the bits of web development work I do on the side certainly helps.

I'm looking forward to the camera arriving so that I can experiment with it. I had my heart set on receiving it today but it didn't show up in the post - hopefully tomorrow! This reminds me very much of the time I was waiting eagerly for my Fujifilm camera and it didn't turn up when expected.

I have just added a number of random photos from my galleries to the right hand side of each page of the blog. With me having over 700 photos in my photo galleries I thought I might as well make better use of them and show them here in the blog as well. Photos in the side bar of peoples' blogs is quite popular in the 'blogosphere', with Flickr being the photo sharing service which seems to be used most often. There is no need to use their code here to display my photos though as all of the photos are stored on the dankarran.com server and managed using a database I designed a few years back.

Over the past few days there have been a load of pictures being posted to Flickr, a popular photo sharing website, about 'transparent screens'.

The idea is that you take a photo of your computer screen which has a background on it of the area behind the screen. Take this photo, for example. The person who took the photo has taken a photo of their desk with a lavalamp on it, set that photo as their desktop and then taken a photo of the two combined.

I think it's pretty clever - especially with some of the others where there are cats sitting behind the monitor with tails sticking out. They have to be perfectly aligned for it all to work.