Welcome Home QRH

Yesterday saw a parade through Worcester streets of the Queen's Royal Hussars to welcome them home. It made me feel very proud to see that so many had turned out to cheer and wave to one of Worcestershire's local regiments following gruelling six month tours of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The parade started at noon from the Territorial Army centre in Silver Street, then made it's way along City Walls Road, College Street and the Lychgate roundabout, into High Street (passing the Mayor and local dignitaries) and finally turned into Broad Street.

Luckily I had remembered to bring my camera and managed to get a couple of pictures. Well done boys and girls, welcome home you've done us proud.

Dan & naD

This may not be the funniest sketch on Youtube but it has to be one of the cleverest. I have absolutely no idea how it was achieved, but this sketch is a palindrome. You could watch it backwards and it would be identical.

The thought that must go into a project like this to get the timing right etc is mind boggling. I hope you enjoy it.

Some Minor Changes

Just so you know I have spent a few hours making some little changes and improvements to the blog. I won't bore you with everything but a quick round up should include...

• All feed subscribers should now have the ability to share my posts with the likes of StumbleUpon, Digg etc more easily by links at the bottom of each post.*
• Email subscribers should now see a more branded and personalised email.
• My friends on Facebook should now have the ability to read my posts in their news feed and to follow e-clecticism without having to leave Facebook. This is all thanks to the NetworkedBlogs application which will hopefully allow you to share my posts with other Facebook users more easily.

These are all ways that I hope to increase the readership of the blog, lets hope it works.

*This has always been possible from the main site but not from the feed. See here and here for more information.

The PEN Story

Another great find from René. The Olympus PEN is fifty years old apparently. To celebrate the fact, Olympus have created a charming stop-motion animation that reminds me a lot of the Her Morning Elegance video I posted a while back.

This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. We hope you enjoy :-)

By the way, I love the song so if anyone knows anything about it, please leave a comment. Thanks.

Final Plea

It is now less than a week to go until I attempt my abseil for the Children Today Charitable Trust. If you don't know what I'm on about, have a look here.

Can I please ask that you either use the widget to the right or click here to visit my fund raising page and sponsor even the smallest of amounts.

Thank you very much.

First-Person Shooter Disease

I was never really a huge fan of computer games until recently. I think my very short attention span was what always put me off. With perhaps the exception of the early LAN versions of Quake, I'd play them for a short while but would quickly lose interest. But since getting a Playstation 3, along with the Call Of Duty series of games, I am a confirmed addict. Even now though it is really only the online multiplayer options that hold my attention. There is something about playing against other people that satifies much more than against any machine. Well for now anyway, obviously technology is improving all the time.

I'm telling you this so that you can appreciate that I realise just how serious First-Person Shooter Disease (Duke Nukem's Disease) actually is. I cannot begin to imagine how much it must devistate the lives of the sufferers and their families. Please watch the video below and give generously.*


*For the gullible, this is of course a joke.

A Day At The Cricket

As I promised recently, I'd like to tell you about the thoroughly pleasant day I spent at New Road last week. The match was a warm up to the Ashes and featured England Lions verses Australia. Not being too flushed for cash at the moment I'd chosen to attend only the second day of the four day test. This turned out to be fantastic timing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the weather was stunning. Not a cloud in the sky most of the day and a top temperature of 31°C according to the thermometer atop the new Graham Hick pavilion.

Another reason was the fact that Australia only had two batsmen left after close of play on the first day. Once they had been dispatch fairly promptly I had nearly a full day to watch England in action.


As you can see I also remembered to take my camera to attempt my first try at Sports photography. Unfortunately a hangover gave me a rather unsteady hand so I didn't get as many good shots as I'd have liked but I was pleased with most of them. It's great because Worcester is not a huge ground and so with the help of my trusty zoom lens I was able to get some fairly good close-ups.


A highlight for me though has to be spotting Nasser Hussein exiting the Sky Sports commentary box and walking right past me. This time I managed to quickly train my camera on him for the shot below. I wasn't as lucky with Michael Atherton sadly as he moved much quicker than I did.