You’ll have all heard in the news on Monday about London’s ‘Mass Skive’. If you haven’t, there’s a nice video of Boris Johnson talking about it.

It really has been a mass skive though. Imperial College Mechanical Engineering Department, usually a bastion of the protestant work ethic, was closed for two whole days (although were back to normal today). I needn’t tell you that London is a brilliant place in the snow. I went to church on Sunday night. When I went in, it was clear, when I came out, the ground was coated in snow. Me and some friends had fun throwing each other into the snow on the way back through Hyde park.

On Monday, the snow was really quite impressive. Enough of description… pictures!

The Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall

Queen’s Lawn Snowball Fight

The view from the 6^th floor of Mechanical Engineering

The panoramas were created using Microsoft’s Seadragon technology. They don’t do a lot of cool stuff, so they might as well get the credit this time. They have a Deep Zoom composer which generates code for your site. Finally, I’d like to present the gallery (I expect I’ll put in captions later):

Hello all,
I’ve been back at Imperial for a week now, and I thought it was about time I gave you an update.
The most exciting thing to greet me on my return to Imperial College was a genuine Ferrari F1 car. Fortunately for you, my wonderful readers, I have pictures!

The Ferrari has been lent to Imperial college for a short time, although I forget the reason why. I recall it being something to do with the Mechanical Engineering department collaborating with Ferrari on something. I said it was a genuine F1 car, but that was a little misleading. It is actually a show model with no engine. I am no F1 expert, but it looks as though it is the Ferrari F2003-GA, but painted in 2009 livery. If you have time, take a look at Ferrari’s new 2009 F1 car.
On Thursday we had quite a fun lab in which we tested the efficiency of two different engines, a diesel and a petrol engine of 1.5 and 1.3 litres respectively. It was definitely one of the louder labs we have done.
But it’s not all fun and games here at Imperial. In fact, practically none of it is fun and games, and despite the light smattering of exciting new things like fiddling with Engines and learning MATLAB, there were also a series of rather horrendous progress tests. I’m not sure I’ve failed any of them, but I’m certain I haven’t performed spectacularly in any of them. I am most optimistic about Mechatronics. Before the test, I didn’t understand any of the questions, and things gradually started to dawn on me through the course of the test, although I forgot the equation to find the V_RMS of an AC wave.
Hope you’re having fun and I’d love to hear from you all,
Peter

This weekend I had a really excellent weekend away in Conwy. Our CU shared the weekend away with Emma’s church. This meant that we could have a hokiday as a CU< which otherwise wouldn't have been possible.

The highlight of the weekend for me was definitely climbing Crib Goch with Tim, Mandy, Ben, Ben, Steve, Cesar, Katherine, and a couple of other people whose names escape me. Crib Goch, if you are not aware, is a mountain in the region around Snowdonia. The original intention had been to climb Crib Goch, then climb up to Snowdonia. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible due to the weather starting to look quite bad, and me having boots that had little or no grip.

However, during the time, we did still manage to see some beautiful sights. The panorama below shows the view from half way up Crib Goch:

Another of my favourite pictures was the one you can see below:

A lot more pictures are available to see on Alastair’s flickr page. Here they can be viewed full, or however you want.

A lot of people have been having birthdays recently. One of those people was Ben Youd (Emma’s boyfriend, and a good friend from CU), who received a Nikon D80. I recommend you head over to see |yearn|only|until|dawn|, his photoblog on aminus3. I’ve been quite impressed so far, because most people who say ‘daily updates’ actually mean ‘I’ll update once or twice, then quit forever’. A good example of such a person is Monika Roberts, but it looks as though Ben actually means it so far. Good job! I was going to comment on how bad the name of his blog was. Then I remember what mine was called, and decided silence on that subject would be better.

To be honest, the weekend for me made me realise just how fantastic the people in my CU are. There’s only a few of us, but I’ll have to say I’m lucky to have such good friends. It was also very special to meet the people from the Word of Life church again, having not seen them since I broke up with Emma.

Peter hat weiter photographiert.
Schönes Wochenende!

deviantART
flickr

Family Funday

Whole gallery

Barry’s Birthday

Check out this fantastic picture by my good friend Howard:

He has an entire gallery on deviantART.

I hope you enjoy this site as much as I enjoyed making it.

I’ve included a picture below as a taste of what’s to come: