Exactly 4 weeks from today I'm getting married.

The process of planning a wedding hasn't been exactly what I expected it to be. I knew there would be pressure and I was fully expecting to battle it all out with family members as to who was cut from the list. I knew that lots of people would be saying "well they invited you to their wedding 10 years ago so you should invite them" even though we'd not even spoken to them since.

But I was wrong. That part turned out to be pretty straightforward. What I wasn't prepared for was spending time thinking about the wedding and not about each other. I guess it's easy to forget that you have to work at relationships and you can't keep burying your head in the sand. If I'm honest I was starting to look at the wedding as a chore, a formality to get out of the way and everything would be fine once it was over and done with. But that's no way to approach a wedding.

After much soul searching and low points, we both realised that we'd stopped communicating, stopped spending the time together we should have, stopped doing the fun things we used to do and had slowly slipped into a rut. We were wondering if we should even carry on with the wedding at all. But once we realised what the problem was we picked ourselves up and starting doing things together rather than her watching TV, me going on the computer. We started being a couple again and we're much happier. Suddenly we both remembered why we wanted to get married in the first place!

When I was younger I always assumed that relationships between people who were meant to be together just worked. Everything clicked, things never went wrong and there were never any lows. But that's ridiculous (well certainly after the first couple of years - prior to that it's all a honeymoon period). All relationships have their ebbs and flows - when things are good they're great, but when things slip you start to notice all the flaws, all the negatives and can easily get consumed but it.

I remember watching a program about relationships a year or so ago. They had a young couple who'd just met, a couple about to get married, one that had been married a short while right up to a couple in their 70s who'd been married forever. What I found most interesting and endearing was the elderly couple. They said that the secret to their staying together so long and being happy together was that they knew that they had to work at their relationship and would have their ups and downs, but to always keep in mind what brought them together in the first place. They said that all too often these "young folk" hit hard times and gave up to easily - hence the high divorce rates these days. They may have been in their 70s but they were still young at heart with their outlook on life and sense of humour. And after all these years they were still very much in love - seeing photos of them when they met you could still see the sparkle in their eyes now. They were really lovely.

We know that once we're married we've still got to work at it, and if we stop doing that we'll end up right back in a rut again. So often couples come back from the high of a year of wedding planning, the perfect wedding day, an awesome honeymoon to the reality of their former lives. They're under the illusion that the rest of their lives will be like their wedding day, but of course that's not the case. As that elderly couple said, you've got to keep working at it!

But in the meantime, I've got a party in 4 weeks to look forward to! If you want to buy us a present from our wedding list, my good lady has put one up on Debenham's website - just search for my name!

I've mentioned before that I like taking the sort of photographs that I like. If someone else likes them too then that's a bonus. Given that I'm an expert on the sort of photos I like, and that I'm a pretty normal, regular guy you'd think I might have an idea what other people like too. The fact is that I don't.

I have a Flickr site where I upload a good portion of the decent photos I take. Flickr's great because the more people who look at your photos, make comments and mark them as favourites, the more "interesting" your photos are. The most interesting photos uploaded each day end up in the Explore section of the site. You can see the 500 most interesting photos each day and look at random interesting photos over the last 7 days, month and so on. Generally you find the most interesting photos are also the best, although that's not always the case - I often find photos and think "what the hell is that doing there?" - but I guess they're interesting to somebody.

I have quite a few photos that currently show up in the Explore section of Flickr (17 at the moment, with a few inside the top 40 of each day - and I even had one in the top ten for a couple of days). When I see one of mine up there I frequently think "what's mine doing with all those amazing photos?" - I'm my own worst critic sometimes. Here's an example:

While doing the Ingleton Waterfall Walk and getting pictures of - wait for it - waterfalls - I spied this simple scene and thought I could maybe make something interesting from it. When I got home I looked at it and thought "well, it's okay, but there's no foreground interest" and left it alone. The other day I was looking through my photos, spotted it and thought I'd do a quick process and put it on Flickr. Much to my surprise it's been very popular! I'd never for a moment have thought people would like it.

Conversely some of my favourite photos that were much more difficult to see, compose and take than the one above have been met with a wall of silence, like this one for example (which is one of my favourites):

My girlfriend agreed with me that the hill photo was okay but not great and she liked the black and white so much that she wants it framed in the kitchen. That's high praise from her - normally if I suggested printing out one of my photos her first suggestion would be to put it in the toilet!

I guess if you want universal appeal you have to go for the simpler, less arty shots that people can instantly make a connection with and don't push the boundaries. Still, since I take photos primarily for me, I don't need to sacrifice art for popularity and can keep doing what I'm doing. But don't worry, I'm sure the odd shot that you'll like too will slip through my "Flickr interesting but not John Conners interesting" filter - as I said, I frequently get it wrong!

In many ways I’m a bit old fashioned. I don’t have fancy gore-tex hiking boots because my old British Army issue boots do the job just fine. I’ve never bought a pair of running shoes that cost over £45 because I just don’t see the point. And I’ve never bought specialist running socks because standard sports socks work well enough.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself in a sports retailer about to buy 4 pairs of the aforementioned specialist running socks. I had a gift voucher, I’ve been doing a lot of running and am blistering my feet to hell, so I thought I’d give them a go and see if they’re worth the extra cost (you can get 3 pairs of normal socks for one pair of these). Here is a shot of my swish new Nike running socks in action:

I’ve just returned from a short run after a workout and I must confess they are worth every penny - I should have bought some years ago! They’re much thinner than the socks I normally wear, and they’re ergonomically designed to fit the contours of my feet (according to the instructions) which means I have to get them the right way round - one has an ‘L’ on it, the other an ‘R’!

I won’t say it feels like my feet have been massaged while floating on a cushion of air (because that would be ridiculous), but they don’t feel like all the skin wants to fall off them (as they normally do) and there’s no chafing from sweat soaking them as I’d usually get - it seems to wick the sweat away.

Of course the best thing about buying the socks was the woman at the till who asked me if I’d “like a free England car flag” to which I gleefully replied: “absolutely not thanks - I’m Scottish!”.

I remember ABBA. Judith Wilson used to live along the road from us when I was a kid and when I was over at hers one day when she brought out an ABBA record. I’d never heard of them at that point and don’t really remember if she played the record or just looked at it (come on, it was 20 years ago!). But they clearly didn’t make an impression as I never made a point of listening to them again.

Sure, they were on the TV loads over the years, at discos, weddings, films and so on - it’s impossible to escape from them even now. I just didn’t pay much attention. So last year when I was doing some redecorating I picked up the ABBA Gold CD from my girlfriend’s collection (it was closest to hand), put it on and was hooked. I never realised what a great band they were! And even more surprising was that I already knew all the words and could sing along immediately. I instantly understood why someone once wrote a PhD on the music of ABBA (I saw a program on the BBC about it years ago).

I’ve been working hard on the next version of John’s Background Switcher (which is in beta, contact me if you want to join in the testing) and fired up Media Player. I wasn’t sure what to listen to so just picked the first on the list - which was 2 Unlimited. Since that was terrible, I chose the next which was of course ABBA - and once again I’m reminded how good they are! Excellent coding music borne out by some of the work I’ve spent the weekend doing - including the much requested anti-pants filter. One of my colleagues was doing a PowerPoint presentation and my background switcher had decided to select a photo of a pair of pants on a moor as his wallpaper, much to his embarrassment! So as of the next version you can put in a list of tags and no photos containing any of those tags will be chosen - so no more photos of random children on your desktop!

Now, if I could just get ABBA to reform and record some new material - I know all their songs already…

I may be Scottish, but that doesn’t mean I automatically support whichever football team England are playing. Since I enjoy watching football (almost as much as playing it) I like to see a good game, quality passing, quality goals and non-stop entertainment. I support Real Madrid (have done for years, long before your Zidane’s and Raul’s played there) so naturally I’m a fan of Dave Beckham who has in my mind been their best player this season. I watch the premiership and love seeing the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Man U slugging it out with some of the world’s best players - some of them English.

So I can hardly watch the World Cup and see a lot of English players I respect and admire - and want them to lose just because Scottish people are supposed to want them to. No, I want them to do well - we’re all British at the end of the day. But frankly, I find them as frustrating to watch as your average Englishman probably does.

You need 5-6 world class players to win a major championship and I think England are there or thereabouts. They have in Lampard and Gerrard two of the best attacking midfielders in the world. In Joe Cole they’ve got a creative player who stands out in a team like Chelsea which is saying something. I’ve been on about Joe Cole for years - ever since I saw him play for the West Ham youth team at 15 - I always told people he’d be a star and they’d say “luxury player”. Shows what they know! Oh, and Wayne Rooney - well no need to talk about the future world player of the year, the press do enough of that.

So when I sit down to watch them I’m always hopeful they’ll show what they can do week in, week out for their clubs. But it never happens. They always seem to struggle, they don’t pass, they make heavy weather of everything and just don’t play to their potential. In fact, they play like my work team does - and that’s not a compliment to anybody!

If England were to win the World Cup by being the best team, I’m not going to begrudge them that. But if they just continue to under-perform and get eliminated long before then I’ll be disappointed, not celebrating. However if they play well and still get knocked out, well it’s fair enough - I won’t be cheering but I won’t be crying either!

I should have put a bet on though. I couldn’t decide who to support before the tournament started - it was either Spain or Argentina - and it turns out they’re the two star teams playing the best football! Since I already have a Spain top from the last European championships, I guess I’ll have to nip out and buy an Argentina one to add to my collection. At least they play like a team - and their coach doesn’t get paid millions a year unlike a certain Swede who isn’t exactly what I’d call value for money if I were an England supporter…

To rival Ian’s unhelpful error message, I just encountered this one while trying to do a Get Latest in TFS:

I did what it said and the problem still arose - not surprisingly. I can just see the developer’s thinking when they wrote it: “Well if an error gets through to here it beats me what it is, let’s just tell them to restart and hope is sorts itself out!”. I’m sure Joel would be amused…

I’ve just bought myself a copy of Capture One LE which is a quality piece of photo processing workflow software as recommended by the likes of Paul Indigo and Keith Henson (a couple of professional photographers). Given that it’s designed for professionals it’s no surprise that it’s made my life easier processing the many photos I’ve been taking on shoots. I can spend a lot less time trawling through photos tweaking and prodding them one-by-one and can instead batch process, apply contrast, saturation and a whole host of things all at once. It stops me being so ad-hoc and makes me follow a workflow which is a good thing. Plus the quality of the processed images is a step up from Photoshop’s RAW editor.

Capture One really is very good (hence why I bought a copy rather than downloading a dodgy key generator) and it’s encouraged me to go through some of the older shots I’ve taken but haven’t done anything with. Like this one:

If I go out on a shoot I can take anywhere from 5 to 50 decent photos. It’s not surprising that when I get home I don’t have time to go process all of them - I’ve just been cherry picking the best (in my opinion) and working on them. Sometimes I clearly miss some nuggets like the one above so it’s not been the best strategy! However the time it’ll take to process them all is dramatically less now thanks to my purchase so in future I’ll be able to make the most of a shoot and share more of my work on my Flickr site and here. Nice.

… It rains and you can smell that lovely odour of water hitting hot tarmac - it’s sort of like sweet, dusty steam. If anything reminds me of long summer days when I was a kid, it has to be that. I should have expected it since I finally got around to washing my car yesterday - it always rains after I wash my car, that’s why I do it so infrequently (it has nothing to do with my being lazy at all).

Anyway, just to clarify, Saturday qualified as a John Conners Nice Day - and it’s not often I can say that! I just hope there are plenty more this summer, it’s about time.

Thanks to BT cocking things up and turning off my broadband connection I spent last night completely disconnected from the internet. It was an interesting experience and made me think about how the march of web-based software is making me change where I store my data.

Take Gmail. I love Gmail. Aside from John’s Background Switcher it’s my favourite piece of software and being a heavy emailer I use it extensively. I also store contact details, recipes and all sorts of things on there knowing no matter where I am I can always get at my information. Contrast this with a couple of years ago where I’d have my inbox stored on my computer at home - my contacts in there too, maybe I’d copy them to my work machine or onto a flash drive so I could get to them elsewhere. Hell, maybe I’d print them out and put them in my wallet!

But now Google hosts all this information. A software company. If I’d thought about this possibility a few years ago I’d have been a bit concerned at what they might do with it, whether they’d decide to delete it all on a whim or release all my dodgy conversations with other women to my girlfriend - or blackmail me with that threat. But now it comes to it, I’m strangely indifferent. I don’t subscribe to the “Google can do no wrong” mentality, but by the same token I don’t have a problem with them storing so much personal information. And now I think about it, that’s quite unsettling.

When I read 1984 at school I dreaded the thought of a world where your every action, every move is tracked and scrutinised. I couldn’t imagine how people could live like that. And yet here I am in 2006 in a world much like the one imagined by Orwell. On any given day I’m filmed around 30 times, my every movement is tracked and logged through the mobile phone in my pocket, every call I make is logged and potentially monitored, every credit card transaction I make is recorded. Every email I send, every web page I visit is logged. With access to all that information and more any government agency could virtually get inside my head. And yet none of that bothers me, I just accept it and carry on my life.

Have I been brainwashed into accepting such a scrutinised life? Have I become an automaton who just accept the erosion of his freedom in the name of technological progress and a safer world? Or should I try not to get so paranoid when my net connection is down and enjoy the World Cup instead? I think I should, but maybe that’s what they want me to do… Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!