9 June, 2011 in Development, Personal by Aonghas

Introducing PicStream

PicStream is a new initiative for photo sharing

I often take random photos on my camera, phone or iPad whenever I see something interesting, but I never knew how to organise or categorise them properly into albums. As a result they always ended up stored in memory somewhere and I’d never look at them again. I wanted some easy way to share these moments and memories with everyone, so after some thought and quick brainstorming I created the PicStream initiative. Similar to photo blogging in some ways, PicStream is a running stream of photos that I plan to add to everyday which basically displays things I come across in my daily life journey. Whether it be people I meet, places I go to, random signs or symbols I see or friends sleeping in lectures, PicStream will hopefully one day become quite a unique album of photos. I’m planning to extend PicStream in future, but I hope you enjoy browsing through the photos in the meanwhile. You never know, you might end up in the PicStream yourself one day!

Note: Initially you will only be able to see the 8 most recent photos on the homepage. In future there wil be a gallery where you can view all the photos in PicStream.

20 February, 2009 in Church, University, Youth Group by Aonghas

Reverse Photo Scavenger Hunt

Today I nearly missed the bus in the morning. I was so close to missing the bus that by the time I got to the traffic lights, the only thing stopping me from missing the bus was the fact that the lights turned red for the bus just as I ran around the corner to the bus stop! That was so close.

In the afternoon tutorial session there wasn’t a lot of work being done. I think it was down to the fact that it was a Friday afternoon and everyone was waiting to go home to start their weekend. The people in the room next door to us were enjoying a game of hangman, led by one of the tutorial helpers. Some of the words they had to identify included ‘DAN CARTER’, ‘FACEBOOK’ and ‘SADDLE POINT’. Since Luke, Marianely and I were sitting in a position where we could see the whiteboard of our neighbouring room, we were playing along as well, and Marianely solved a number of them quite fast. She told me to call out her answers, most of which were correct! The tutorial helper (I think her name is Jennifer) asked me to come up and choose a word. I didn’t know what word to choose until I introduced myself as Aonghas and was about to say “but it’s spelt differently…” That gave me the idea to use my name as the word for hangman. I started off with seven lines _ _ _ _ _ _ _, to which many people responded with a puzzled look. They managed to spell most of my name correctly quite fast but the only letter they couldn’t work out for while was the ‘O’ (A _ NGHAS). I nearly had the whole hangman drawn before someone shouted out ‘O’. That was quite a fun activity, and a good way to sort of get to know the others on the course.

Marianely’s dad gave me a ride home today. He dropped me off on Te Atatu Road because I said I could walk the rest of the way home. Luckily on the way home, my mum happened to be driving past so she stopped to give me a lift home. Before we went to Youth Group tonight, I stopped at David’s house quickly just to drop off the laptop so he could do some programming for the robot before tomorrow’s competition. He showed me the robot upstairs in all its glory, together with spare parts scattered on the floor. It looked pretty sophisticated.

Tonight at Youth Group Hamish and I led worship. First Hamish led the song we played off a CD, called “What the Lord Has Done in Me“, while I wrote the lyrics for the next song on the whiteboard. The second song we sang was called “Great is the Lord and Most Worthy of Praise“. I attempted to play the accompaniment on piano, a personal first for me at church. All in all I think it was okay, despite my many split notes and mistakes.

After our worship leading, it was activity time! On explained that we were going to be split into three groups and we’d each be given a set of captions. For each caption we had to take a photo that would match the caption. In my group there was Claire, Cleo, Brendan, Justin and myself. The three captions we were given were:

• It was pretty obvious to the onlookers how THIS was going to end.
• It is a miracle! A youth group walking on water! (or similar)
• Who would have thought a youth group could do THIS and no one got arrested!

We were stuck for ideas at first, but we decided to have a walk around the church anyway to give us some inspiration. We thought we might go into the bathroom to see if we could photograph anything in there. I had my first experience in the female bathroom at church tonight (don’t worry, there wasn’t anyone in there at the time) and I must say their bathroom looks a tad prettier than the guys’ one. They have more toilet cubicles for one, though I guess they make up for the absence of urinals. We ended up taking a photo of me in one of the toilet cubicles with my back to the camera… embracing myself… as though I was making out with someone! Don’t ask me how that idea came up..

Next we went into the janitor’s closest further up the hallway and found a huge gas cylinder in there. After playing around for a little while, Cleo taped Brendan to the gas cylinder and I put on latex gloves, ready to “interrogate?” Brendan (this was all for the photo of course, I wasn’t planning on carrying out any such act on Brendan!)

We got back to the classroom at the end of the activity and looked through all the groups’ photos after sharing time. Some of them were quite funny, while others were just plain random! Hopefully someone will upload the photos on to Facebook or something so you can see the final shoots.