Autumn is near!

Although the day started out quite cold it soon warmed up in the sunshine when I went out for more track practice -(rough tracks/by-ways gravel tracks) the leaves were starting to fall. The trees that seem to be losing their leaves first are the horse chestnuts - probably because they have been afflicted by a leaf mite. Here in the flatlands we don't really get hills - so even this pimple seems a challenge - how I am going to find 2000m hills - ho hum. I know it is possible. The other more interesting feature of this pimple, which by the way is only 30m in height, is the way the leaves are already falling along the verge.

I went out at around 3.30pm and when I took this picture is was probably around 5.0pm and already you can see from the shadow that the sun was quite low in the sky. It is a good bit of track to cycle along though as it gets from Exning to Burwell without having to worry about cars. This time around I met a couple of dog walkers (and dog) but quite often do not meet anyone on the track although from the state of it you can see it is quite well used.

Tomorrow I must get around to checking what equipment I have and what I will need to buy before setting out to India. Oh yes after the memory full error on my Garmin EDGE GPS device I erased some history and it seemed OK today.

One other geeky thing that I have been playing with is Picasa - this is Google's free photo categorising ands editing software. It is a great way to view all my photographs and is pretty good at photo editing as well. They have just released version 3.5 (from version 3.0) which has added a face tagging capability It runs through all of the stored photographs and identifies faces, groups them and allows the user to add a name tag to them. I have around 18,000 pictures stored so it took an overnight run - but I am quite impressed. You quite often have to tag the same person's picture a few times as it does not always match them up but overall it works quite well. mind you I have around 3,500 unidentified pictures to either add name tags to or ignore. I do a few at a time. My digital pictures go back around 10 years so it is quite interesting to compare the kids faces as they mature.