I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 [: UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 [: UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

The chunk of cold weather we’re having here in the UK at the moment is a bit of a problem for the birds. They’re having difficulty finding enough food. We wanted to help, but we have a bit of a problem – we live in the top flat in an old four-storey school building. We get to our door by climbing a set of metal steps on the outside of the building. Our outside space consists of a few square metres of metal panelling, with metal railings around it, and a long drop.

Feeders are available that attach with suction cups to the outside of a window, which seem like a good idea, but I’m not sure I trust them. For a normal house, if it falls off, you just have to go outside, pick it up, and stick it back in place. If one fell off our living room windows, it would fall four floors down, and land in a cut-out section below ground level, outside the basement flat’s front windows. Or, if it bounced a bit further forward by hitting the window sill, it could fall far enough forward to land on someone’s car.

Anyway, I hit on a solution last weekend – part of the packaging from our new microwave, some holes punched through with my Swiss Army Knife, and a couple of shoelaces:

It sat there firmly, and the food (a slice of bread and some seeds) didn’t blow away. Win. The birds, however, didn’t know it was there. Fail.

My boss had a good suggestion, though – add a couple of hanging bird feeders, and not only do we add more options for food, but we put something there the birds might actually recognise as a source of food. A white polystyrene tray probably isn’t going to say ‘food’ to a chaffinch, but a swinging tube of peanuts might. So, this weekend, we visited Pets at Home, and stocked up. Here’s the result:

Some food on the tray, and three hanging feeders, containing:

• Peanuts, with a spare bag ready for refills.
• Mixed seeds, with sunflower hearts to replace them when they’re gone.
• Fat balls, with a large tub full of replacements ready.

There’s only one problem with this now. You may notice the lack of snow – it’s pretty much all thawed here, and there doesn’t appear to be too much risk of more to come. We may be a bit late, but hopefully they’ll still enjoy a few treats.

We needed bread, so I took a walk to the local shop. I decided to go the long way around, though, by the canal, and give my camera something to do – it’s been spending a lot of time bored in a bag recently.

The canal was frozen – it was only at the end of the walk that I saw a small area where the water had broken through. The ice made for some interesting pics, though:

(Here’s the photoset on Flickr in case the slideshow above doesn’t work for you.)

I was sitting at my desk at work, when I looked out of the window, and high up in the oak tree outside was a white bird. A big white bird. I had no idea what it was.

It looked like a heron, but herons aren’t white, and it looked a little shorter than a heron. Fortunately, Simon recognised it, as he’d seen them before in Dartmouth – it was a Snowy Egret – a small white heron.

(Here’s the photoset on Flickr in case the slideshow above doesn’t work for you.)

It stayed in the tree, preening itself and relaxing, for maybe an hour and a half.

This was the first time I’ve regretted switching to carrying just a pocketable Panasonic Lumix [: UK, US], rather than my Nikon D90 [: UK, US]. I regretted it a lot. I carried the Nikon for a couple of days afterwards, but it didn’t return.

We’ve made a new tradition. Shopping for the Christmas food shall be done on Christmas Eve, and we will try to buy as much of it as possible when it’s reduced to clear.

After a very quiet half-day at work, I tried to call in at Tesco, but the queue was too much. I tried to call in to the town centre, to see what Somerfield/Co-op had to offer, but the queue was all the way through the town. I succeeded better at Morrisons, getting quite a few reduced bits, but no meat.

I managed to get parked surprisingly easily in M&S, and got more extras, but still no meat. After Sam finished work, we tried again at M&S, but they still weren’t reducing their very expensive prepared joints. We found a friendly member of staff (most of them are), and were told that it didn’t look likely that they’d be reducing any of the things we wanted.

We decided to brave Tesco. They weren’t reducing the meat either, but we got a few other bargains, and their full price prepared joints were still a fraction of the price of the ones at M&S. They probably aren’t as fancy, but we’re not fussy. A lump of meat, some potato products, and lots of little sausages wrapped in bacon – the important things.

The biggest problem was arriving home with everything – it was a lot of shopping to carry all the way up to our flat!

Anyway, I hope everyone has a merry Christmas, or enjoys whatever else you like to celebrate around this time. If that’s nothing, have a fun Friday.