A bit of a morning of it really, owing to a sequence of power outages at Kingston Comms' facility in Leeds - the car park's usually empty! Then I worked out why my Macbook kept shutting itself down - the ruddy battery is faulty.

Some photos of the Fotopic office after the dust had settled.

Up to our arms in bleachfix, developer effluent, sludge, and other crap. Not a pleasant smell or a pleasant experience either. Features Nicky in a lab coat with latex gloves, so it's not all bad.

While bored and waiting for stuff to copy, I took some pics of servers. Marvel at the servers. Come on, marvel. Oh suit yourself.

Some odds and ends playing with the L11.

The annual staff Christmas party in Wakefield, with Fotopic staff from far and wide! We started at Henry Boon's, went on to Louie's Cajun restaurant and then ended up in Fernandes Bierkeller until about 1ish. Nairn brought out a pile of glowsticks halfway through the dinner, which provided some rather amusing diversions before most of them ended up round Richie's neck.

A few pics of the server racks powering Fotopic, primarily for our own reference but interesting nontheless.

While refilling one of the bulk ink systems, I managed to fire magenta ink at the ceiling leaving a nice blotch and most of us covered in spots of ink. These photos are from *after* we cleaned - not all the spots on my face are zits...

Neil's last day at Fotopic, which called for a celebration. Luckily Shrood were playing at O'Donoghue's which gave us a wonderful excuse to go and have some drinks while listening to the lads play some ace music. With the lighting in ODs being a bit cack, I took most of the band pics in B+W again.

The Tut'n'Shive pub has closed (a former haunt in my youth) and will be demolished; the 1960s market hall will be closed early next year; the site of the new market hall is now flat and ready to be built on. I pottered in to take a few archive photos before things went up and got knocked down any more.

Sunday morning was taken up with running some promo shots from the minilab, and showing Nairn how it all worked - well, once the bugger had got up to temperature, anyway.

Sometimes you print the silliest things given the opportunity...

Learning to use the new d-Lab.2.

It's only taken us 7 years but we've finally brought printing in-house with our new Agfa d.Lab 2. Mmm, lab goodness.

Big things are afoot, and we need a big space to put a new toy. Thus, the workshop's getting a reorganisation and some stuff's going onto Freecycle. Woohoo!

Shifting almost 40 servers from London Docklands up to Leeds - not many photos (we were concentrating on working) but you get an idea of the work involved!

Doing a photo shoot for a new product, I had an excuse to wield the 10D for a bit while we were working.

The annual excuse to get ratarsed, this time at Cowshed in Wakefield. We had a good showing of Fotopic staff and moderators, including Sam who came up from Tenby, and some of the London folks; finally got to bed at 3:30am full of beer and dreading the following day's hangover.

Christmas is almost upon us - and the rush has begun!

Another server upgrade, Nicky working on the my.fotopic.net server, and an up-to-date pic of the racks.

Joel and Neil with some interesting effects for April 1st... and none of it Photoshop.

I hate datacentres - I think I've mentioned this before. Me and Neil went to install a new box for Fotopic gallery services in GS1, and do a bit of fettling to increase resilience and speed of recovery in out-of-hours outages. Then we went for KFC on the way back home. Mmmmm, KFC.

A couple of views from Joel's desk in the Fotopic office.

A bit heavy for our side of Wakefield, but it's going to make it fun getting up Pollard Street...

The fourth - and final - day of the Focus show at Birmingham NEC. Nicky and the guys met Ozzy, a couple of lost people from the 20's; then Kieran brought cakes and Kenya (photos by Neil, Colin and Jon).

The third day of the Focus show at Birmingham NEC, with costumed actors walking around, and a goth in a tutu and FMBs (photos by Neil, Colin and Jon).

The second day of the Focus show at Birmingham NEC, followed by a bit of a session in the Tiger Room at the guest house (photos by Neil, Colin and Jon).

A quick trip round the show, taking photos of lots of things and making sure we'd got photos of some of our users. Bumped into some odd characters from the toy fair in the hall next door as well

Building the stand for the Focus on Imaging show 2006 at Birmingham NEC. We got there and found the walls and carpet were the wrong colour, and BT had knackered up the broadband connection - but eventually things started going right and we finished the day with dinner at Wing Wah, the Chinese all-you-can-eat restaurant near Coventry. Yum!

There's a nice Italian restaurant called Valentino's around the corner from the office - when the final parcels had been sent, we went round to celebrate the fact with some good munchies. Oh, and Google sent us a nice Christmas prezzie with lots of Google-branded USB goodies.