The Good Fight are one of my favourite local bands right now. On Saturday night they were playing the Ulster Hall with Jody has a Hitlist, Six Star Hotel, and General Fiasco. I was down shooting the gig, have a stack of photos to get through, but have a few online.

They are playing at the Shadow Rooms in Carrick this Thursday night if you are about.

Check out a few more shots on Flickr

‘Bigger than the Titanic, bigger than the Armada, bigger than anything Belfast has seen before’. 

That was the way that last weekends maritime festival was advertised. You would have to be living under a rock to have been oblivious to the Tall Ships in Belfast. 

I decided to head down to the docks on Friday night and Saturday as 40 of the ships, fresh from their Atlantic Challenge, spent a few days moored here. I was really surprised by how busy things were down at the docks. I knew that visitor numbers were going to be high, but I didn’t expect 100,000 plus every day. 

I really enjoyed walking around the docks, having a look at the ships, watching fireworks, and generally soaking up the atmosphere. The continental market had set up shop as well. I love the continental market when it visits City Hall at Christmas, so it was brilliant that it was at the maritime festival. I like all the sights and smells of the market, browsing the stalls, some selling bizzare creations, buying cupcakes, all while enjoying a hog roast baguette as well. BBC were covering the event across various media, and one of the newest shows to the BBC, Bang Goes the Theory, had a science roadshow. Much like W5, but outside the odyssey in a tent.   

With total visitor numbers reaching nearly 1 million people over the course of the 4 day, there were bound to be some problems. The traffic was pretty busy around the Odyssey, and Translink did have trouble coping on the first day. However the only other problem that I noticed over the weekend was the grass at the Odyssey became a bit of a muddy quagmire. Nearly 1 million visitors and the police only made 6 arrests, the place was packed but very nearly everything seemed to run pretty smoothly.

I was a child in 1991, when the Tall Ships last visited, so i don’t have any real notion of the problems that Belfast faced back then. I do know however that Belfast is a very different place now than it was then. You can see that Belfast is changing, with things like the Maritime Festival, the Continental Market, food festivals, and various other festivals and events in the city, happening more and more frequently. There was such a positive vibe about the Tall Ships, everyone seemed to be smiling and laughing. I didn’t hear too much grumbling or complaining, something that we are all too good at these days. Surely events like this are a great way to boost morale, in a city that still bears scars of the past, and to raise spirits when people are feeling the effects of the economic situation.

More events like this please Belfast City Council 

If you live in Northern Ireland, then you will have most definately heard about a few boats that visited this past weekend. I will do a post about the Tall Ships festival tomorrow, but the photo-of-the-week this week was taken when I was walking home from the event on Saturday afternoon. 

When I started university in 2005 I had a real love/hate relationship with it. I loved the student life, loved living in Belfast, all that was great, and still is. On the other hand I really didn’t like my course. I chose to go to Queens University, to study computer science, because I vaguely enjoyed working with computers, taking them to bits, building them, building websites, all that stuff. The course however was pretty much a degree in Programming/Software engineering, which turned out I really hated.

So in second year, QUB introduced a new IT pathway. Computing and IT, it was a more general IT degree encompassing other disciplines, and putting less of a focus on development.

I did a placement year, working in IT, and then found it very difficult to settle back into uni for my final year.

Final year was hard work, and took a lot of effort and stress. It paid off though, I was the only person in my pathway to get a 1st, and as of yesterday I am Connor McCullough BSc (Hons)

Sorry about the poor photos, they were taken on my phone, I haven’t got the better photos from my parents yet.