BLAIR PUT ELECTRONIC TAG ON ME
I was just sorting through my photos on Flickr, and came across this photo I took in Trafalgar Square back in March. I don't know why, but I suddenly decided to Google the phrase "BLAIR PUT ELECTRONIC TAG ON ME". Several pages of results were returned all pointing to crazed posting on the same site. I can't tell if this is some kind of performance art, or whether he really is some kind of a one off man mental.
Holiday Video
I've uploaded some video of my Sheffield to Shanghai trip. Don't expect mini masterpieces as it's all a bit rubbish. Keep in mind...1) I had a budget video camera.
2) I suck at filming.
3) I'm rubbish at video editing.
4) On the train, I was shooting through a dirty window.
I'll eventually publish my journal too, but it won't be any time soon. I typed it all up and there's 15,000 words, which is too much to upload and expect people to read, even the hardcore that made it all the way through this post. It needs editing and structuring, and these are both skills I don't currently posses. I do have a desire to learn though, and so have bought and read Elements of Style by William Struck.
I discovered this morning that the whole text is available online, which would have saved me a few squid. Bizarrely, I also found out that the book has been turned into an operatic cycle of nine songs, a work which was premiered a few days ago in New York. The review sounds like something from The Onion. Fair play, I say. If I came up with an idea as ridiculous and impractical as writing an opera based on an English Writing text book, I would very quickly decide not to pursue it. In fact, I often do come up with ideas as ridiculous as this, and always discount them as of little value and a waste of time. Maybe it's time to change that. Maybe it's time I started acting on some of these ideas. God help us all.
Coffee
Coffee. I drink much less of it these days, no more than three cups a day. The rest of the time I drink herbal teas, green teas, fruit teas, nettle teas, teas of all colours and aromas . But I am still a slave to coffee, I need my hit, I can't function without. When I try, it's like a window into the future, what I'll be like when my memory isn't what it was, how I'll cope when my coordination is completely lost, tottering around trying to make sense of a world where there is none. I was like that this morning. Lack of coffee caused me to forget to have coffee and I then attempted a number of tasks such as doing a load of washing, and changing the fuse wire on my lighting circuit (I don't have one of those fancy switch boxes like all the cool kids have these days). After a while of walking around the house like a bull in a china shop, getting increasingly frustrated with everything, wondering why nothing made sense, it hit me. Coffee. I need Coffee.
Why am I telling you all this? Well it's something to do while this batch of photos uploads to Flickr. I'm currently having a big sort out of my photos, there are a lot that have remained un-processed for months and months. In fact, some of the photos, such as this batch, date back a few years.
Photo Book from QOOP
I ordered one of those photo books from QOOP, which I may or may not have mentioned here before. Anyway, it arrived today, and I'm pretty happy with it. The print quality isn't exactly out of this world, but it is really good value, and it's great to have all 246 Sheffield to Shanghai photos in a properly bound book. You can see the inside pages here.
Nice one Tony
Heh, this is funny; Tony - who most of you are probably only aware of as the Pineapple winning individual that fixed the CSS on my Shanghai site - got a mention in the New York Times, Guardian, and a few other sites for uncovering a new Google service, and in doing so drove down Ebay's stock 5 percentage points in one day. Nice one!NYT, Guardian
the cat
By popular demand, here is a cat based post. I have nothing cat-based to say. I don't like posting pictures of the cat when I have nothing cat-based to say, but as luck would have it, I bought a book of Charles Bukowski poems at lunch time today that happens to have a poem called the cat which I reproduce for you here. This probably breaks all kinds of copyright laws, and so no doubt this post will end me up in the slammer. Never mind.Oh, here's some pictures of Jimmy the Cat that I took earlier in the year, and only just uploaded to Flickr.
the cat
the hunter goes by my window
4 feet locked in the stillness of a
yellow and blue
night
cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in
gardens-
the yellow and blue night explodes before
me, atomic, surgical,
full of starlit
devils...
then the cat leaps up on the
fence, a tubby dismay,
stupid, lonely,
whiskers like an old lady in the
supermarket
and naked as the
moon
I am temporarily
delighted.
Refreshers
You would not believe how much trouble I am having buying a single packet of Refreshers. I need to buy a packet of Refreshers in order to prove that I am right in saying that Phil Nichols's herbal tea smells like Refreshers (until you brew it, when smells like someone's done a sick in your mug). Most people quite rightly accept what I say as fact, because I am always right, but for some reason Tony, Chris and Phil dispute my findings.Now, I should clarify something here, when I refer to Refreshers I of course mean these bad boys, as opposed to these chewy bars, which if memory serves didn't appear on the confectionary scene until around 1988, maybe 1989. The Refreshers I'm referring to are a candy classic, even the packaging is a work of bold genius. So why is it that I've just walked around town for an hour, and come back empty handed? Even Woolworths didn't have them! Woolworths!
You can get them on the internet, but I'm going to London this weekend, so I'll have a look there first. My only worry is that by the time that I find a packet, Phil will have finished his box of tea, so we'll have nothing to compare the smell with. That would be a disaster.
Aperture
Interesting, Apple are looking to compete head on with Adobe's Photoshop. Having looked at the demo, it looks pretty good. Photoshop is a fantastic photo editing package, but it is hugely let down by the clunky way in which it handles RAW files, the format I and most photographers with digital SLRs shoot in. If you take a picture with a digital camera in JPEG format, the camera has to make decision about how to convert the data from the image sensor into a picture, and it then compresses the result to your memory card. With the RAW format, the camera doesn't do any of that, the file format is essentially just a dump of the sensor data. It is therefore a non-destructive file format. Deciding how to process the image, e.g. decisions about brightness, sharpness and colour balance, are left up to you to resolve.Adobe's approach to RAW files is to retrofit an import process to get them into the existing editing environment. What this means is that you have one screen where you make your initial adjustments to the RAW file, and then fine tune the image in the proper Photoshop environment. It is a flawed process, but you can't really fault Adobe for going down that route, RAW files are new, and no doubt later versions will improve the process.
Apple are starting out with a blank canvas, are so can tackle the issue of how to work with RAW files directly, rather than how to convert them to a different format, and it looks like they've done a good job of that. I don't know why I'm typing this. To the best of my knowledge, nobody that reads this blog uses RAW files, so it's all a bit of waste of time really, I doubt anyone has read this far. I wish I'd thought of that before I started writing, I would have saved 10 minutes of my life. Oh well.
Stuff
Right, time for one of those boring stereotypical blog posts where I detail what's going on and you skim read it and think, "Jesus, Chris, this is a really dull blog entry. It's people like you that giving blogging a bad name. Why do you feel the need to record selected details of your life in text format on a web site, and why do you think people even care, you narcissistic wanker? You make me sick."
Well, I don't care what you think. Screw you. It's my blog and if I want to talk about these things I will.
The Dam House - is a new pub in Sheffield. What makes this pub noteworthy is that it occupies the newly renovated Dam House in Crookes Valley Park. You may recall I took some pictures there earlier in the year, when it was still just a seemingly forgotten derelict building covered with graffitti. It could be a really nice summer pub given its location next to the lake. It could be an overpriced souless bar. We'll see.
Serenity Now!!! There's a lot of buzz around the new film Serenity which has gone to the top of the UK film chart. I've not seen it yet, because first I want to plough through the the tv series Firefly on which it is based. I've always avoided Firefly, I'm not a huge sci-fi fan at the best of times, and a show about space pirates from the maker of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is actually something I'd go out of my way to avoid. But Briddon assured me it was really good, and so far I'm enoying it, apart from the episode I'm watching now which is a bit rubbish. Maybe that's because I'm not paying proper attention, what with writing this blog entry and all.
Loft - I never like to leave a job undone, and so yesterday I finished boarding up my loft. OK, I started this job 18 months ago, but it is now finished, so technically I haven't left it undone. Yes, I know, I still haven't plastered over that conduit in my lounge alcove, but it's not undone, merely unfinished. Get off my back, I'm not like Nick & Rach who take lots of performance enhancing drugs in order to get DIY jobs done. Drugs are bad, OK?
Bee Dogs
Beedogs.com is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.
Snakes on a Plane
When this film hits theatres I'll be there. Synopsis...On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes.
Sounds genius. And it's got Samual L in it, he chose to do the film purely on the basis of the title. Photos.
Kal-El
I always thought to myself that it would be cool to have a dog called Kal-El because I am a mild Superman geek (I even watch Smallville for god's sake), and if you didn't know, Kal-El is Clark's Kryptonian name. But Nicolas Cage, the mad bastard, has just named his son Kal-El. Now that's just cruel.
Shanghai Photos
That's it then, all my photos are now online. If you've seen the previous batches, start here.
My thoughts have already turned towards the next trip. A few possibilities are at the top of the list...
1) Fly back to Shanghai, and continue the journey by train via Hong Kong to Saigon. Then the following year, I can go from Saigon to Singapore.
2) I found at today that you can travel from coast to coast across the US for just $133. That's amazingly cheap, so it got me looking at travelling from New York to Chicago to San Fransisco.
By the way, I'm not the only one with the travel bug right now, Bill, aka The Hat, will be leaving for India in a couple of weeks for a 4 months jaunt around Asia. He's set up a blog for the trip here.
Beijing Photos
Blimey, I hadn't realised just how many pictures I'd taken. There's around 100 from Beijing, which are now online. If you've seen the first three batches of photos from my trip, start here.
Yet More Photos
I've uploaded more photos, up to my arrival in Beijing. If you've seen the first two batches, start here
Mini Blog
I come across a number of interesting, fun, clever, stupid links on my travels around the internet, but can never be arsed to blog them as it's too much effort. However, Friend Feed has aleviated nearly all of that hassle. So, subscribe to this feed and you'll get all the links that I think worthy of your attention. It will be just like old times, when this blog was nothing but a repository of links to other sites. Anything else I post on the internet, like new photos will also show up in the feed.
Previous Posts
Link Blog
Poland, Upside down houses, Vodka
Milk
MANBABIES
Bad Translation
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Dolphins
Ken Lee...
New Forest
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