Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
One of a whole series of reconstructions of classic photos using Lego
Lovely!
Found via photojojo
Labels: photos
Posted by Jane at 8:36 PMMay 06, 2008Festival so far
It's festival time, and although we're not doing much in the Brighton Festival itself, we have a punishing schedule in the Brighton Festival Fringe—which, I'm told, is the "England's largest arts event, and the 2008 Fringe is the second largest Fringe Festival in the world". Citation needed, indeed.
So far we've been to...
- X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund, who turns out to be the long haired blond geeky one in the X-Files. A small turn out (30 people?), but a huge amount of fun. Essentially, an X-Files episode is created using audience suggestions, and it worked really well. A top act.
- We spent an hour or so of a boiling hot day in The Last South: Pursuit of the Pole. Yes, there were initial technical issues with the sound, and yes the venue suffered from being on a roundabout on bank holiday Monday with motorcycles roaring passed, but this didn't distract from a great play. It was Scott and Amundsen on stage, writing their journals, in step with each other, but with very different experiences. Touching, funny, etc.
- Up to the university we dropped in on a professorial lecture, namely "Alcohol: a simple molecule with complex consequences for emotion and behaviour". We learned about the experiments on memory and behaviour under the effects of booze, and it was eye-opening. I didn't know, for example, that drinking enhances your memory (but only for events before the drinking starts). Naturally, there was a wine reception after.
- And tonight we went to see Mike Leigh in conversation with Amy Raphael, discussing his films and watching bits of some of them. We headed back home to sign up to LoveFilm to get his back catalog.
One negative: the £1 per ticket booking fees are evil, especially as the booking system isn't finished and the web sites are frustrating to use. And on top of that "internet booking fees" should be made illegal. But, there's no competition, so we pay. I'd rather have to pay than not have it at all, is what it comes down to.
Posted by Richard at 10:15 PM
April 24, 2008Old Bailey
Transcripts from the Old Bailey (from 1674 to 1913) are now online, which has generated plenty of press.
As I suspect many others have, I went searching for references to my family name and I've found a few...
- In 1796, a 19 year old George Dallaway wandered into a warehouse and told the clerk that he wanted "half a hundred weight of sheathing nails", but didn't have the paperwork. The clerk gave him the goods, and thus a fraud was committed. Geroge was "respited to go for a sailor or soldier" which we take to mean he was given the opportunity to fight, but a few months later he's in the proceedings as having a year in jail and a public whipping.
- Matthew Dallaway stole 12 spoons in 1769 and was transported. Nice touch in that he took them while the victim's house was on fire. And he would have got away with it had it not been for the pesky pawnbroker grassing him up. His defense: "I was very much in liquor", a phrase I plan to use whenever the situation merits it.
It's worth having a dig around the site for some of the history to the publication. For example, the Proceedings were popular ("...in the opinion of many people one of the most diverting things a man can read in London") until the rise of newspapers, and even carried advertising for a while.
Posted by Richard at 10:23 PM
April 22, 2008Science 'Open Notebook'
One to file under "wish I'd thought of that", from Slashdot:
Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.
Posted by Richard at 10:18 PM
April 21, 2008Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
One of a whole series of reconstructions of classic photos using Lego
Lovely!
Found via photojojo
Labels: photos
Posted by Jane at 8:36 PM
April 16, 2008A history of snowboarding in 2 minutes
Warning: This moves pretty quickly. Hang on to your hats!
Found via Nollie.
Posted by Jane at 12:53 PM
April 10, 2008That looks about right
Is it meme o'clock already? Well, if you really must know...
toto:~ richard$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head 130 cd 110 ls 50 ssh 20 exit 15 scp 14 cp 11 svn 11 sudo 11 openssl 11 javaI'm surprised there's not some
Posted by Richard at 5:07 AMfind,grepandmatein there.
- Disturbing
Extensive use of "openssl" is usually scary.
Posted by Dominic Mitchell on 2008-04-16 09:12:36
- hmmmmm - too much dev
171 ls
70 cd
50 vi
50 pwd
46 ./build-dev.sh
17 cat
16 ./start.sh
9 open
7 more
5 grep
Posted by goul on 2008-04-16 15:05:10
March 30, 2008Glenn on the history of his company
Tuesday, at £5 App, Glenn gave his personal view of the history of his company: The idea, name, table football, money, cake and the culture. The most interesting parts for me were his description of using scale to escape the for hire rollercoster (if you're working as an agency), the importance of having a shared set of values, and using money as a tool.
Interesting stuff. It'll take a while for it to sink in for me, but as Ribot caught the talk on video (part 1) (and part 2) you can judge for yourself.
[Disclaimer: Glenn is Jane's employer]
Posted by Richard at 8:46 AM
March 26, 2008i360
The BBC say "work will start on the i360 tower during the summer". Of course, they said it'd start last June, so who knows...
Posted by Richard at 2:10 PM
March 24, 2008Mr Ouch
I took this photo in the grounds of the Morning Star Lodge near the Silver Mountain Gondola station in Kellogg, Idaho with the sole intention of posting it to the Stick Figures in Peril group. This I duly did and someone added a tag of Mr Ouch. I was curious about this and so looked at all photos tagged with Mr Ouch and discovered that they are all the same peril picture but with different text, instructions and warnings - a sub domain of stick figures in peril.
I will now be on the lookout for other Mr Ouch warning signs to add to the collection.
Posted by Jane at 6:54 AM
February 15, 2008TED iTunes Feed
We all love TED, and have all probably lost days digging through the video archive. So hurrah for the feed they set up a while back allowing me to just get a constant update of TED videos.
I was going to write a quick pipe to filter out the old stuff and just take 2007 onwards. But I first thought I'd have a look at some of the olders stuff and...oh my gosh, its wonderful.
For example, take a look at Nicholas Negroponte talking about input devices (amongst other things) in 1984. The striking thing, aside from the use of laser discs, is how he describes touch input, including the rolling behaviour for fine input which we now see in the iPhone. And remember the talk was given 23 years before the iPhone was in stores.
(Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, as that's what the kind of thing he was paid to think about, and the kind of thinking that a year later lead to the opening of the Media lab.)
So I won't be filtering out the older TED talks. I'll watch it all, which, now I think about it, is what I knew I'd end up doing anyway.
Posted by Richard at 9:42 PM
February 13, 2008A month at The Werks
I've mentioned I've been working out of the Werks. Well... it's been a month now [over a month, but this blog post has been sitting around whilst I was away] and in that time I've visited the Werks ten times or so. I'm not sure exactly how often, but long enough and frequently enough for the coffee shop to know what my order is.
Unexpectedly I've ended up having about three times the number of meetings I'd normally have—the good kind of meeting, mind you. That's down to being able to say "just drop by" rather than having to actually arrange anything. An example: Danny popping round the other day and we had the space to spread out his Post-Its® and discuss a bunch of ideas.
I get the sense that there's a good chance of chance happenings happening—especially once more of the space is used. I'd expect more people to be showing up once we're out of the dismal months.
A few times I find it better to work from the home office, for instance if I need the printer, make tricky phone calls, or just absolutely need guaranteed quiet. But mostly I've noticed that I may be getting more done when I do go to the Werks. As odd as it might seem, having to plan the day around what you need (that file? that external drive?) and then having to head out, seems to set the tone for the day. Prevents thrashing. Create focus. Something like that.
Posted by Richard at 5:55 PM
February 05, 2008Our cabin in the woods
Today is our last day in Oregon after a great week staying in this lovely log cabin in Brightwood, Oregon.
So far we've visited 2 ski resorts - Timberline and Mount Hood Meadows and plan to head up to Mount Hood Ski Bowl this afternoon.
Posted by Jane at 7:59 PM
February 03, 2008Sierra Nevada Laguina Lift
For a while I've been meaning to record an entire lift run at a ski resort. On a trip to Sierra Nevada last March, Jane decided to make the recording -- presumably because she was bored of me mentioning it and forgetting to do it.
Unfortunately she picked the longest lift run at the resort. The original video sequence was a finger chilling 10min 11sec, but you'll be glad to know it's been sped up here to just 2:10. There's no sound on this clip, in case you were wondering if your sound was turned all the way down.
The only feature of interest here is that there's a radio telescope at the top of a hill. When riding with that in the background, you half expect James Bond bad guys with automatic weapons to start chasing you on skidoos. Well, I do.
Labels: snowboard
Posted by Richard at 10:47 PM
January 30, 2008New gadgets
Over the past few months I've gained some nice new gadgets, which I've reviewed over at one or other of my other blogs. But, this was originally the home of gadget reviews, so here's an overview with links to my other musings.
Nokia 6110 Navigator - I got this phone on Vodafone in August time and its the first phone that I've made use of as a general device rather than just a phone. I use the mobile internet on it quite a lot to keep up with google reader and twitter (mainly). I make use of the GPS tracking via the Nokia Research project SportsTracker and have uploaded some tracks to their new beta community site as well as listing them all in our maps section. This has taken over from the combined SportsDo on an old Sony P900 connection to an external bluetooth GPS. The major advantage of the 6110 Navigator is that the routes can be saved directly from the memory card, with SportsDo they had to be uploaded over mobile internet to the SportsDo site before then allowing them to be downloaded in google maps format. The 6110 Navigator also comes with Route 66 software with which I've had a few battles but am now getting on fine with.
iPod Touch - I got this as a Christmas present and I love it. I got a rubberised case for it as part of my Christmas gift but also bought a screen protector for it (after I'd managed to give it a small scratch). Since getting this I've started watching a lot more video podcasts, especially to do with photography. I purchased the $20 January upgrade and am finding the mail application really great to use.
Braun PixelBank - As I wind up taking more and more photographs with my beautiful Nikon D80 the ability to recycle my SD cards quickly enough is getting to be more of a challenge, especially when I am without my laptop. So, I decided it was time to buy a portable storage unit that could read from SD and xD (for my little Olympus fe130). It has 60GB of storage all held on a 2.5 inch replaceable hard disk and can be charged via USB and uses USB 2 for transfers.
3 different gadgets, all so far being enjoyed...
Labels: gadget
Posted by Jane at 7:00 PM
Collective Nouns
I was having a conversation with Alex earlier, and we started talking about collective nouns. My personal favourite is still an "ostentation of peacocks". We found various online resources (Animal Groups, and of course Wikipedia has something to offer) to ponder and discussed how much some of these words really had anything to do with the object being collected - an "aurora of polar bears" for instance.
Wikipedia also offers collective nouns for job types as well, offering among others a sulk of developers. We'd already been thinking of terms for developers, designers, project managers and the other disciplines we have here at work and came up with a "creation of designers", "list of project managers" and the fairly obvious "Victory of Madgexians" (paying homage to the Madgex Arms of course).
Any suggestions to offer? If so, leave a comment and I'll try and collate them.
Labels: words
Posted by Jane at 4:17 PM
