A Distant Memory Now

Why did I buy that huge coffee when I stopped for petrol this morning on my way up the M6 to Manchester? It took me ages to get onto site this morning due to awkward security staff. By the end I was bursting.

Interesting talking to a new colleague today who is into meditation and Chi Kung. Although I've tried recently to increase my sitting practise, I've really let the Chi Kung slip.

Only back at work two days and I'm knackered already! I really got to a very relaxed place during last weeks holiday. It's a distant memory now.

Good To Be Home

The last full day of the holiday was thankfully dry and sunny and spent at Crealy adventure park. The kids had a great time on everything. Harriet discovered a love of the Pirate Ship ride much to my discomfort as I had to go on with her again and again. Finished off the holiday with fish and chips at Rick Steins chip shop in Padstow. Absolutely yummy. Best ever.

Early start on the homeward journey this morning. Dreadful traffic and roadworks. Took about eight hours to get home. Knackered. Mom and Dad brought the pets over. Great to see Pebbles again. Took her out for a walk tonight straight back into the normal routine. Good to be home.

Blue Bar

Down at the Blue Bar in Porthtowan, just a mile from our holiday cottage. Jacq brought her MacBook down to take advantage of the free wi-fi. Better weather today. Having fun.

Goonhilly

Blogging from the internet cafe at Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall. The holiday cottage is great and the weather a bit grim but we're having a great time.

See You In A Week

Work has been a bit of a grind with the ammount of travelling so working at home today certainly eased the load. A luxury to pop down to TGI's for lunch with t'wife. Tonight we went to parents evening at the school and both kids got great reports. So proud of them. I want them to do well of course, but mostly I just want them to have as nice a time as possible as they go through the system.

Tomorrow we're off down to Cornwall for a week in this cottage. We're all really looking forward to it. Don't suppose the weather will be that great but the change of scene will do us all good. Packing my laptop and hoping for a creative boost from being in an inspirational area.

See you in a week.

Steve Albini Owns Me Right Now

Weekend just wizzed-by, party-style. Dylan and Harriet were both out at parties on Saturday afternoon. I took Dylan to the local sports stadium for a 'multi-sport' party at which he had a great time. Meanwhile Harriet was up town with her friends taking in a movie and a pizza, very grown up. Sunday Jacqs family came over for the usual get together.

Working in Stafford today as the M6 is closed and it's not worth trying to get up to Manchester. A shorter day but at least I've got an internet connection so I can catch up with some personal productivity as well as the day job. Hence this post.

Music-wise my iPod is churning out a lot of Big Black at the moment. Not sure what triggered this decent into noise as I'd recently been listening to lots of quiet stuff like Eno and Budd. But anyway, Steve Albini owns me right now. Tiny King Of The Jews is the best track ever right now and has overtaken my previous fave, Kerosene.

Parties Coming Up

Enjoyed a lovely bottle of German wine tonight given to me yesterday by one of the guys I'm workng with up in Manchester. This guy has a hotel in Hambug which he invited us to. What a nice chap. It must be said that all of the German guys I've been working with over the last 12 months have been incredibly friendly. I'm sure us English don't come across as such.

My blogging of late has been wanting but that's mainly down to lack of internet during the working day. Still driving up and down to Manchester which is a drag but pays well. The excessive driving time is being filled with podcasts by the splendid Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann.

Harriets birthday next week. Eleven. Gosh.

Lots of parties coming up.

Why Wasn't This Band Massive?

The Wolfgang Press. Awesome. Fact.

Fisheye

Saturday morning I dropped Dylan off at the Sea Life Centre for his friends birthday then I had a couple of hours to myself around town. In the Ikon Gallery I saw an exhibition by Marijke van Warmerdam with some real nice film loops. 'Dream Machine' was a mesmerising slow motion loop of milk droplets in a glass of clear water eventually resulting in a whiteout screen. I watched it for ages. In the Ikon shop I picked up a 35mm fisheye camera made by Lomography. Looking forward to taking some fisheye shots.

Google Reader Update

The new Google Reader looks like there's lots of improvements with this update. Using the 'Share' functionality to make an RSS feed to this blog over in the 'Links' section. Also, check out the 'Tingy Link Blog'. This is automatically generated by my shared links and looks pretty damn cool.

27/11

Last night I went down to see Graham Lewis playing again at the Notting Hill Arts Club. Last minute decision. Mike came too. It was good. The set played seemed the same as before to me. Sounded great, some of the songs are well catchy. A couple of them I've been humming ever since. Didn't see anyone else there from the Ideal Copy list but I did spot Bruce Gilbert. Took a few photos but not as good as the previous set.

Bashed

Working up in Manchester this week and commuting each day has fair knackered me out. And the worst of it is there's no internet access up on the clients site. Imagine that, no internet access! It's just not right.

We are skipping swimming in the morning. Dylan bashed his face up real bad yesterday by running into a wall at school. The poor thing really did bash himself. He's got a black and swollen eye and he can't get his goggles on. He had to skip swimming lessons at school today. Harriet is suffering with a cold as well so swimming lessons are off. We're staying in for a lazy Saturday morning, something we haven't done for ages.

Uncontrolled Copy

Created today in my lunchbreak working up in Manchester. Photographs from the motorway and my desk. Loving Photoshop right now. Got a graphics tablet yesterday which is great fun so there might be some more of these. Number 001 in a series. I would like to try and aim for one-a-day but I'd only end up stressing when I failed and that kind of defeats the object.

Tonight we went to our first secondary school open evening. Kind of depressing thinking of Harriet moving up next year. Time is passing way too fast.

Much too fast.

Pause.

Enjoying The View

I've always been a fan of First-Person-Shooter games since Doom. Not just for the shooting, but also the immersive quality of moving within a 3D space. I used to download loads of Quake 2 maps, some for the office deathmatch and some just for strolling around in enjoying the view. I dabbled in a bit of map creation but like most things, just dabbling. With the quality of current games like Half Life 2 the immersion experience is getting even better. I was well impressed by this movie of a HL2 map recreating Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water. The graphics are stunning and I love the fact that it doesn't function as a HL2 game map, it's just a 3D space to be explored and enjoyed. Must get HL2 re-installed on my PC and download this map so I can go visit the house.

Mac Fan-Boy

Today I have mostly been a Mac fan-boy. Downloaded iTunes 7 last night and spent ages marvelling at the CD cover browsing feature. Pure eye candy I know, but usually that's good enough for me. I'm very shallow that way. Listened to a MacBreak Weekly podcast on the drive in to work. More Mac-geekness. On the drive home a good door-to-door chat with Phil. Catching up on work-ish stuff and spreading the Mac-love.

Moving Through The Photograph

After bitching on about photographing Artsfest 2006 in my previous post, tonight I uploaded the last of my efforts to Flickr and the panorama above I'm quiet pleased with. You have to look at it full size and pan along it to really see it. That's what I like about composites, moving through the photograph. Like Deckards Esper in Bladerunner.

Of the other photos in the Artsfest pool, I'm increasingly attracted to the Through The Viewfinder (TTV) pictures. The square format and the grungy scratches and distortions are really appealing. I've got my eye on a Kodak Duaflex on eBay at the moment. Watch this space.

Update: Just looked at the Flickr Blog and right there is a post about TTV complete with a photo from the Artsfest pool! Nice one.

Jacq had a meeting about another IT initiative at the school. This one is just for Dylans Year 3 kids and is focussed on Music Technology. Apparently it's all being done on Macs using Garageband. How cool is that? We'll be able to play with it at home too, when the MacBook comes back from repair.

In pet news, Sparky the hamster died yesterday. But hold back your tears, do not fret, for a new hamster was already installed by the time I got home from work. Her name is Chunky.

Artsfest

The weekend just gone was dominated by Artsfest 2006 which was taking place all over Birmingham city centre. As part of the Birmingham Flickr Group, I was photographing the event as an 'artist participant'. Saturday afternoon involved a LOT of walking, trying to get around all of the venues across the city. As I was walking around I started to get the feeling that actually I wasn't particularly enjoying myself. By the time I got the bus home I realised I had taken far fewer photos than expected. What had gone wrong?

Having thought about this since, I've come to the realisation that the Artsfest as a photographic subject holds very little interest for me. Photos of performers or portraits of visitors are all very nice but they just don't really do it for me as interesting images. Which leads me to question the reasoning for being part of the Flickr group. I think that most of the members in the group are interested in all sorts of photography whereas I feel more and more that only particular aspects of photography interest me and other leave me quite cold. For example, I usually find a single image much less interesting than a composite of multiple images. For me an interesting photograph attempts to represent more than just reality. The distortion of a 'lo-fi' approach, multiple perspectives, representations of movement and time, these are the areas that interest me right now. So what am I doing taking photos of people at an arts festival?

On Sunday I went back into town for some more Artsfest but this time with the family. It was more fun to just consume the festival rather than document it. I was also a bit burnt out from the ammount of walking done the previous day. Met up with Steve, Mary and crew. Didn't bother with the Flickrmeet at the pub at the end of the day. Not much to say.

Having said all that, I DID take some pictures. Check the photostream. My favourite thing at Artsfest was an installation called Bangmingham by Surasi Kusolwong in an old chapel taken over by Ikon. The sight of a wall-mounted drum-kit being bashed at really raised my spirits.

The Birmingham Flickr Group Artsfest photos are here.

Swimming, MacBook & Stipe

A great start to the weekend with Dylan passing his level 3 swimming test. Keith said that everything he did was perfect. It's a pity that Dyl's friend Mitchell didn't pass because they have so much fun together. Hopefully they will still get a chance to play on a Saturday morning. Harriet did not pass but she wasn't really expecting to. It so technical and difficult at her level I don't think I'd pass either. We are so proud of both of them.

As a prize for passing Dylan chose the Cars PS2 game. Cars is still very much the movie of choice with the kids at the moment. They asked to go see it again today on their last day of the holiday. School tomorrow.

Sunday morning we took the MacBook to the Apple Store Genius Bar. Quite impressed by how that system worked. We booked a slot using the website before we set off for the Bullring and it was reassuring to talk to the Genius about the shutdown problem we've been experiencing. Although the shutdown problem is all over the Apple forums, according to the Genius it's not really all that common considering the huge ammount of MacBooks they are selling. This may of course be bullshit, but on this first occasion I choose to believe the official line and remain reassured. So he booked the machine in for testing and ran through the parts he was ordering for replacement depending on how the tests go. It was a far more pleasant experience than returning a faulty bit of kit to a spotty youth at an electrical superstore. Although we used the Genius Bar to report a fault, it seems it can be used just for a bit of ad-hoc training on anything Apple. I'd rather not use it for that myself being too proud but for some I'm sure it's great. So Jacq is without her Mac for a week but hopefully when it's back and reliable, she (we) can fall in love with it again.

Sunday night I stumbled upon a great program on the Artsworld channel about Michael Stipe and his friendship with Mario Batali (who I'd never heard of).

It was a nice insight into a bit of his life in NYC. Of course, he probably lives in other places too, but his life in New York looked impossibly cool.

I especially loved listening to him rave about photography so much.

It reminded me of how much I rate the guy.

Quietly Creative

Been quietly creative of late. Nothing earth-shattering, just quietly doing stuff and then keeping on doing stuff. And before you know it, stuff is done. Stuff exists. Baby steps I know, but still satisfying all the same. I don't want to make too much noise about it for fear that I'll stop and that would be a shame.

So, some things I have been doing...

1. Digitizing old tapes of my music. OK, so maybe this is not entirely creative but it's hopefully part of a process that leads to creativity so it gets listed here. It's my list. It's a chore that's been on my action-list for ages and I'm pleased that I've finally started. The hardest part is locating the tapes.

2. Making collages in Photoshop. I'm trying to keep this quick and not fiddle too much. Starting from a photo of mine and setting the Photoshop controls for stun it's lots of fun. It has highlighted how much I've forgotten in Photoshop. I'm tempted to pause and dig into some tutorials but I'm resisting that to just carry on making more images.

3. Taking lots of photos with my phone. Driving home on the motorway listening to Boards Of Canada and taking photos into the sunset. These will end up in the collages mentioned above.

In other news, the Artsfest brochure is B-I-G. There's lots of stuff happening. You can see the programme online here. I haven't a clue how to decide what to photograph as part of the Flickr project. I'll definitely being doing plenty of composites that's for sure.

Chancers Meetup Summer 2006

The Chancers meetup happened yesterday with everyone gathering in Brum for a few beers, much chat and some Chinese nosh. Even though we've all only left Siemens for a matter of weeks, so much has happened in this short period of time that there's lots and lots to talk about.

It was great to see everyone, and inevitably in this kind of situation I felt I never got to chat enough with each person. It was a treat to meet up with Phil and get a chance to hang out again. In the Apple Store, at the Ikon Gallery or just standing in Victoria Square drinking German wine, it was great to be chatting and sharing our common enthusiasms. Just like old times back at Coventry. I hope we can somehow manage to keep in touch like this in the future cos it's always a pleasure.

Managed to avoid drinking to much which I am pleased about. I was on my guard about drinking too early in the afternoon as it never ends well for me. Missed out on some of the eating time at the Big Wok as I had to help Dan find where he'd parked his car!