Tag Archives: London

Books, Computers/Technology, Pictures, Web/Internet

24 Hours of Flickr – London

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So after a bit of discussion, we decided to head off into London to attend the 24 Hours of Flickr London event. Although it involved dashing home from work, and an hour on the train each way the prospect of seeing my picture hung on the wall, as the pictures had been at the Berlin and Paris events was just rather tempting.

Flickr Logo

I managed to make it home from work pretty promptly, and we headed straight down to Fleet station. Thanks to some early-bird commuters heading home we even managed to get a space just beyond the reserved parking in the car park. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite so well after that. There was one person in front of me in the queue, an old gentleman buying a ticket for tomorrow morning. The reason he was doing that was because they now will not sell the reduce priced tickets on the train. If you’re lucky they’ll sell you a full price ticket – if you’re unlucky they’ll give you a penalty fare. As a result, there is now a sizeable queue at the ticket office whenever a train arrives with people buying a ticket for tomorrow. Anyway, after grumbling about this for a bit, he was then told about the other new South-West Trains policy – super off-peak fares. In actual fact what they’ve done is hiked off-peak fares towards London by 20% and introduced a new super off-peak band that comes into force at lunchtime – anyway, that produced another grumble. With all that grumbling we got our tickets just as the next train to London pulled into the opposite platform, and typically the guard closed the doors and the train pulled out just as we made it to the stairs down off the bridge. We caught the next train, and made it to the event just before 8pm.

Flickr had taken over the foyer area inside the Manton Entrance of the gallery on Atterbury Street. The reason for the choice of venue being that for the first time Tate Britain was hosting an exhibition of photography – How We Are, with photographs stretching right from the dawn of photography – right up to a PC connected to Flickr itself as the final exhibit. Alongside a selection of Flickr freebies, they were also giving away copies of the book, plus a selection of nibbles and free drinks. All very nice. The only disappointment was that the only place that 24 Hours of Flickr pictures were being shown were on a plasma screen – they didn’t appear to have the big blown up versions of the book pages that they had shown at the other events. To be honest there was nowhere that they could have shown them, but it was still a bit disappointing.

Page 64

So in lieu of a gratuitous shot of me by my picture, I’ve got a shot of my picture in the book. It’s in amongst a selection of wedding pictures not surprisingly.

The rest of the book has a massive range of pictures, covering a broad spectrum of subjects. Unless you can get to the last of the events in Montreal, the book is available from blurb.com – my picture is on page 64. 😀

After a browse round the How We Are exhibit, we headed back to Waterloo and the train for home. A bit of a lightning visit – but enjoyable – even if I didn’t get to see my picture actually hung in the Tate…

Update: The posts on the event are starting to come in – check out technorati for a selection. Being a Flickr event, there are lots of pictures too, the most interesting of which includes the page with our picture on it as a result of two of the other wedding pictures being taken by different people at the same event – apparently not the only coincidence like that in the book!

Andy Piper also highlights that the guys from Moo who produce the cool little Moo MiniCards from pictures in your Flickr stream were in attendance. Beth has recently ordered a set using some of her pictures, and absolutely loves them. She actually came home with a few more, as amongst the freebies last night were a selection advertising Flickr…

Books, Pictures

24 Hours of Flickr Published

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The Waiting is Over

I’ve just ordered my copy of the 24 Hours of Flickr Book which was published this week via blurb.com one of a number of Print on Demand companies.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was really chuffed to have one of my pictures selected for the book, even more so when I discovered how many of the 7,477 pictures submitted actually made it to the final book – only 122! The picture, along with a much larger selection of those submitted will also be displayed at an event at Tate Britain in London on Monday, and in Montreal on Friday.

Life on Mars, Movies & TV

Ashes to Ashes – Nothing More than a Life on Mars Clone?

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Is anyone else as amazed as I am about the un-originality of the Life on Mars follow up? Not only is there going to be a US remake but it looks like the British team are doing the same. According to the article on the BBC news website the new series focuses on a 21st century police officer who has an accident and wakes up in the past, working with DCI Gene Hunt. The key differences is that the 21st century police officer is a woman, and this time it’s London in the eighties rather than Manchester in 1973. Is there going to be some sort of underlying plot linking Sam Tyler’s 1973 experience to this new characters 1981 experience, or was the production team just caught out by John Simm wanting to leave after two series and don’t have any new ideas?

General

Good News for Calgary

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Many of you will probably have heard me grumble about the prices of direct flights from London to Calgary. Thanks in part to the take over of Canadian by Air Canada, the only major carrier operating a direct service has been Air Canada. The impression I’ve got over recent years is that they’ve tended to take advantage of that to make some money on the tickets – the cheapest direct tickets sometimes costing twice as much as some of the indirect competition. However, all of that is going to change come December, as after an absence of eight years, British Airways are starting up direct flights again, which hopefully should bring about some competition on the route and bring the fares down a bit.

Computers/Technology

MacExpo 2005

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Whose Show Is It Again?

So after spending last Saturday wearing my developer hat, this week we spent our Saturday being Mac fans, at MacExpo 2005.

If you’d forgotten where you were going, you certainly were reminded about it when you arrived at Olympia station – the place was covered with matching Apple iPod adverts, including banners on every streetlamp, all with the familiar black figure, with white iPod, this time on a red and orange background. As Howard said on the way out, whatever you think about Apple and their products, you can’t fault their advertising for simple brand awareness.

Once inside it was straight into the action. Adobe was directly by the door, but behind that was the biggest stand at the show, the Apple stand itself. Alongside those were a number of other big names including BMW with their iPod equipped 1-Series, HP, Sony, Bose, and even a large stand from Microsoft showcasing Office 2004 and Virtual PC.

One interesting little game was to see if you could spot any PC’s. On the way in, all the registration and ticket sales were being carried out using iMacs, with many other stands using a Mac for sales as well as demonstrations. Even Microsoft had only Macs on show. In fact the only stand I could spot that was blatantly showing PC’s was Sony, who alongside demonstrating using their cameras with the Mac, had several of their own VIAO PC’s attracting little interest.

The big products Apple were showing off this year hardware wise were the iPod Nano, video playing fifth generation iPod and the new revision C iMac G5. In terms of software, the big new package was Aperture, best described as a professional equivalent of iPhoto.

Demo Time

Needless to say there was a non-stop programme of demonstrations on the stand. Beth and Howard both got to play with the new iPods, and we saw the demonstrations of the new iMac, where much was made of the simplicity of the new Front Row software and it’s six button remote. I was really impressed with Aperture, particularly the speed with which it throws around batches of large RAW format images. Although it has good Photoshop integration, for most of the basic image edit work, you don’t even need to leave the application.

It wasn’t only graphics people that were provided for. Over in another part of the hall, there was Rod Gammons demonstrating how he put together a Liberty-X hit with Logic Pro, with the whole record, including vocals stored away in his Mac.

Games Experience

We finished off with a visit to the corner of the exhibition attempting to disprove the myth that you can’t play games on a Mac. Here they had a mixture of Macs playing everything from Sims 2 to Doom 3. However what Beth really liked was Lego: Star Wars. If you haven’t seen this, this review over at the BBC explains more. Essentially this is a Star Wars game aimed squarely at kids, with a number of sequences from the films recreated, but using graphics that look Lego bricks. There are a number of comedy Lego moments as everything breaks into constituent bricks when destroyed, and there are some comedy close ups of the expressions on the Lego character faces at key moments. Great fun, but we didn’t think we could justify a copy just for us big kids!

Anyway, we had a great afternoon seeing what is going on in the world of Apple, and we’re now looking forward to doing it all again next year!