haniblog

Gillian and I went for a run in Hampstead Heath this morning. The weather was (and still is) beautiful. We were enjoying our run and chatting and suddenly realised that we lost our bearings.

We were trying to decide which way to go when we noticed a man walking his dog coming towards us. “Where do you want to get to?” he asked. Gillian started replying but I cut her off and blubbered “You’re one of the Pythons!” “Yes, Terry Jones.” he replied laughing. We shook hands and I managed say something along the lines of “Nice to meet you Terry!” He gave us directions, we thanked him and we went our way.

For the rest of our run I kept on jabbing the air in front and going “You’re one of the Pythons!” It’s not every day you meet one of your heros!

Vibrant red chillis taken this afternoon in our kitchen. There are a few more photos on my Flickr stream.

Have a good bank holiday everyone!

Danger Mouse – DJ, producer, music auteur and one half of Gnarls Barkley – has teamed up with Sparklehorse and produced a fantastic album, Dark Night of the Soul.

There’s quite a quarrel between the artists and EMI so the CD’s distribution is unusual, to say the least. The package looks good, with a beautifully printed booklet with visuals by none other than David Lynch. Oh, and a blank CDR. Yes, you read that right. The CD is blank. The artists encourage you to, uhm, “find” the music online and burn it yourself. NPR is streaming the whole album but it’s available in loads of places if you know where to look.

The album is fantastic. Go get it!

For as long as I’ve had an iPod (and I’ve had one of the originals), I’ve always filled them with songs. My still-going-strong third generation 40GB iPod is full of music I felt I ought to have. I’ve always been averse to buying single tracks off albums and prefer to get the whole lot. But I have a confession to make… I’m afraid of most of my music. To be precise, I’ve been afraid of using that conceptually huge function known as Shuffle Songs.

No more. I’m facing my fear. I just stuck the iPod in the dreaded mode all afternoon and the last five tracks played are:

I know this is almost 8 years too late, but it’s like having my own eclectic radio station! Yes, I know. It is sad.

Oooh, Supergrass is on! Haven’t heard this in years!

Just a quick post to apologise for the lack of updates. Life is a bit of a whirlwind right now but I promise to get back to this as soon as. Until then, here’s a photo I took on Hampstead Heath the other day.

Back soon (hopefully)!

The Droste Effect is a technique whereby an image is rendered recursively to create a mind-bending (or brain-hurting) result. If you look at MC Escher‘s famous works you’ll see how a master artist uses this technique.

Now let’s have some fun. Download and install Adobe’s Pixel Blender Photoshop plugin, then get the Droste Effect Filter and start warping!

The effect is a lot more effective when it’s in motion. Take a look at OneInThree‘s fantastic video for Wild Beasts. I have to stress that the video was done mathematically by OneInThree themselves and not using the Adobe plugin. Enjoy!

Since I bought my first MacBook three years ago, I’ve migrated my applications and data across to every upgraded laptop. I suspect my MacBook Pro isn’t working as efficiently as it would after a clean system install. Would re-installing Leopard and the applications stop those random beachballs spinning? At the risk of making a rod for my own back, I’ve decided to do just that. I’ll update this post when it’s all done.

See you on the other side.

Monday, May 4th:

In between birthday parties, visitors, cooking, tidying up, the gym and various other distractions, I managed to resist the surprisingly strong impluse just to restore everything from the Time Machine backup and forget about doing a spring clean. I managed to keep the momentum going though and so far, the system feels snappier. Powering up or rebooting takes a lot less time and applications like Photoshop now launch in one bounce.

I’ll do a final update when everything’s back. Stay tuned.

Monday, May 4th, 9pm:

All done! All apps installed, as you can see from the dock above. I’ll run the Mac through it’s paces this week and see how Photoshop and Illustrator (the main beachball culprits) perform. So far the experiment went smoothly and the system feels faster, as mentioned before. I wouldn’t rush to do this again and I doubt installing Snow Leopard will force me to. Would it?

The Big Picture is the Boston Globe’s photo blog and the content is usually stunning. The latest update is about the wet and dry 2009 Formula 1 season and has amazing photographs of the latest race in Bahrain, like the one above and this action shot of Hamilton.

Make sure you grab the RSS feed. Whenever the blog is updated, be prepared to lose a lot of time looking through the superb photography.

Lots of people I know have been getting text messages or calls from O2 offering them upgrades on either their current or first generation iPhones. Naturally, there’s lots of speculation on the new version and June 8th (during Apple’s Wordwide Developer Conference, or WWDC) seems to be the likeliest release date.

And what will the new killer feature be? Video. Solid-state HD video cameras like the Flip Mino HD and Kodak’s Zi6 are selling well. I find myself looking at these and wondering if I should buy one and then I think: the next iPhone will have this built-in.

iPhone Video. You heard it here first.