Mammary Fluid

It’s been a while since I cycled anything like a long distance in one go – and this weekend I tested my knees, lungs and new bike in aid of getting kids in Uganda through school.

I posted a couple of images while on the road, and will dump a couple more once I can get them off my useless phone.

It was a very rewarding day – a long ride, through some beautiful parts of Southern England. The weather was kind, and we had a lot of fun. As well as burning many calories I’m pretty sure I consumed a fair number due to all the energy bars and drinks I sank – and the pub lunch of course.

Discovery of the day for me was Dark Star Hophead. A delicious beer. Brewed only a few miles from the excellent pub in Wineham where we stopped for lunch.

The route we chose meant that we opted for a climb around Devil’s Dyke rather than Ditchling Beacon. This was chosen in order to make the last section of the ride less daunting – but it was still quite a challenging bit of hill, believe me. I’d definitely do the ride again, and I’d use that route again too – once we were past the M25 it really came into it’s own. Beautiful.

All in all we’ve now raised over £3000 for Action Aid. It definitely makes the sore knees less painful knowing that. Thanks to everyone who pledged support.

Well it’s been a while since I dropped any words into this corner of the internet. It seems that the demands of work and the distractions of twitter have done well to curtail my blogging. Currently reading “Homicide” by David Simon, and loving it, and working hard to deliver the site for a well known hotel chain. I’ve lost two pounds since my last blog post. Not all of it in blood. sweat and tears.

In a (possibly vain, given this blog’s readership – or lack thereof) attempt to improve the visibility of the site, I’m following Mia’s advice and linking to an excellent site about London’s Mayor. He’s the worst thing to happen to my city for years, and I’m really rather worried about the next four years. Mia puts it far better than I could.

I may be a latecomer to this particular social tool, although it’s been on my Radar for some time – but weheartit.com is a great site. I’m having trouble using it at work though, given the frequently explicit nature of the images people seem to bookmark. ffffound is a much more purely “arty” service in a similar vein.

Plus I wonder what the etiquette is with regard to hearting your own images? A touch vain perhaps, but I couldn’t help it

My much awaited cable-release kit has just arrived, along with a new Glass-Lensed Holga. Though the release kit was intended for use with my older, plastic lensed beauty, I immediately attempted to put the cable release frame onto the new camera body, only to discover a fairly important, but totally niche piece of information.

The standard Holga cable release kit will not fit onto the Holga GCFN (the code for the glass-lensed version). This is because the screw hole for a tripod shoe is in a slightly different location on the two different types of Holga.

I’m sure that careful use of a Dremel and a little creativity would mean that it’s still eminently feasible to cut a bit out of the release kit to allow it to fit onto the GCFN, but I’m glad that my intention to use it with the plastic lensed CFN meant that no such plastic sculpting was necessary. Also, given that the tripod shoe from my Gorilla pod (and no doubt any other sort of tripod) butts directly against the body of the kit once it’s attached to the camera, and helps clamp it into place, any DIY adjustment to this fairly important area of the thing might make it less stable and therefore less fit for purpose.

But now the kit is in place, I have one body for tripod shots and long exposures and one for everyday use. I also look forward to seeing what differences, if any, the glass vs. plastic lens makes. Results coming soon to a flickr photostream near you.

And I’ve only contemplated murder once during that time. Things that have been taking up my leisure time are Roller Derby, Bicycle maintenance and Eine letters.

London Rollergirls are an awesome evening’s entertainment and I am sure to be back there in December for their next Jam. It was one of those occasions where you manage to bump into loads of people you know, and a great way to spend a Saturday.

Did video kill the radio star? And will “social listening” revive it? BBC Labs have launched “Radio Pop“, an experimental social listening platform. It’s experimental and it may disappear, but the listening-tracking technology may also make its way into the iPlayer some day. At first glance its a bit like a BBC radio specific scrobbler/last.fm combination – it graphs past listens and allows you to push-button “pop” stuff you listen to, with which it then creates a reminder list.

There’s no sign of a recommendation engine – in that respect it’s clearly not trying to ape last.fm mechanics. I’d hesitate to imply that was the aim at all – it would be tough to introduce some sort of social listening site without making some of the features smell a bit last.fm-ish though!

At current – given that it only tracks live stream listening and listening needs to be done through the radiopop widget – it’s a bit of a useability step back and away from the glorious iPlayer. But the potential in future tracking, tagging and marking listens to non-live archives is clear. Socialising the iPlayer is a mere step away and represents a pretty exciting future for BBC interactive services.

Full disclosure: I work for one of the two digital agencies employed by the BBC, but have had no part in the development of the radiopop technology or strategy. My only contact with the iPlayer is production of periodic newsletters. The content of this blog does not have any connection with my employer.

And I’m posting from it now. All in all a VERY satisfying browser, and this just from impressions of the first few minutes. Four tabs open and the memory footprint is similar to Firefox, and it’s running much faster than even that browser out of the box and unencumbered by add-ons. The interface is very clean. I do miss Live Bookmarks – I’ll have to find an alternative of some sort. It handles google applications very well, predictably. Netvibes is a little worrying though; it seems to be chewing up memory at a rate of knots – 8-16kb per second adding to its stack, maxing at 64Mb.

What the comic said about being able to use the task manager to target poorly programmed web sites appears to be correct! As to whether the browser is as bad an idea as some may think, I doubt the most pessimistic of predictions. Its built in VM for Javascript is a very good idea and appears at first glance to have the desired effect. Isolation of tabs into processes is a significant improvement on previous single-threaded browsers, and though it may yet just turn into a vehicle for google services, ads, and information gathering, its challenge to the duopoly of IE and FF and its use of new techniques is a great leap forward.

The only down side I have is that it will make testing more laborious for any development once it emerges from beta (if that ever happens, given the perpetual beta of gmail and google calendar!)

Update: A security flaw (due to the software being based on an old version of WebKit) has already been discovered in Chrome. I guess there will be more… And some people have chosen to comment on the browser in the same comic form used to Press Release it.

Well I’ve updated the WordPress version and in the process lost all my category names. So I hacked at the database a bit and got all the names reinstated. And then I converted all the categories to tags, and now all my posts are “uncategorised”. Cue gnashing of teeth.

I really like WordPress. It’s slick and it just works. Until it doesn’t. And something about that upgrade didn’t. Now maybe it’s my fault for not rolling back upon seeing the fault. But ‘just barrel on and fix it’ is somehow inscribed on my brain. Thank goodness I had proper access to the database.

I’m also mulling over a bit of a refresh to the template I’m using. Just as soon as I can find some down-time in which to throw Jquery, some CSS and some PotatoChop at a wall and see what sticks.

Internal monologue ends.

Waxy.org have posted online all the episodes of this documentary, which I’d not seen before, but which is fascinating in a thoroughly geeky and pre-intertube way:

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains – Waxy.org

So far I’m just into episode II, dealing with ENIAC and the breakthrough of computing machines into business. Thankfully I’m not quite old enough to remember punch-cards.