Badda Bing Badda Boom!

Was thinking for a while about heading down to Batersea Park to watch the fireworks – until that is I heard the explosions going off right above our house. A look out of the window revealed the neighbouring tennis club having a great little display. So I camped out in our garden for a while to enjoy the show… Thankyou Southfields Tennis Club!

And the weather today ? Scorchio!

Another weekend of scanning, and I’ve finally got around to scanning my pictures of Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project”. Amongst my favourites, is the guy captured mid-stride at the top of the stairs, but the general B+W shots turned out pretty great too.

A few sites of my own

Time for a little shameless self-promotion of mini-sites I run…

• autobuild.org: home to Test-AutoBuild – the PERL framework for performing continuous, unattended, automated software builds,
• tube-haiku.org: a collection of Haiku inspired from by life travelling on the London Underground.
• autoant.org: the home-to-be of a project to provide a high level tool around ANT, as AutoMake is to Make.
• beer-o-clock.org: a handful of drinking establishments around London that I’ve been known to frequent

Free your mind

Buy a Lomo! After a weekend scanning negatives, I’ve now uploaded my first set of shots from my trusty Lomo to my gallery. A handful of my favourites are also gracing my Lomo Home. Next to process are a handful from a day trip down to Brighton back at the end of the summer.

Free web services

Since the great Dot Com crash, there’s been a huge rationalization of ‘free web services’ and a corresponding commercialization of many others, covering themselves with a pile of adverts. Every now and then, however, I come across a site that has managed to maintain a functional clean design, free of advertizing, with a really useful service. Three that spring to mind are:

• The Lomographic Society – the worldwide community built up around the Lomo Kompakt Automat camera, offering free photographic hosting for all their members.
• Beer in the Evening – the ultimate A-Z of pubs in London, and the UK at large. If you’re looking to meet up with a bunch of friends, then don’t send around the Streetmap URL, go for the Beer in the Evening link instead.
• Move Flat – Loot clearly hasn’t taken advantage of the opportunities offered by the web for enhancing its advertising services. Still restricting you to next to no lines of text for description, and crude search services. They’re probably afraid of impacting the sales of the dead tree version. Move Flat, however, has no such qualms, allowing incredibly detailed information about your flat to be entered, combined with fantastic search service. What’s more its all completely free!