So having decided it was time to get myself a ‘serious’ camera, so I spent much of the weekend visiting camera shops, reading camera books & leafing through magazine reviews. Deciding on which ‘body’ to go for was the simple part – just pick a price point & choose between the Canon & the Nikon.
What’s not nearly so clear cut is which lens to go for. One option is to pay the extra 70 quid & get the ‘standard zoom’, but when you’re spending 400 on the body, is a 70 quid lens really doing the camera justice ? I rather think not.
A good rule of thumb seems to be to split the budget 50/50 between body & lens. Still, that doesn’t help the decision process all that much. There is still the choice between a fixed and zoom lens. Most common advice on photo.net is to pick a 50mm fixed lens & add more as you need, but having used a compact with a 28-120mm zoom lens for a while, there is still the nagging thought that maybe a zoom would be more versatile. And there are soo many options with zooms too, a series of smalls with short ranges, but wide appertures, or go for convenience of a large range, sacrificing quality.
Oh well, looks like another busy weekend at the camera shops…
…but you wouldn’t want to live there. Back at the turn of the century, Brussels was a strong centre for Art Noveau design and architecture, and later Art Deco. Sadly in modern times they seem to have little respect for their heritage – in the 60’s they demolished two of the best examples of Art Noveau architecuture by Victor Horta – the ‘Maison du Peuple’ and ‘Hotel Eetvelde’. Thankfully, his personal house survives as the ‘Horta Museum’. Wandering around the city you find a such a wide variety of styles that you
soon find that little really stands out, until you come across the hidden gems such as the Horta House, or the not so hidden gems like the outrageously huge Ministry of Justice and the impressive Grand Place.
The thing that Brussels is probably most famous for is being the center of the European Commission – in fact since most of the politicians are on holiday this time of year, the city was rather empty of people. Which meant there was all the more room in the bars for sampling Brussels other point of fame – its beers. In sharp contrast with Britain where all beers are served in pretty much the same standard pint glass, the Belgiums like to hightlight the differences between the beers. Nearly every beer appeared to have its own ‘ideal’ glass & suggested manner of serving from which bar staff were none to happy at diverging. When requesting a ‘slice of lemon’ with a glass of Ciney Blonde, we were rather abruptly refused – ‘NO. You don’t have lemon with that’ . Of well, so much for the customer is always right.
But first lets do Boston… My visit to Boston involved a pretty busy working week – not helped by the fact that Red Hat’s offices aren’t actually in Boston – instead we’ve an hour’s drive north to Westford. Still we managed to sample a number of bars in the evenings, enabling Herr Stein to have the inspired thought of decamping to New York for the weekend.
And so come Friday afternoon, we packed in work early and headed out of town on the Mass. Turnpike bound for New York. Having stopped for a few hours on the way down, we finally got into Manhatten around 1-ish. The daytime on Saturday was assigned to ‘seeing the sights’ – in the space of 6 hours or so, I managed to take in the Cooper Hewitt, Metopolitan Museum and of course Empire State Building. But it was the nightlife that we really came down for, so come the end of the afternoon, it was back to Herr Stein’s for a quick change of clothing. Things started off gently with a mexican & a few cocktails, but when we met up with Laura & ‘the girls’ who were out for a bachelorette party (aka Hen night) things started to liven up. NB, walking into a room of 15 drunk girls on a Bachelorette party at a Karaoke bar can be a traumatic experiance! Thankfully I survived, and shortly after carried on with our tour of Manhatten bars, ending up at a nice place somewhere in the East Village called ‘The Thirsty Scholar’.
Since Adam Mathes conceived his 2001 April fools joke, Google Bombing has grown
into quite a phenomenon – helped in no small part by the popularity of blogging. The steps to setup a bomb are surprisingly
simple: (Taken from original essay on bombing
- Get a web site. If you already have a web site, you can skip this step. If not, be a cheap bastard and go Geocities, Angelfire, Pitas, whatever. I don’t care. Everyone has something to say blah blah blah personal expression yadda yadda. Just remember the Google bombing.
- Whenever you update your site, which should be approximately three to five times a week, be sure to include the following HTML at some point:
Andy “talentless hack” Pressman
- Add your site to Google.
- Wait for the magic to happen! Soon, whenever you type in talentless hack into google, you’ll see Andy “talentless hack” Pressman smiling right back at you.
In fact the speed with which bloggers get indexed & their prevalence has prompted Google to consider setting up a dedicated ‘Blog’ search & possibly removing them from the main index.
The two latest GoogleBombs are “french military victories”, which (in case it slips down the ratings) takes you here
and Weapons of Mass Destruction which takes you here
Last friday evening, I ventured up to The Enterprise @ Chalk Farm. The occassion was Claire‘s brother Eric playing a set for this month’s Chippy Gang.
Their
the chippy gang is a night of good music and company run by a group of young london bands
Getting there was a chore thanks to signal failure taking out practically the entire Northern Line. Sigh :( Initials DC was first in the line up, playing about 7 or 8 songs in a mixture of english & french – sadly no esperanto though! Its hard to fit his sound into any one category – its a mix of electronic pop & indie guitar sounds – but it certainly sounded good. Next up was SeRGE, two more french guys with a very similar style to Initials DC – not surprising really, since they used to all be in the same group. Whether delibrate or not, I don’t know, but Jerome was doing a good part as a modern day Andy Warhol lookalike.
The third band of the night (no clue what they were called) had evidently gotten themselves confused as to the difference between ‘Good’ and ‘Loud’. Five guys, 3 playing lead guitar, one bass guitar and one drummer, just churned out mindless loud guitar noise. Their sound would have been vastly improved if they merely axed two of the lead guitarists (only one of them was any good anyway). After a handful of their songs, we bailed to the bar downstairs, a unique & characterful irish pub – a large bar in the center of room, sofas / chairs / large & small tables around the edge of the room. Don’t be put off by the coloured stripes for the paint job outside – its really a very nice atmosphere. I don’t remember much of the last band of the evening, but they put in a solid performance, making 3 out of 4 successes for the evening. Not too shabby, by anyone’s standards.
The next Chippy Gang is Friday 25th July….
