Republican

Joan Smith in yesterday's Guardian:

My own observations of the Queen are that she isn't actually good at her job. I've seen her at Buckingham Palace garden parties – I was introduced to her once at a Christmas party. I said "hello" and smiled at her, and she looked absolutely aghast. She stared at me for a moment and then cut me dead and moved on, because I didn't curtsey and didn't speak until I was spoken to. I think she should have had the manners to say, "Very nice to meet you" or something.

Staunch Republican here. Can't bear the thought of more fawning, unquestioning TV coverage coming up over the next few weeks.

Jubilee Protest, South Bank, 3 June

Jony Ive

“We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.”


Great interview with Apple's newly-knighted Jonathan Ive in today's Telegraph.

Creative Commons + Flickr

creative commons by libraryman on Flickr

Spurred on by my good friend Dom's comments to my post wondering whether it was time to leave Flickr, I spent a few hours over the weekend changing the licenses to most of my content on the photo-sharing site.


So, around 8000 images from the past seven or so years have been set free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence. This allows anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work and to make commercial use of it (as long as I am attributed).


Initially, I thought of making the images for non-commercial use only but then remembered my photography has been used commercially by my friends at Brighton's QueenSpark Books in the past, so I figured I would like similar organisations to be allowed such freedom too.


Thanks to Dom for his original comments and help via Twitter. His Flickr photos have been available for a while under a Creative Commons licence and can be found here: Globalism Pictures.

the beauty is in the marriage

bill by joebusy1 on Flickr

"There is nothing you can say about a surfboard that you cannot say about a sailboat, an airplane, a ski. The artistry follows the function and the beauty is in the marriage. The grace of line is an expression of potential force. Motion holds its breath in every swelling curve. The trembling flank of a horse, warm under the palm, could not be more loaded with motion. But a board, if it is made by an old-school, traditional shaper like Bruno, is made just for you. He may ask where you like to surf and your skill level, but his assessment is mostly intuitive and is made in the first quick glance as you meet - the breadth of your shoulders, your animation, the length of your limbs, your quickness to laugh, all somehow as important as your height and weight and ability ... As many measurements as he records in his drawings, even a board out of his computer can't compare to what he shapes by hand from the foam blanks. Every board he creates is a unique animal with its own personality and potential for brilliance."

from Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave by Peter Heller (Free Press)

childhood cars

On Sunday we headed to Weston-super-Mare for an afternoon walk on the seafront and to check out the new Grand Pier, now open after the old pier burned down almost four years ago. When we arrived the town was basking in Bank Holiday sunshine and therefore packed with locals, Bristolians (no doubt) and plenty of people from the Midlands judging by the accents. Martin Parr would have had an absolute field day.


The pier was... ok. I was disappointed that you're not allowed to walk the entire way around. Cynics would say this is to force you through the arcade at the sea end and spend some money. Not us - we turned around and walked back the way we'd come.

A bigger draw for me was a car rally on the lawns beside the seafront. Normally, I'm not much interested in cars: I don't drive, I know nothing about engines and I can't tell the difference between a Vauxhall and a Peugeot. But I was fascinated to see old models that I could recognise from my childhood: Ford Capris, Escorts, Hillman Imp, Austin Princess, other ones I can't remember the names of. The one car I was looking out for but didn't spot was a Ford Zephyr. My grandad owned one of the newer models back in the 70s and I always loved sitting sandwiched between the driver and passenger on the bench seat in the front. 


There are more photos I took of the rally over on Flickr.

welcome to my breakfast table

“There’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ’round the breakfast table. It’s personal — you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.” 

Trent Walton

via swissmiss
original via Trent Walton

Stokes Croft sign

Finally managed to get a photo of this great sign in Stokes Croft this morning. It looks pretty official (note the Bristol City Council logo) but it's almost certainly the work of these guys.

full circle

I knew the unfocused, randomness of this blog would come back into fashion one day...

52 Tiger:

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in blogging. In short, there’s a trend moving away from hyper-focused niche blogs, back to what I’d call “personality” blogs. It makes me think of when I started writing online in 2000, and I like it.

Today I see the “personality” blog returning. Consider Daring Fireball, The Loop, Shawn Blanc.net and 512 Pixels, to name a few. You could argue that each is a “tech site,” but that’s not the whole truth. Daring Fireball is John’s voice, personality and interests. He’s as likely to write about the New York Yankees as he is the new iPad. The Loop reflects the interests of Jim, Peter, Shawn and the the other contributors. The same is true of Stephen and Shawn Blanc.

The niche blog will never be replaced, of course ... I’m glad personality blogs are swinging back into popularity.

I'm nowhere near in the same league of course, but indeed it is nice to have a bit of personality in blogs.

PF Flyers

Check this out - a new pair of PFs for the summer!

I've gone through a few pairs of PF Flyers over the last decade or so but more recently it's been harder to buy them in the UK. Back in the 1930s they were designed for use on the basketball court. They gained popularity in the 50s and 60s but then everything went quiet until they were resurrected in 2003.

'PF' stands for 'Posture Foundation' which, as far as I've been able to tell, means the ball of your foot is supported better than in many other types of trainer - a wedge in the insole shifts your weight to the outside of the foot which evenly distributes your weight.

I prefer the chunkiness of these to Converse Chucks. Interestingly, in the early 70s, Converse purchased the brand, but the American government filed an antitrust suit arguing that if both companies merged they'd have a monopoly for sneakers.

Apparently, PFs feature prominently in the film The Sandlot, a comedy about young baseball players during the summer of 1962.

is it time to bail on Flickr?

Is it finally time to ditch the photo-sharing site Flickr? I ask myself this question each December when the time comes to renew my annual $24.95 Pro subscription. I've been a subscribing member for over 6 years now but in recent years it seems to have become increasingly irrelevant. Amongst friends of mine who are users, there has also been a decline in uploads.

So what's stopping me quitting? Answer: the knowledge that should I stop paying my annual subscription I will lose access to all but my most recent 200 photos. The more I think about this the more appalled I feel. Regardless of the fact that when I uploaded my images I was a paying subscriber, Flickr will, as photographer Thomas Hawk says, hold the rest of your photos hostage on their site until you renew. Moreover, Flickr makes the process of quitting and moving your photos elsewhere - or even batch downloading them - difficult. Tools are available, though they potentially involve a cost.

I joined Flickr in December 2005 to use it as a repository for the increasing number of digital photos I was taking. It also seemed like a good way of showing them off. I soon discovered friends of mine were using the service and I like to think that I introduced a few others along the way too. Comments began to come in from fellow users across the globe and this spurred me on. On the odd occasion I received feedback that helped me improve (for example, keeping the horizon straight). I was a bit more diligent with my tagging back then and I'd add photos to various Groups. But as I began uploading more and more the process of going through each image, giving it a title, description and tags, adding it to a Set and then to a map and then to a Group became a laborious process that I didn't relish. Nowadays I upload photos to Flickr as somewhere to keep them backed up but each year, when renewal time comes around, I think I really should find a way of downloading them all from the site and leaving it to gather dust on the web.

Yahoo! has owned Flickr for a good few years now but, as Thomas Hawk has repeatedly pointed out, you could ask yourself whether they really understand what they've had their hands on for all this time. There has been little in the way of innovation to the point that Flickr looks as though it is still stuck in 2004, or worse, dead. This has allowed competitors such as Google, to steal a march and tempt users over to its Google+ service where you can host photos for free. There seems to be a huge contingent of serious photographers making the switch right now. Anybody that's left seems to be using Facebook.

Over the next few months I'll investigate various alternatives and I'll be sure to blog about the process here.


Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection
idleformat on Flickr