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Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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A Month In Music

In Fiction, Non fiction, Photography on November 17, 2011 at 9:07 am

Blogs like this are counterintuitive – the more hectic and energetic life is, the quieter they are, despite the fact they’re supposed to be records of activity. I wonder if diaries suffered from the same problems.

Well, life has been full and interesting these past few months. Plenty of things happening at work, but today I’m posting about my own new personal writing project which got underway last week. It’s called A Month In Music. I have all my MP3s in iTunes, and at first it tells you how many hours worth of music you have, and then how many days. I recently realised I had 30.3 days of music in my collection – a whole month. I was fascinated with the idea that I had, over 15 years, accumulated so much music that I could listen to it non stop for a whole month and never hear the same track repeated.

So that’s what I decided to do, writing about it as I went. Read the rest of this entry »

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Recently: January and February 2011

In Dennis Media Factory, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on March 20, 2011 at 10:40 pm

January and February: so good at seeming unending. There are few good days, few clear days, because mostly the sky is like a silver lid pressing down on us. It’s a hard drag until the clocks change. Keeping busy at work helped. The new team – the Dennis Media Factory – is getting going, although I always forget how hiring just tends to take ages.

We went to New York right after new year to kick off this year’s biggest project, but there’s a long way to go with it. In early February, I spent a very enjoyable and intense 10 day period on the design for what will be our first app, and here I was lucky to find a terrific UX expert to mastermind the process, an old colleague I bumped into a Windows Phone 7 event. It was great to actually get out of meetings and strategising and start the sketching and questioning, plotting and planning for an actual product.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Recently: September – December 2010

In Dennis Media Factory, Photography, The Wired Jester on December 21, 2010 at 4:30 pm

Only a man with a very busy life (or possibly, just possibly, a lackadaisical attitude to blogging) could seriously put the word “recently” and “September” together in a post title right at the end of the year. Regardless, that’s just how I roll. The other reason for this all-in-one four month update is because the Autumn and the first half of the Winter were all of a piece really. So, work: The new role that I mentioned last time came to pass, turning from a speculative secondment into a permanent move. I’m now working in a new team, looking at what Dennis Publishing can and should do with its content on mobile phones, tablets, eReaders and all kinds of other new hardware. My new team’s work also includes a bit of brainstorming of more general “new ideas” and some behind-the-scenes work on dull but important things like content management systems.

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Recently: July and August 2010

In bit-tech, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on October 22, 2010 at 6:40 pm

* Work: Summer seems like a long time ago, even more so as my work in July and August is quite separate to what happened when September came along, and what I’m doing now. August saw me hand over the Custom PC and bit-tech Editor’s Chair – for it is a chair, nay, a throne more like, bejewelled wi’ rubies and emeralds and all the riches of the Orient – and I didn’t really do a whole lot of writing for the site in these two final months. Nothing on the blog, but I did contribute a couple of reviews of two fabulous Xbox Live Arcade games. I’ve never played a game that engages with death quite as viscerally and tenderly as Limbo. It’s a distinctive, bleak and audacious game that really stuck with me. The other game I looked at was the far lighter Snoopy Flying Ace, an arcade flying game that’s visually charming but with hard-hitting, exciting combat.
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Recently: May and June 2010

In bit-tech, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on July 16, 2010 at 6:59 pm

* Work: Well, May and the start of June are all about Computex in Taiwan; we covered it in quite some style, with myself and two other reporters. It was good fun, especially as it was the first time for one of the guys, and Taipei delivered its usual craziness in spades. Not literally in a spade, although there are times when the jetlag and lack of rest mean you never feel something that surreal is too far off. The show this year lacked big product launches, but the behind the scenes jostling made it the most fascinating one I’ve been to yet. The battle between Intel and ARM is fascinating, as is Apple’s influence and the way that mobile smartphones/tablets are taking off. I tried to summarise it in a blog post. Speaking of mobiles, this blog post was a fun one to write: My iPhone told me what to have for lunch.

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Recently: January and February 2010

In bit-tech, Photography, The Wired Jester on February 22, 2010 at 12:40 am

* Work: Technical piece of analysis - Why the iPad is Intel’s worst nightmare, and to balance that out, a distinctly less technical review of the marvellously simple Zombie Driver.

* First few photos from my epic trip to China on my sabbatical in September/October last year: Tea and Temples.

* The Wired Jester: My year in books, 2009.


Garden photography

In Photography on December 12, 2009 at 10:37 am

Since I’ve got family nearby, I’ve visited Wakehurst Place in West Sussex a couple of times this year. It’s lovely; it combines an Elizabethan country house with extensive gardens and the Millennium Seedbank, the world’s largest seed conservation project. Earlier in the Autumn, the gardens featured an exhibition of photos from the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. It runs until February, and it features  some terrific work, especially the macros of seeds and flowers. The 2010 competition has come up, and I decided to enter two categories: garden views and plant portraits. You could enter four images in each category, so here’s a selection of the ones I went with:

Plant portraits

Stalk of Fire. An old photo that I rescued from a dusty folder on the hard disk to brighten up a dull winter day. Taken an August ago, in the gardens of one of South East London’s best days out, Eltham Palace.

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Rothko and 1984

In Photography, The Wired Jester on July 16, 2009 at 6:31 pm

Rothko colours

Camera: iPhone 3G, processed with Camerabag app.

A favourite image of mine, snapped on the iPhone at Tate’s Rothko show. I entered it into a competition run by Penguin to win a big print of the new cover artwork for 1984. To win, you had to enter an image that reflected 1984; I chose this shot because it’s funnier and stranger than a lot of 1984-derived images tend to be, although of course, it doesn’t shy away from the central darkness of the novel – how bleak life is when words cannot be trusted.


A trip to Taipei, Taiwan

In Photography, The Wired Jester on July 4, 2009 at 11:06 am

Waiting in the rain

Camera: Nikon D40
Lens: Nikon 18-55 (kit lens)

Not a place many people visit, but I’d agree with Rough Guide when they call Taipei Asia’s most under-rated city. Here’s some photos not of motherboards or netbooks, but of the place where they’re born.


The Tube

In Photography on June 30, 2009 at 7:04 pm

The Tube

Exiting Warren Street Tube station, London. Cross processed. My most popular shot on Flickr.

Camera: Ricoh Caplio RR211

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