Dead Ringers

Getting a new mobile? Apparently there are seven billion mobile phones in the world and only 1.3 billion users (from this BBC Online article). That’s quite a lot.

Fortunately you can get your old one recycled.
(End of public service announcement)

slide

I just discovered this Flickr / Flash widget from slide.com. It only took 1 minute to configure and get the HTML code to copy and paste. A bit large for some purposes perhaps but quite a nice way to show your recent photos:

Overnight Success

One of the things I love about Flickr is the way that occasionally a photo will catch everyone’s eye and its popularity explodes like wildfire.

The photo above is one such example. I took this in Livigno, one morning on the day of a whiteout. Looking at the piste from the cafe at the bottom it reminded me of one of those L.S. Lowry matchstick men paintings, so I zoomed in and managed to isolate just the people on the slope.

I posted this (and a few other photos) to Flickr last night just before I went out. When I checked back this morning it had 27 comments, 450 viewings, 39 people had added it to their favourites and it was on the homepage of Flickr's Explore section!

Quite a pleasant surprise – and totally unexpected – though I suppose the photo did come out quite well now I think about it.

Gridrunner AKA Firstperson

Back in 2000, when I was at university in Leeds, I stopped writing tunes. Now I know that in my Ableton Live post I said I was starting again, but in reality I seem to get round to such things at a near-glacial rate. Yes, I’ve had a few attempts, but there are no anywhere-near-finished tunes yet.

But anyway, between 1995 to 2000 I put together a few tracks using my PC at home and various bits of kit at my 6th form college and university. Only about two or three of the tunes are actually any good but I like them all for their sentimental value and naivety.

I recently recovered a few of them off cassette and I’ve posted them up on Last FM under my old pseudonym Firstperson. There's one ‘EP’ (better) and an archive selection (older):

Firstperson – EP1
Firstperson – Archive

Make of it what you will. Console is the best tune IMO. They’re all a bit long though!

Back from Livigno

Well I’m back from my snowboarding holiday, which actually turned into a skiing holiday. I just couldn’t handle playing out the new media cliché. Well, that and the fact that I went straight to the top of a mountain, tried to snowboard down and spent over two hours falling on my arse. I got to the bottom of the run and decided to swap the board for skis. I just couldn’t be bothered spending the week learning when I knew I could already ski really well. I could do the same run in under 20 minutes on a set of skis.

All in all it was a great week. Lots of snow, lots of skiing very fast, a bit of getting stuck off-piste, and the predictable splashing of booze.

Here’s the photo set, which at time of writing only contains about half of my Ixus photos. I’ve not even looked at the one of the SLR yet. Check back in a week or so if pictures of snow and mountains are your thing.

So, back to normal now. Dunc’s back from his adventures in Honduras too, which sounds like it was pretty much amazing.

Going Snowboarding

I’m off to Livigno in Italy tomorrow morning for a week of snowboarding. I’ve been skiing before and was pretty good at that, though I realise that snowboading is completely different. I actually tried it for one day at the end of my skiing holiday and after a few hours I was doing OK. So hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up in a couple of days.

The only thing is that most if not all of the other guys going are quite experienced snowboarders so it’s probably just going to be me on my own on the baby slopes or doing lessons until I get the hang of it. The other beginner (my mate Robin) had to drop out due to a mix-up over dates and the subsequent clash with his trip to America.

Anyway, I’m very excited about it. I’ll be back in a week (hopefully in one piece) to bore everyone with lots of photos of white stuff.

Ciao,
Ade