Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
This annoying video of a waif on a bike for TopShop incidentally gives a very good tour of the green spaces of the London Borough of my youth. See how many landmarks you can spot.
Alert: Annoying music contained in abundance.
I have come to the startling realisation that despite being 6'3" and looking skinny that I am slightly overweight with a BMI of nearly 26. The plan is to get down to 190 by the time of the hood to coast run on the 26th, and then down to 180 by the end of the summer. To make this fun for all and at to reinforce the goal I have used Google Docs to create a spreadsheet and within that created a graph gadget that tracks my weight and the events associated with it. You can check it out in the sidebar on the right.
Google Docs makes this kind of thing ridiculously easy. Here is a larger version of the chart.
So far my iPhone as wonderful as it is has crashed four times. In addition to the crahses of the phone various applications have decided for one reason or another to spontaneously stop working or crash on opening. Even Apple's own remote application has fallen prey to this particular behaviour.
I expect that apple will release a 2.xx firmware in the not too distant future and I imagine that apps will get more robust as developers figure out the platform.
Applications to date are a very mixed bag. There are some excellent apps, that really seem to make the most of the platform, and then there are tons of your bog standard crappy utilities/games/useless one problem applications.
My favourites so far:
Worst thing about the iPhone, because there is so much function that you actually use, location, media player, data etc the battery life has the potential to be horrible. I can see myself carrying a Dock cable and looking for spare USB ports to suck the power out of.
Peter Tripp a radio DJ in New York spent 8 days that’s 201 hours awake in the longest sleep deprivation experiment ever conducted. The two videos below are a fascinating insight into exactly what happened over those 8 days.
7:31 Sitting in a mall in downtown Portland waiting to pick up an iPhone 3G. Got here at 7 am, store opens at 8 and I would say there are about 50 people ahead of me in the queue. Apple are doing a great job on the logistics. Handing out water and coffee to everyone. Still struggling to choose between white and black, hope to have mind made up by the time I get to the store. There is no indication what stocks are like so the decision may be made for me.
07:45 There are a ot of people with first gen iphones in the line. Looks like all the fanboys are upgrading.
10:55 Have iPhone but can't activate server is timing out, more than mildly annoying. On the plus side it does look pretty.
11:17 The phone is working but iTunes is still having problems, error message -4 whenever i connect the phone.
My brother is taking the big leap from regular employment to freelance art director and has just launched his portfolio site. Go check it out pass on the word and tap into the creative awesomeness that is ostrichsized.com.
My training to become the ultimate guitar hero has come to an abrupt halt. My Xbox 360 has succumbed to the dreaded red ring of death or RROD (That’s a nice initialism, thanks Ben). Fortunately Microsoft have extended the warranty from 1 to 3 years for this one particular issue and I should be back up and rocking in a few weeks.
Fortunately the weather here is beautiful and I have managed to lie up on the roof of my apartment building reading heaps of books on my kindle, which is fortunately still going strong. For anyone stuck with crappy weather here is the forecast for Portland.
MMM Toasty.
Via Make
In my pursuit of fitness for the Hood to Coast relay race this summer I am training with a Garmin forerunner 305. In general I think it’s a great deveice, if a little heavy and the heart rate band is less than stellar in its comfort. The main problem is saving the data in some useful form. I have tried most of the tools including Garmin Training Centre, Motion Based and lately Trail Runner.
I have started using Trail Runner to post my routes here. It is far from an ideal solution but so far as I can tell none of the online systems have really good direct import of data from a forerunner.
Less tech more running there are only 2 months before hood to coast!
I moved into my new apartment on Monday and thought with the high density of housing where I live that it would be no trouble poaching wifi for a day or two. It turns out I was wrong, I can see about 16 networks and of those only two do not employ WEP, one was too weak to connect to and the other refused to let me on, perhaps because of an access control list.
This resulted in an emergency trip to a comcast service center to pick up a cable modem. That process went pretty smoothly, I ordered and picked up that afternoon. The installation process on the other hand was terrible. The modem lit up promisingly but then spent the next 3 hours steadfastly refusing to get through the set up wizard. The excuse it gave, "could not connect" despite the fact that it had just downloaded the wizard from the comcast site. this lead to a good deal of messing around and DNS fiddling on my side before I finally gave in and called customer service who managed to get me up and running in about 10 min.
My apartment now contains:
And occasionally me.
I moved into my new apartment last night. Probably the easiest move ever. Facilitated by my total lack of possessions and a very handy freight elevator. The huge studio is currently home to an armchair and ottoman, a mattress on the floor, an ikea kitchen island and a boat load of clothes spread across the floor.
Here are some pics of the previous tenants layout. Will post some of mine soon.
One of the nice things about traveling between London and Portland is that there is generally no weather shock. After 19 hours and 6000 miles of travel we stepped off the airplane into almost identical weather as we stepped on. Fortunately the eight hour time difference worked in my favour this time making an 8:30 am meeting far easier than it would otherwise have been. I find that traveling east is far harder to adjust to than traveling west. I would love to be able to feel as perky at 7am on a regular day as I do with the jet lag. I wonder does anybody actually ever wake up feeling refreshed? The morning feels like a trial of wills, of me vs the duvet and so often the duvet wins.
I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus.
It weighs as much as a small, car has a mustache and eats 7000 oysters a day. It’s a walrus and it probably makes a terrible pet.
Great article on them over at the nytimes.
I am going to be back in the UK for 5 days from the 27th through the 1st. I will be in Oxford at least Wednesday, Thursday, and in London Friday night and Sat. Clear your calendars people its time for an overdue catch up.
Apparently this photo was take at one of the anti-Beijing Olympics protests. If I remember correctly Germany hosted the 1936 olympics with Hitler even presiding over some of it.
This is an amazing trailer for a film titled Argoman. It is being immediately added to my list of bad movies to watch. The trailer has such epic action as Argoman seeming playing lethal dodgeball with a robot. Fight sequences choreographed by an adherent to the no touch fighting style mixed with some very dramatic falling down.
Like any super hero he has his weakness, his powers disappear for 6 hours after a passionate session of lady loving.I think that’s called a post coital nap.
Watch and be amazed.