April 2005 Archives

Selfridge's in the Bullring, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

For a long time I've been very unsure about the very distinctive design of the Selfridge's store in Birmingham. I saw it for myself yesterday, and I now see that no photograph really does it justice. It's a lovely piece of work, and one that fits into the urban context far better than I expected.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Veteran animal rights activist jailed after threat in court:

Moments after being spared prison, the veteran animal rights activist Keith Mann landed himself in jail yesterday by openly threatening the director of a research laboratory who was sitting in court.
The act of defiance forced Judge Richard Price to reconvene proceedings at Portsmouth crown court, conduct a trial on the charge of contempt of court and sentence Mann, 38, to six months in prison.

Good.

This is an insanely good idea:

Fraser Speirs - Neutrino XML - all your feeds in one file.:
What is Neutrino?A Neutrino feed is a collection of pointers to other syndication feeds - say, a blog, Flickr and Del.icio.us - all of which belong to one individual. It's essentially indirection for feeds - point someone at your Neutrino feed and they can then discover your blog feed, your Flickr feed, your Del.icio.us feed, and anything else you care to include which you publish and can be syndicated.

I have a blog, a Livejournal, a Flickr account and a (rarely-used) del.icio.us account. All of them are chucking out feeds. To combine them all in one feed so people can get streaming Adam goodness in a single place would just be a fantastic step forward.

Bravo!

(Now, if you can find a way to pull each person's contributions to a group blog into their Neutrino stream, all the better.

Technorati Tags: flickr, xml, rss, atom, aggregation, blogging, blogs, syndication, neutrino, review

Tom Coates has posted an essay based on a speech he gave at a recent Six Apart event. It's entitled The Horseless Carriage...:

This is a slightly rewritten and polished up version of a talk I gave to a Six Apart event (cf. On being on the panel at Blogs in Action) at London's Polish Club a few weeks ago. It's kind of a personal history of and exposition around weblogs and webloggery. This version has had some of the more colourful language removed.

What it also is, beyond the above, is well worth a read. Go to it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, writing

The observant will have noticed the sudden appearance of Technorati tags at the bottom of the last post. That's because I've just switched to the latest version of ecto, my blogging tool of choice, which not only makes using them very, very easy, it also has a spiffy new interface.

If you're blogging on a Mac, give it a try. Oh, and there's a Windows version, too.

Technorati Tags: mac, ecto, technology, apple, software, blogging, OS X, technorati, tags

The times, they are a-changin'.

BBC NEWS | Health | Nurses warn over teen group sex:
Teenagers are taking part in a group sex activity known as �daisy-chaining�, nurses have claimed.
School nurses at the Royal College of Nursing's conference in Harrogate said colleagues in parts of London had become aware of the practice.
Nurses warn daisy-chaining, where acts are performed with multiple partners, puts teenagers' health at risk.

Frankly, as a teenager, I spent most of my time hoping just to kiss a girl. Having sex with multiple partners wasn't even on my radar.

Technorati Tags: culture, medicine, sex, UK

Suffolk street, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

A quiet day in a Suffolk town. It's nice to escape London, if only for 24 hours.

I've just spent my lunchbreak in a very agreeable cafe with WiFi, upgrading this blog to Movable Type 3.16 and watching the world go buy on an unexpectedly sunny day.

If you find any problems, drop me a line at [email protected]

Islington Borough Council has WiFi enabled a whole street, as part of a regeneration idea.

So, Lewisham Council, how about it? The centre of Lewisham? Deptford High Street? Sounds good to me.

Google has launched its map service in the UK. And it's rather good.

It has the clarity of design and ease of searching that are Google hallmarks. A quick search of a few locations I'm very familiar with proves that the maps are good. Let's see how they pan out in regular use.

My first election post! Break out the bubbly

Once you're done with the fizzy stuff, swing by and check out Channel 4's Fact Check site, which is doing an excellent job of fact checking the rather dubious claims being made by our politicians. Why aren't the BBC doing stuff as good as this?

There is a group of classical music fans out there that are currently the bane of my life. These people, despite having a fine ear for music, are morons. They are completely incapable of differentiating between �artist�, �composer� and �track�. For example, Beethoven is not a �track�, he's a composer. So, when entering the details of one of his symphonies into your music software, you should put his name in the �composer� slot, not the �track� slot. Equally, putting the track name into the �artist� slot just confuses things further.

Now, to be charitable, you could assume they have a quirky, idiosyncratic labeling system for their MP3s, that makes sense to them. That's as may be. But, even allowing for that, why upload your quirky, idiosyncratic and just plain wrong information to Gracenote so that every other poor blighter who sucks down your information from the CDDB is forced to spend 10 minutes correcting your idiotic work?

Devon Woods, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Everything I love about woodland, in one picture.

Salcombe, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

As seen in this week's EG.

Finally, proof that the makers of the new series of Doctor Who have got it right: people are complaining that it's too frightening for children.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Doctor Who 'too scary', say parents:

Hiding behind the sofa is an age-old ritual for younger viewers of Doctor Who. But the BBC has been inundated with complaints from parents that the doctor's latest adventure crossed the line between fun and frightening - and was too terrifying to be broadcast at 7pm.

I remember complaints like that when I was seven or eight, back in the late 70s, and even at the time I thought the adults were being silly. The show was just scary enough.

Hurrah for early evening terror for a whole new generation.

Enjoying his ice cream, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

A Devon candid

Rocks - 2, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Yes, I'm pleased with these pictures.

Committed contrarians, protestors and activists' news site Indymedia has decalred Lewisham a "rotten borough" because it's allowing developers to build on part of Deptford Park:

The Rotten Borough of Lewisham is failing its local community with its planning policy, with its housing policy. It is though the developers best friend, providing ideal development opportunities. In practice it is no different to many other Councils that fail to act in the best interests of the local community but are quick to provide development and get rich quick opportunities for property developers.

Ah-ha! Nasty council and eeeevil developers in league again!

Of course, there's almost certainly another side of this story, and I note that Indymedia only links to its own news stories, and a handful of other protest-related sites.

Any comments Councillors Brown or Milton?

Hallsands - 16, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

In 1917, the village of Hallsands on the Devon coast was destroyed by the sea. In the century since, the sea has steadily eroded what's left.

We visited the village at the tail end of our stay. The sea has claimed the walkway down to the village in the last decade, leaving it inaccessible to visitors. These photos were taken on the walk to and from the observation platform.

I'm glad I went. In another decade, I doubt many of the buildings in these pictures will still exist.

You can see the rest of my pictures here and read more about the village here.

Rock Texture 2, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

I've finally finished going through the wedding photos I shot for some friends and my time is my own again. In the meantime, here's a rock texture I rather liked. It was shot during a walking holiday in Devon over Easter.

More here.