Some pretty amazing images from China.
Found on the City of Sound blog.
Category Archives: Photos
Toronto
I was in Toronto at the weekend, meeting up with the good folks from DirectLeap. It was exceedingly cold on Sat night when I arrived, as I had expected at this time of the year, but on Sunday the sun shone, and all was bright and clear, and we sat outside enjoying the weather.
A pasteural scene
There are some people, perhaps even amongst my readership, for whom milk is only milk if it comes straight from the cow. For some of you, the very thought of pasteurisation is an abhorrence. That, at least, was my assumption when I saw that my local supermarket had created an aisle which wholeheartedly rejected the UHT concept:
On closer inspection, I discovered that this aisle not only contained long-life milk, but that it was right next door to the ‘Free from’ section: “Free from gluten”, “Free from sugar”, “Free from artificial preservatives”…
Platform of choice
Once again, a certain platform was noticeably more popular than any other at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference.
Christine Herron, pictured here in the glow of her screen, has been blogging the conference pretty thoroughly.
8 o’clock shadow
Thanks to my jetlag, I was up and about earlier than usual yesterday morning, as evidenced by the shadows on this section of a BART platform.
I was in San Francisco for a meeting and did some clothes shopping at the same time. I’ll be sure to wear some flowers in my hair, I thought, but it would be nice to wear something else as well.
I walked out of the store clutching my bag, crossed Market St in glorious sunshine, and my mobile rang. It was BA telling me they’d found my suitcase…
SFO
I’ve landed at San Francisco, but my suitcase hasn’t. I am both combatting my jetlag, and postponing the laundry I’m going to have to do in the bathroom of my hotel room, by playing with the Ixus 750 that I bought in Duty Free on the way out. Lovely.
Tickr for Flickr
If you have a Mac and you don’t need to get any work done for a bit… Tickr for Flickr is remarkably addictive. You type a word into its search box and it displays, along one side of your screen, a scrolling band of photos which have that tag on Flickr. It’s very nicely done. If you want some good words to get started, try ‘coniston’, ‘scuba’ or ‘night’…
Stanley Park, Vancouver
A couple of days ago.
Lake Geneva
Yesterday evening.
Swiss trains not only run on time, they also have clean enough windows that you can take photos through them!
I was visiting my old friends Pierre & Linda, who live in a little village high up in the hills. Here’s a view from Pierre’s commute in to work:
Pierre works in Martigny at IDIAP which doesn’t look quite like your typical research lab:
More photos of the area here.
Chateau Naughton
Another lovely photo on John’s blog.
Pop
Chris DiBona uploaded this rather nice picture of Ward Cunningham (creator of the original Wiki) holding a half-exploded balloon.
The high-speed photography session was a fun one at Foo Camp, but I got there at the end and didn’t get anything as good as those in Chris’s collection.
‘Tis true, ’tis pity…
And pity ’tis, ’tis true…
…that the most interesting periods of my life are the ones when I have the least time to post blog entries. So here’s a quick summary of the recent past.
Less than a week ago, I jumped on a plane to San Francisco and then drove to the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol, CA for Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp.
Of that, much has been written elsewhere, but suffice it to say that I had many interesting conversations with, and listened to fascinating talks by, a remarkable group of people. I also rode several varieties of Segway and other scooter-like devices, perhaps the most impressive being one of Trevor Blackwell’s home-made ones.
On Monday, I headed for the Apple HQ in Cupertino, to visit my old University friend Stuart Cheshire, the chief motive force behind the technology formerly known as Rendezvous, now ‘Bonjour‘. I hadn’t seen him for nearly twenty years, and I remembered him as a Mac enthusiast from college. He was driven to create Bonjour, he said, partly through frustration that TCP/IP was so much harder to use than Appletalk had been, and partly because people seemed to invent a new transport protocol whenever a new connection type came along. Why wasn’t IP used for Bluetooth? And USB? And DECT? And… well, you get the idea. It wasn’t suitable mostly because it needed too much other infrastructure and configuration. And so his Zero Configuration Networking initiative was born. Most networked printers support it now, as do some Linux distributions. And, yes, Windows users can download it too.
On Tuesday, Hap & CD & I went cycling in the wine country around Healdsburg. The weather, the wine, the company and the views were all wonderful, and I have a new-found respect for Zinfandel.
Yesterday morning I was in San Francisco, where I visited Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, which lives in a wonderful little building in the Presidio.
The archive is a most inspiring project, aiming, in a nutshell, to make all of human knowledge accessible to everybody. The first conversation I’ve had which used the word ‘petabyte’ while talking in the present tense. A quick trip over the Oakland hills to another winery for a picnic lunch, before heading for the airport.
And now I’m on a train heading out from London to Cambridge. The sky has small patches of blue between big grey rainclouds. But it’s good to be back.
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