Congratulations
Just a very quick congratulations to the Blyths who gave birth to a little girl at 6:40am yesterday. Mother and daughter are recuperating in hospital and will be home on Friday.
Babies Babies, Babies
Everyone seems to be having babies. The Blyths went into labour over in Geneva at 3am this morning and my little sister is due before we’ll know it. Here’s a nice little film from vimeo. This french lady has posted more films of Capuchine’s antics, some of which we’ve seen. I like the one when she tells the story about the hippopotamus.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.listingslab.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big4.png){kind=icon}
Tweet \"Babies Babies, Babies\"
Nick Griffin, the BNP Chairman went to my school
He did. I’m not proud.
Here’s my skool on wikipedia. The ‘orrible bleeder is mentioned in the Notable former pupils section. And just to back my story up, I’ve checked my sources and had a read of Nick’s biography on his own wikipedia page.
The son of former Conservative councillor Edgar Griffin and his wife Jean Griffin, Nicholas John Griffin was born in Barnet, then in Hertfordshire now Greater London, before moving to Southwold in Suffolk aged eight. He was educated at Woodbridge School in Woodbridge, and won a sixth-form scholarship to the independent St Felix School in Southwold, becoming one of only two boys in the girls’ school.
Griffin had read Mein Kampf by the age of 13, and two years later he joined the National Front. Aged 16 he stayed at the home of National Front organiser Martin Webster.
- Woodbridge School Badge
Just so we’re clear about what kind of people lead the BNP (aka Nazi) party into their first significant position of power in the UK. It’s not good. And shouldn’t continue. It’s almost enough to get us to cast a vote now and again.
Tweet \"Nick Griffin, the BNP Chairman went to my school\"
Time lapsing the afternoon away
The view out of my window this afternoon. You can catch a glimpse of the neighbors hanging out and cutting the grass. It was such a nice afternoon, everyone was out in the village. Then the weather came in and there was a little thunderstorm before dark. Also, as you can see, Tia the cat managed to get in the movie. She’s such an attention junkie.
Time lapse photography is quite difficult to do. It’s exactly like taking a photograph and having to wait 6 hours for the shutter to go click. Obviously a tripod is used. And a video camera which takes high definition resolution pictures at a fixed interval. And you need to be near a plug socket because the camera’s battery will die after a few hours. So once you’ve set everything up and you think the camera is pointed in the right direction, you can forget about it for a while. But you’ll wish you adjusted the focus,white balance or just framed the damn shot better for that entire 6 hours.
When you’ve finished the photography bit & turned the camera off, you simply compile the photos together Video usually uses a frame rate of 25 frames per second. But it doesn’t have to. 15 fps is quite fast enough and saves bandwidth. So I’ve got 508 images taken 1 second apart. At 15 frames per second I get about half a minute of time lapsed shot. I could batch edit those images in photoShop to tweak colours and cropping etc, but 500 high res images take a while to crunch. So I open up an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro (which it’s well worth paying for), and then simply export the movie with the compression I want for the web. Done.
Tweet \"Time lapsing the afternoon away\"
Best Of Vimeo
Living like a chamionard is an exmple of how to create your own vimeo channel, but why not use that channel and feed it into a drupal website? That would give you the opportunity to really open up the content to the search market, whilst also providing a nice, free service to both registered and unregistered users of the site.
We tried it with Best-Of-Vimeo.com, and it seems to work very well. After only 6 months, we have an ever increaing number of visitors, and generate much traiffic to the Listingslab Productions website.
Best-Of-Vimeo.com
Starting my week on Tuesdays
I like Tuesdays. It’s when I really get my week started. Mondays are usually a write off for me. Sometimes I’ve been working over the weekend and take Monday off to clean the house, do my washing & maybe a bit of cooking. That or I’ve been out and about drinking and being social all weekend, and I take Monday off to er….. sit around eating chips and watching telly. Which is what I did yesterday.
I had a very good weekend. Friday night down the pub was quite raucous, but I managed to escape just before the jaegermeister started hemorrhaging on my mate’s tab. Saturday I drove over to Divonne on the other side of Geneva lake to visit my friends. They’re a month away from their first baby being born and both waiting, waiting, waiting. What a lovely calm, household they have set up. Made perfect with the arrival of a tiny new kitten, Charlie. I can’t wait to visit again later in the summer and meet their new daughter.
But there was a little wine-drinking involved and by Sunday afternoon I was staring down the barrel of a long, energetic night of fete de la musique with a hangover. Much as I love the fete, a few pints in the afternoon,a burger down at the office bar and a few games of carrom with my mate Fred in the evening and I was settled. A crowded, noisy Rue De Moulin seemed too much to bear and I was asleep in front of the telly by 10pm.
Monday was endured, but Tuesday is warm, sunny and smiling. A bit of work this monrning: emails, business generation and a bit of coding and then I’m off to pick up my van.
I blew it up the other day - did I mention that? A catastrophic failiure of the coolant system sprayed all the boiling coolant water all over myself and my paintwork.
It’s fixed and ready to pick up from the garage in Les Houches this afternoon. That’s about 20km away & mostly downhill so I’m going get padded up in reduced armour (just shinguards & gloves) and boot it down the Balcon Sud & the Gaillands run. Should take me an hour, no more. Then lob the bike in the back of the van, head down to Sallanches to do a big monthly shop and everything’s back on track for a good week.
Tweet \"Starting my week on Tuesdays\"
Listingslab Productions .eu
It’s been a long time in the planning, but I’ve finally made myself a website for my Listingslab business.
www.listingslab-productions.eu
I’m going to be going in a different direction with the mothership URL, www.listingslab.com. So I’ve created a whole new domain for the Listingslab Productions website.
The .eu domain lets people know that it’s a European company, not a UK one, and the purpose of the site is to find the kind of clients that I’d like to work with. It’s a site which can grow and develop. A mash up between Drupal and Flash. it has equal emphasis on being well set up for Internet Marketing (SEO) and clean delivery of information and design to real people who might actually look at it to see if Listingslab know what they’re talking about.
Hopefully it shows that even though I live in some little village up in mountains, I can still do you a good website and probably a lot cheaper than those London chaps too!
It’s a long time since I’ve had my own business website that is good enough to start promoting. There’s still a lot of work to be done with editing the content of the site, but that’s easy with drupal. I’m rather proud of it. I always think my last work was my best. I guess when I stop thinking that, then I’ll stop making websites.
Tweet \"Listingslab Productions .eu\"
iphone cut and paste
The new iphone software was released today and it includes Cut and Paste at last. My London mate @TommyDarko posted something about it a few weeks back. He knows about this kind of thing and was helping apple beta test the new OS before the full release went out to numpties like me today. He reckons Apple have nailed it, and so do I. Its easy, intuitive and it properly solves one of the few annoying issues I’ve had with the iphone.
Aside from that there is other cool stuff in this update. My picks would be Internet Tethering (allowing you to connect your laptop to the internet through your iphone’s 3G connection if you happen to out of wi-fi range), better calendar and if some scally nicks the thing, you can now click a button to wipe all your personal data off it wherever it is through the excellent Mobile Me service.
With the new hardware available (iphone 3G s - the S stands for speed apparantly) which even though it looks exactly the same does have some significant improvements to things like the camera and GPS chips, there’s never been a better gadget. Sure there are the naysayers who bang on about blackberries and the like, but really the mobile phone using world is polarised into only 2 camps. Those who have, use and love the iphone. And those who don’t yet. Heck - even my Auntie Carole has one!
Tweet \"iphone cut and paste\"
Life marches on
Spring inter-season is finally over here in Chamonix. Over the past few months I’ve been both resting after skiing all winter and working very hard to develop my business in the down time. I haven’t written much about business recently, but that will all change soon enough.
I judge summer season to have started properly because the lifts are running again this week. I bought my summer pass and took my new bike up on Le Tour lift for the first time. Brilliant. I know it’s dangerous and I’m probably going to break my collar bone before the summer is out, but downhill mountain biking is such a buzz.
I’m wearing full body armor: shin guards, gloves, helmet & full upper body protection with a back plate. I’ve got a decent bike with suspension and most importantly I’ve got a lift pass and live right at the bottom of the the Le Tour lift system which access not only the Domain De Balme, but also Vallorcine, the Col Des Montets and there are even tracks right down to Trient in Switzerland. I’ve found my sport for the summer. It’s not quite as much fun as skiing, but it’ll keep my adrenaline levels up until the snow comes back.
The vegetable garden is going great guns and I’ve even started to eat the first produce. The radishes are amazing little buggers - from seed to table in about 3 weeks. The radishes and some beautiful baby spinach leaves have been the first food I’ve grown and eaten. All from seed. I’m actually quite proud of my veg patch. I’m always banging on about it in the pub and anyone who comes round the chalet is immediately given the tour.
First produce from my kitchen garden
In other news: I blew up my van. Bugger. It’s not as bad as it sounds (or looks) I hope. I think I just ruptured a coolant hose and all the horrible, corrosive, nasty cooling water spewed out at 100 degrees C all over myself and the van’s paintwork. It’s in the garage in Les Houches getting sorted and I’ll probably pick it up in a day or two. I’m quite looking forward to the 20km bike ride (almost all down hill) to go and pick it up.
When I were a lad
Now I’m not an old duffer, but I do remember a time before the internet and before mobile phones. When I was 19 I lived in Sydney for a year. I hadn’t heard of the internet, didn’t have a mobile phone and traveled with travelers cheques.
Instead I went surfing a lot on the beaches up the North Shore. North Styne on Manly was generally the easiest to get to on the bus and that’s where I surfed most.
This all came back to me this morning when I read a retweet from my mate on twitter (@andygozo) with a link to an amazing image in Google Maps showing a surfer very close to what appears to be a shark. Take a look at the actual Google Map Image (you’ll need to zoom in on it).
It’s amazing that the image was captured by the Google Earth satellites. Incredible that someone actually spotted and recognised it for what it was and wrote a blog about it. It’s almost unbelievable that the information managed to find it’s way through the internet maze to be in front of my eyes.
It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come and how fast. As far as I can tell we’ve only just started. I’m actually looking forward to being an old duffer, shaking my head at innovation in a world I no longer understand. When I were a lad…..