Future of the internet is here! Twinkle is a new application for the iPhone that lets you see who is using twitter within a range of km of where you are, it uses your current mobile mast position to roughly locate you. Not only will it let you find new friends but it will also make it possible to find out what is going on in the area you are in. The possibilities of this are endless, image how useful this might have been in London during the terrorist attacks the hours of not knowing what was going on may have shrunk as people posted messages about what they heard, of course on the flip side it may have made it worse with conflicting stories etc… I imagine for the geek crowd this will be handy trying to work out where everyone is going for the conference after party. Here’s a screenshot of it in action -
I set my distance to 1000km for that screenshot but there’s some people using it within 4 miles of me!
On a separate note I started twitlinks.com this evening, it is a simple site I wrote in my spare time for getting tech. news out of twitter faster. I gave RWW the exclusive to it, check it out at twitlinks.com Andres, the South American artist genius did the logo for it -
Checkout Anhdres.com for more drawings
To get away from all the doom and gloom that has been hitting the site recently, I made a little trip today to the Design Museum on the Riverfront about 20 seconds walk from my house. It had just about everything I was interested in inside. F1 Cars, Computers and Surfboards!!! The Design Museum is about 20 seconds walk from my flat and I’ve never been further inside than the gift shop. That was all to change as their outside display was of a surfboard.
First off was the McLaren F1. You are allowed to feel the weight of all the components composite materials such as the carbon fibre body, the steel drive shaft etc.. etc..
THE HAÇIENDA, a famous night club in Manchester featured in the cool film with Steve Coogan ‘24 Hour Party People’ which I watched in Canada was featured in the Design Museum, concentrating on its traffic sign style design -
Then there was the surfboards! This was the coolest part, it is like having a surf shop 20 seconds from my house -
There were surf boards from the 1950ies to 2004 from the old fashioned wooden boards to current day epoxy models. The wooden ones look beautiful but they are so slow in the water (unless your surfing 40ft Jaws). Here are some more boards -
Left to Right 2000 - 1969
The ‘Shape and Shapers - The Evolution of the Surboard’ at the Design Museum closes on the 9th October.
The difference between a cappuccino and a latte in the UK, from what I could work out, is that cappuccino had chocolate on top and latte didn’t. In India, the difference between a cappuccino and a latte is the size of the cup you get the coffee in!
I don’t believe it is possible to be any further away from the United States than I am now, so going to the ’shopping mall’ in Gurgaon for McDonalds/Subway/Marks and Spencers for lunch still doesn’t feel right, I don’t think I’ll get used to it any time soon, let alone the people who live here.
After leaving my SPV mobile in my black bag in midday sun for a couple of hours last Sunday and it consequently breaking; I have purchased a new phone here in India. Phones are about Rs. 6500 (£80) cheaper than the UK so I got a nice Nokia 6100 at a very reasonable price, I am so glad I have gone back to using Nokia, it has such a great easy to use system on it.
There was an Earthquake in Delhi on Thursday, but I did not notice it 
This is our new driver, Mr Rarjinda who told us a story about a fight between a monkey and a dog in Hindi once. He is so much better than Mr Saruj, and also the guy we had for a day who’s name I didn’t get, who I was sure didn’t actually know how to drive.
I still have not seen a cloud, I wake up in the morning hoping that it might be ‘overcast’ for the day. Normally blue skies would leave the average person who spends most of their time in a country where it rains a lot thinking great! However, I feel I am getting cloud withdrawal symptons. It would be nice to just see one of those little guys floating in the air, maybe just a little plane contrail cutting through the vast blueness of the sky, but no. Not a sinnnnnngle cloud.
I said last post that I thought the Hindustan Times was a little bit harsh when it said that Delhi was unsafe for women. I’ve changed my mind, this city is definetly not safe for women on there own, especially tourists. Gruesome Story Here.
This Saturday I went on a serious tourist tour of Delhi with Nitin. This is a picture of the Lotus Temple, where people can go and pray. It’s very nice, you are not allowed to talk when inside and there’s even microphones under the seat that will catch you talking and subsequently get you kicked out.
These are the trees in the garden of the Lotus temple. There the roundest trees I’ve ever seen -
We also went to a place called “Bhagwan Mahavir Ahinsa Sthal” where I had to take my shoes, socks and belt off and then I had to wash my hands before we could go up to see the place of worship. Your not allowed to take photos of it so I didn’t.
We then went to a place called ‘Dilli Haat’ which sold loads of nice India style things. I bought an Indian style shirt and some presents. This is a picture of a lady dressed in lots of colors (she must have been boiling though as it hit a max of 37 degrees today) -
Lastly this is Qutb Minar which was built in the 14th century (the picture angle idea was stolen off a photo taken by one of the people from Holland I met) -
One emperor started to build a bigger Qutb Minar but he died one year into the project and this is as far as he got -
We also went to TGI Fridays and a Shopping Mall where I got some CDs for a 3rd of the cost in the UK! Brilliant! A great day out, Sunday I just spent the day by the pool. The monkeys were back again in force, one even jumping for a great height into the swimming pool. Eventually the hotel management came out in force and then some guy showed up with a rifle, so monkey brain may be on the hotel menu tomorrow…..
Took some cool photos of London last night while out with some friends - we went to a place called Cafe Pacifico on Langley Street, WC2 that does Mexican food, it was very nice -
I took the one below after 6 bottles of Corona and half a margarita (they are disgusting I couldn’t drink the other half) - not a bad effort I don’t think! (Click to enlarge -)
6 second exposure, 2 second delay
If there’s an album I can recommend to anyone that read this, its ‘Thirteenth Step’ by A Perfect Circle. It’s got some great tracks, have a listen to ‘The Noose’ for example, or ‘Blue’, ‘Pet’, ‘The Nurse Who Loved Me’.
The RSS Aggregator is coming along nicely, this is an example of it now, I’ve got the RSS loading working, I think I’ll add support for ‘atom’ and the comment-api, again, just to make it a competitive aggregator. The key is going to be in its operational simplicity. Here’s the screen shot -
That’s it for this regularly scheduled blog. Until the next time.
G
…these days are mine. Billy Corgan blogs more than I do - its official.
It snowed in London today!! I took my camera to work this morning in the knowledge given to me by the weather man.
This is looking into the sky at the broadgate area.
I’ve put some of my old websites back online. They were really cool back in the day, and it seems sad to not have them ‘out there’, so here they are -
I’m slightly concerned about this ‘bird flu’ - it sounds bad and it is bad.
Anyway, I have broken my New Years Resolution (which was to only drink for 3 hours on Friday and Saturday night only). I have been out ‘drinking’ for 3 days in a row, which I feel terribly guitly about, I haven’t been for a jog recently neither. I put not jogging down to that fact that I have recently had all these injections and it may make me ill. I am sure it probably won’t, but there’s a negative-placebo outcome there somewhere.
Saturday night (the last night of boozing and should I say the biggest night of boozing) saw us in Shoreditch, which is an area of North London that was once ‘underground cool’ now it just has a lot of bars, which do so well with customers that they’ve managed to be able to afford to make them pretty nice. Blu Bar, on the corner of Hoxton Square has closed down. However, the bar next door has doubled in size - we went there for a couple of drinks and then moved onto a Spanish restaurant called ‘Macondo’ it was tiny but really really good, and modestly priced. I recommend it to anyone, its best to go in early and get a table sorted as it is so small, but very casual as well.
After this we moved onto a club called ‘Troy Bar’ - it was a bit seedy and to be honest we looked a little out of place - but by this time we had all drunk far too much so we didn’t care!! On the way out of the club, whilst searching for a cab, I took this photo of some great graffiti. Although you can see the reflection of the post and myself in it (boooo). Click to enlarge -
On another note, I’ve written an alternative google deskbar, although it now works how I want it to.
It looks like this at the moment, but I need to woo my designer friend in Holland if he will make me a nice little background image for the textbox. I am going to publish it at hotzoup.com when I’ve written the installer.
I’ve started to have dreams about being in Australia, although they are the worst case scenario dreams, you know, where I make no friends and suddenly the daunting truth of being the other side of the world sitting on a baking hot beach but not knowing anybody was maybe not one of my greatest ideas.
Take it easy, fight the fighters, not their wars.
I’ve been taking photo’s again! You better believe it!
I have taken two photos of a building opposite London Bridge Station which appears to cross the boundaries betweeen the 3D modelling world and the real world. When I looked at these photos from on the computer, it looked like they had been made by a computer! But I can assure you they exist in real life. The only change I have made is RGB balance and contrast/brightness.
This is looking into the corner of the building
This picture is looking straight up the side of the building into the sky.
This is the other side of the bulding, the black glass reflects the nearby building brilliantly. You can see the stair cases of the building in the glass as well.
I took this one morning on the way to work. You can see the men working on the outside of the erotic guerkin. The windows of the building infront give some idea of scale and how high the Swiss Re tower is.
One of my favourite signs in London is this F R A N C E sign on the French Railways House building off Piccadilly. It’s very 60ies I think!
That’s is for our regularly scheduled picture show!!!!
Last night photo until I get a new photographic source. Had injections for Hepatitus A, Diptheria, Teberculosis, Thyphoid and a sugar cube for Polio today. The ball is rolling for the big trips! My arm hurts now though.
This is from the little bridge that joins Shad Thames and Mill Street, looking back into the City. You should be able to see Tower Bridge in this picture (just)!
These pictures were taken at night time. Night time pictures require a longer exposure. Which means the shutter stays open for longer and the camera is able to take in more light. The real difficulty with this is that any movement the camera makes will blur the image. It’s really much better to use a tripod - I don’t have one of these and even when you can put the camera onto a solid surface, the shake of pressing the button and releasing it is enough to ruin pictures be causing a slight blur. The trick here is to use the countdown feature of the camera. This way you can get the camera stable while taking the photo. Check out these two pictures below - (click to enlarge)
This picture was taken in my room with the lights off, with just the blue of the Windows XP on both machines to light up the room. 10 second exposure.
This was taken at midnight from my balcony with 15 seconds of exposure. Look how bright it makes the towers of Canary Wharf!
