First Blog From The Iphone

Just testing really.

Wow the geolocate thing is a bit scary - a stalkers wet dream. Think I'll turn that off for now....

Posted with LifeCast

:/

Seems to be totally down for the past 10-15 mins?

I is for Iceberg

BB pic

Another quick photoshopping done for my friend Paul:

Rush

New picture I've just 'done' - basically playing around with some new photoshop brushes.

Not yet our flag

When making a website make sure you get the right flag....



That was from the Continental Airlines site, looks like it's fixed now...

Coming Soon

Where soon is an ill defined concept...

It only bloody works

Screenshot

Screenshot, originally uploaded by simonroadkill.

Setting up my new computer today and I'm really quite pleased with it. Have Ubuntu installed and now tweaked to doing just what I want, which was surprisingly easy! More screen grabs soon - this is my Ubuntu environment, currently my windows one is very plain. LInks to the .conkyrc, theme and background to appear soon (e.g. probably never ;)). They're basically tweaks of things you'll find in my recent del.icio.us bookmarks.

Dead Simple Pesto

I looked around the net for some simple pesto recipes (mainly because we had an overgrown basil plant and wanted to not waste the trimmings) and they all basically boiled down to the following.

Ingredients

• roughly equal amounts of Basil and Parmesan cheese
• Olive Oil
• Clove or two of Garlic
• Salt and Pepper
• Lemon Juice
  

Chuck all the solid ingredients into a blender, add oil till you have the consistency you want. Season with the salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste. Blend it all up. Put into a container and pour some more oil over the surface to cover the pesto to stop it drying out. Put in the fridge, seems to keep for a few weeks...

Roasted Goats Cheese and Butternut Squash

Dead simple and very very tasty. Takes about an hour to cook, and almost zero preparation.

Ingredients (serves 2)

• Butternut squash
• Goats Cheese
• Homemade Pesto
• Pecan nuts
• Tomatoes
• Balsamic Vinegar
• Olive Oil
• Italian herbs, black pepper
  

Cut the Butternut Squash in half length-ways, and scoop out the seeds and pulp from the bulb. Drizzle both halves with the olive oil and season with the herbs and black pepper. Put in the oven at 180C for 30 mins or so. Chop the tomato up into smallish chunks, put them into the bulb of the squash (which should be roasting up nicely by now) and add a dash of the balsamic vinegar in with the tomato. Put back in the oven for another 15 mins or thereabouts. Take the squash out the oven again and put the goats cheese over the tomatoes (and any spare over the rest of the squash). Drizzle some of the pesto along the squash and sprinkle crushed nuts on top. Put it back in the oven for 20 mins, basically until the cheese melts and browns up a bit.

Serve with roasted crushed boiled potatoes and green leafy salad.

Aspirational Living

0% finance on boob jobs - who said there's a credit crunch!

Caffiene test - CLICK!

I'd not even drank any...

Not Inspired, Inspired

I realise that for a long time I have been very uninspired by a number of things that I used to be very passionate about. Music has become muted, the Internet is dial-up, visuals sepia. A few things have have made this uninspired state seem more dramatic, such that it is now identifiable. This coming into focus has sort of inspired me to write this post, and then do something about it!

First up: The Internet, or more correctly the World Wide Web. There was once a time when those three W's would make my neurons explode with ideas. I had things I wanted to find out there in cyberspace, things I wanted to put out there (other than random blog posts). Now it seems the web is just a place to sell things on various "social networking" sites. The user experience has become homogenised to the point of being an identical set of click-throughs. Where once I saw dreams, ideas, new horizons now I just see cheap CD's.

I do occasionally get excited about webby things but they are either mundae, work related or more about some technology geek-out. In most places the content of a page leaves me cold. I'm as bored of the internet as I am of TV - probably for similar reasons. I guess I've moved out of the target market, so that content is no longer aimed at me. I suppose that is a good thing (who wants to be a target) but as someone who has historically been quite "into" the web it leaves me at a bit of a loss.

Visuals, or more specifically me creating them and actively engaging in that process, is a tough one. I don't think I'm disconnected from it, or bored of it, more that I don't have time to engage as deeply as required. A ten minute flick through DA or Flickr every few weeks isn't really enough to consider oneself engaged. I do a bit more photography than before, but nothing like enough to satisfy any creative urge. I haven't done a photo-manipulation for years (well there were two a month ago...), likewise for any kind of design/typographical stuff.

Music is a tricky one. I've probably bought more music in the past year than in the past 6 or 7 years preceeding it, mainly due to having a salary these days. But a lot of the CD's I've bought have been back fill - getting the CD of the MP3's I've had for ages, filling in gaps in an artists discography. There's very little "new music" in what I've bought. Why is that? Well, partly I don't have the time to trek through record stores and go to empty gigs every week night.

There's also a massive failing in radio and music press to cover anything I'm interested in either intelligently enough to make me want to read/listen or at all. Music magazines/websites are either painfully pretentious or aimed at the pre-pubescent. (One exception is Stereogum!)

Last but not least, there's a lot of shit out there, and wading through it gets you rather smelly. People don't have (and don't need) and kind of quality control they record songs on their laptop, using free/pirate software and upload to MySpace. Don't get me wrong, I've stumbled upon some amazing music on myspace for which I am extremely glad, but there's not an easy way to interact there (the site is dreadful, admit it!) and I can't dial up a bunch of new tunes at random.

I've used podcasts a bit (again Stereogum!!) but they don't really solve the problem (I'm not sure what the problem is...). I have more than three weeks worth of solid music on my computer - why do I need more? It's like a crack habit.

The catalyst to this post was reading a NY Times article on Trent Reznor. Love or hate his music, you've got to admit this guy is a genius, a generous one too! The whole way that Year Zero was "marketed" was phenomenal. More like a piece of Brecht theatre than an album launch. The recent releases of Ghosts and The Slip really brought NIN into the "digital age", and set a high benchmark for what people should expect. These MP3's were beautifully packaged, for want of a better word. Each track with individual art work. Splendid. Inspirational.

So, what to do? Where to go? How to progress? What is my "next action"?

Well first up, I want to get inspired by the internet again. I want to create things with the wide-eyed amazement of my 16 year old self. One thing I plan on doing is writing a little script that makes a podcast from a bunch of artists on MySpace. Half of the code has already been done (must remember to blog that...) so it'd really just be making the podcast xml - simple!

Next, Visuals. Hmm, well YANU need a decent web presence. Time to get on that, I think. I worked out how blogger style sheets work a while ago to help Chloe with a web page so maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use! This place could do with finishing off, too. I've also got a ton of photos from Iceland to sort through.

Music, well again it's about time, and making the most of what you've got. I'm playing in two bands, one as a hired gun (The Uphills) and another where I'm more central (YANU) - I should be making more of this! With The Uphills I get to goof around and play loud solo's, fine. In YANU I used to write more of the music. Recently I've not been as involved, busy boy, and I think I'm going to put my mark back on what we do. I think that we've lost some of our experimental edge and are kind of rehashing the same ideas. Time for a change!

One common thread in this is a lack of time. But these past two days I've got loads done, I just had to get off my arse and do it. So, I think next time I'm mindlessly clicking through the web, bored to a coma, I'll stop myself, think about what I'd like to see or hear, and go off and make it!

I'm a winner!!

I am so so so lucky!

Another neat Quicksilver trick

You can choose an application, put it on the shelf (,) then choose another (and another, and another...) and open them all at once. Handy if you need to fire up a bunch of things first thing in the morning!

Hiveminder scripts

I've made a couple of little scripts that hook into hiveminder. Hiveminder is a really nice web based GTD tool. I've pretty much replaced Omni Focus with it, mainly because I need something that works across multiple machines easily - web based is the way to go! It also has a well documented API - which is always nice to see. So, the scripts...

First off there's a simple todo script, which'll add a new todo (like filling in the brain dump box, but from a script). There are two neat features to this script, which I like.

Firstly you can hook it into Quicksilver (a must for all Mac users!) by placing it in

~/Library/Application\ Support/Quicksilver/Actions

to use it invoke Quicksilver, press . to enter text mode, write your "brain dump":



Then tab to the second pane type todo (or as much of it as you need to) and press enter:



If the task gets created Quicksilver will give you a nice "Task Created!" message - ahhh:



But what happens if the task isn't created? That's the second neat feature. If for whatever reason a task can't be added (for instance you are on a plane without network) it'll write the task to a little SQLite database. The next time you sucessfully add a task to hiveminder the database is polled and all the tasks you've queued up locally will be uploaded too - neato!

The second script was something I'd discussed with Tim Barrass - some kind of GTD shuffle. We thought it's easy to write a bunch of lists, but if everything is about as important as everything else choosing what you do becomes quite hard. So we went all Apple and decided to make a simple shuffle program. We then remembered that we both had full time jobs, busy lives and didn't live in Silicon Valley. The idea was sort of shelved. Until now!

The Hiveminder API made coding up a quick task shuffle dead simple. Again put it in the Quicksilver actions folder, invoke it (type taskshuffle in QS) and it'll randomly choose a task from your todo list and take you to the appropriate page on Hiveminder. Slick. At the moment there's no weighting by priority (patches welcome, I'm not very good at setting priorities so it's not that useful to me) but it shouldn't give you a task you can't do before completing another.

The scripts are both available from my subversion repository, leave a comment if you use them/have problems with it etc.

Quicksilver just got a whole load better

So, I've got a bunch of mp3 files that I downloaded with my little myspace fetching script (*). I want to put them into itunes, but they're hidden away in some random directory structure. What's this? Quicksilver command line? qs *.mp3 enter enter? They're in iTunes you say? Wowzer.


(*) to be blogged at a later date...

Reykjavik

Graffiti Montage, originally uploaded by simonroadkill.

Chloe and I got to Reykjavik yesterday and have been pootling around taking photos. Here's a few. Every young person here looks like they should be in a very cool indie band.

Statue of a Boat, originally uploaded by simonroadkill.

The full set: here

The Dream

Well done me

I've reached the end of the internet! Well, not quite. I've reached the end of my posts in Google Reader, which is a really nice app.

Basically, you can pile in a load of rss feeds from all over the web and it then sorts them into one long feed (not so unusual). Then you can add it to your google ig page - neat - and add a bookmarklet to firefox so you can click through the posts in the feed - neater.

You can even categorise (tag) your feeds, so you only see what you want to. The only criticism of it is that it doesn't filter/merge posts. I don't want to see lots of posts on the same thing from different news vendors (or the same one if they provide different feeds), I'd rather Google Reader merge them up, and show a single post for that thread.

Python Course

So tomorrow is the big day: I'm running my first course. This one is for the ACRC and is called "Data Analysis With Python" (you can download the slides and material from my CERN home page) and I hope it'll be good.
It was quite hard cramming everything into it (and maybe next time it'll be shorter) and the description is pretty broad. I decided to keep things fairly brief, and just point the attendees in the direction of useful material. I'll let you know how it goes....