strangerpixel

I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.

These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.

Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ’soft zone’.

I’ve decided to move my albums to Flickr and upgrade to a Pro account. Zenphoto may be free and better than ever, but for exposure, community and inspiration, it’s got to be Flickr. Since I made the switch I’ve been practically addicted.

The other reason for the switch is that I’m re-designing this website. It’s been over a year, and it needs a freshen up. More of which very soon.

My preoccupation with mannequins is ongoing. Could be time to devote an entire album to my plastic friends.

This one from the backstreets of Copenhagen.

In central London we’re practically swimming in free newspapers. There are vendors at every street corner from mid-afternoon, and by 7pm the pavements are littered with discarded copies. There’s a massive over-supply of free ‘news’, printed ‘chat’ and ‘gossip’. So why would you pay even 20p to get more of it?

Or is the answer just blindingly obvious.

London cycle commuting takes its toll on any bike. I’m currently on about 45 minutes per day, possibly my swiftest trip ever to and from work in this frantic bottlenecked city. My general philosophy is ‘ride it ’til it breaks’ - but this naturally can mean that I’ll be riding up Portland Place quite happily, and this will happen:

Severe, but not enough to prevent me from getting home (on a deflated tyre).

I’ve had worse. Last year, I’d been noticing strange cracking noises for months before I eventually inspected the frame, to discover this:

Andrew Gilligan, the chubby whistleblower of the dodgy dossier, has become a keen cyclist. Now a lean bike nerd, Gilligan wrote recently in the Evening Standard that he has lost 4 stone in just over a year. More interesting was what he said about cycling vs public transport:

‘I used to think I could put up with the Underground. It was only when I stopped using it that I realised how life-shortening it is… It wasn’t just the service… It was the crowds, the heat, the filthy air, the endless moronic announcements, the kids playing music on their mobile phones, the pushing and shoving, all of which delivered me to my destination in a low-level bad temper.’

‘Part of cycling’s appeal for me is that it is a last outpost of freedom in an authoritarian, CCTV city, essentially uncontrolled by anyone except the cyclist.

Happy biking AG.

Most mornings are like any other at London College of Fashion. But not this morning. Walking through the Fashion Space Gallery in the direction of my office, I found the door blocked by a huddle of females. When they didn’t disperse, I photographed them.

Turns out these mannequins were part of a design competition for high street retailers, the theme being recycling, and the reuse of materials ordinarily discarded during the fashion design process. As I write, Heart FM is outside in the gallery doing a feature on the competition. Entrants include Wedgwood and Playboy.

Just as a footnote to this post, I’m not unhealthily obsessed by mannequins or wigs.

The above is a new arrival to the strangerpixel cycle stable. Sweet, awesome - these don’t cover it. Compared to my Scott Expert (01?), this bike is like a rocket: quick, flickable, stiff under pressure, compliant over rough surfaces, sure on the descents. Classy. It turns heads.

When I test rode the Wilier about a fortnight ago, the unexpected feeling of power and speed on a climb were better than a year’s supply of Floyd Landis’s testosterone patches. It was so exciting I nearly burst a lung firing up Rosslyn Hill.

I pondered the Wilier’s rivals: efficient German engineering in the shape of the Focus Cayo on the one hand, on the other the undeniable quality of the US bike giant Trek. But I came back, remembering that first acceleration.

Searching for a new house or flat is not my favourite pastime. It tends to be a long-winded, nerve-racking process that fills your leisure time with a fog of facts, figures and phone numbers. As in so many other areas - how did people operate before the internet? Cold-calling? Pen and paper? (more…)

I watched Current TV for the first time tonight, and it’s been something of a revelation. Mainly, TV has become peripheral in my day-to-day media experience - the web is my number one focus, and anyway, clearly, most TV is rubbish. But Current TV is just gripping: 8-minute segments, created by viewers, pinging around the world and from subject to subject with this slick, perky style, nicely designed graphics, and progress bars to tell you how far you are through a programme. It’s very webby, offering loads of links that you can check out while viewing, but the producers also know to mix laddish content (I just watched something about the next Jackie Chan) with current affairs and documentary-style content (like features on what matters to Buddhists in Nepal). The website is pretty nice too.