Completed (almost) a server move yesterday and the day before - all of our domains are now hosted on a shiny new Plesk server. Many thanks to Rachel for making the move go smoothly.
Archive for February, 2006
Discovered a new photo site today - Pxite - noticed they had a weekly photo contest, saw the theme this week was “airport” and thought “no, nothing I can do for that”.
Then I remembered a picture I took in Brussels Zaventum airport two years ago. Didn’t like the photo very much at the time, but with a bit of retrospective cleaning and cropping it’s turned out nicely. The statue is called “Flying” by Jean Michel Folon, but I prefer to call my version “Dreaming of Flying” (or just “the man with the propeller head”).
I would write something here about Michael Haneke’s film Hidden (Caché), but I can’t because my brain isn’t working this morning. But what I will do, mainly for my own benefit, is link to this brief review and anything-but-brief discussion of the film, which helped me to unravel some of the themes and in particular the “what happened there?” ending. Something I love about Michael Haneke’s films: they’re never over at the end, the audience is expected to work hard and, in doing so, gets so much more out of the movie.
And a quote from the lead character which gives away the movie’s context:
Terrorize me and my family and you’ll regret it.
I saw this movie a fortnight ago, and realisations about it are only just blossoming within my head. Although many of the themes within it relate to France’s treatment of Algeria, I believe many elements within the film actually refer to the USA’s treatment of Iraq (from the obvious - the TV news footage shown while the Laurents fret over their missing son, to the less so - the fact that Georges is convinced his once-almost-brother Majid is terrorizing him but Majid strenuously denies this and eventually the audience comes to believe his denials. Hell, even the fact that the main character is called George(s) and (possible spoiler this) the brief suggestion that the “terrorists” could be the children of Georges and Majid, an allegory for their own deeds coming home to roost).
Damn, yes. A hell of a lot to think about.
I just discovered that the gorgeous website I built for Ed Griffiths doesn’t work at all on OS X. Not just “looks slightly wrong on OS X” but is completely and utterly screwy, almost everything that could possibly go wrong does. There’s no text anywhere and everything goes to the wrong point on the screen. AAAARRRGH!
I’d always assumed that a Flash file was relatively platform independent. Obviously not. Back to the drawing board…
Update: The website actually does work on Mac, as long as you have Flash Player 8 installed. However, unlike on a PC, it seems OS X won’t warn you if you have an earlier version of Flash installed, instead you are served a ballsed-up totally incomprehensible version of the Flash movie.
I recently offered my services as a photographer and gig reviewer to Sandman magazine - a free music mag which covers the Yorkshire & Humberside area plus Nottingham. The job isn’t paid, but I didn’t really expect it to be, what I get from it is lots of free gigs, a little kudos, and some photographic memories for my old age.
They wanted me to initially send in some photos and a review, to show what kind of thing I’m capable of producing. I went to see Cazals in London on Wednesday (excellent band!), took a load of photos of the band and wrote a short review of the gig. I was just going through the photos, selecting the best few, converting them to black & white (something I’ve no previous exprerience of, but which was more rewarding than I’d expected), and generally trying to get them so they would look as good as possible in the magazine (fairly contasty ought to work best as the magazine print quality isn’t great).
I’ve finished everything, written an accompanying email to Sandman, and am about to hit “send” when for some unknown reason I decide to have another quick flick through a back issue to check, once again, on the style of pictures in there. I reach the final page (page 27 of issue 038, in case you’re wondering) and come across this article on the River Don. The place in the photo looks very familiar, I look closely and realise that I know exactly where it is, at the beginning of the Five Weirs Walk. A feeling of great cleverness comes over me, at having spotted the location despite not being a native Sheffielder.
After a brief moment, I realise that not only do I know this place, I have taken my own picture of it. Swiftly followed by the realisation that I took my picture from the exact same location, because mine also had that railing (which I rested my camera on) in the foreground. But it takes me a few seconds longer to realise that not only have I photographed from the exact same spot but, dammit, this is my photo of the weir and bridges. My feeling has switched rapidly from one of smugness to one of righteous indignation. How dare they steal my picture without asking, without even telling, without so much as a whisper. I know that the theft was blatant too, because this magazine was published in November last year, about a year after I went through my photo pages putting big copyright notices on them all and instructions on how to get in touch with me.
This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I still want to work for Sandman, I am still happy to photograph bands in return for expenses, but I am far from happy about retrospectively authorising this blatant theft. I fire off the email anyway, with a footnote added:
BY THE WAY, SPEAKING OF PICTURES, I JUST NOTICED THAT ON PAGE 27 OF ISSUE 038 OF YOUR MAGAZINE YOU *STOLE* ONE OF MY PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MY WEBSITE AT http://www.sumption.org/life/20030605fiveweirs/fiveweirs0015.html - THIS IS SERIOUSLY OUT OF ORDER AND I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SUE YOUR ASS! Besides which, if you’d asked first I could have given you a much higher resolution version and done a better B&W conversion. Pah!
Let’s see where this one goes.
Mark spotted a poster, part of Microsoft’s dinosaur advertising campaign for MS Office, on the London Underground. It included these frames:
Now, it is quite obvious that Microsoft Office are trying to piggyback on the new markanddan website and marketing strategy. So, what do you think… should we sue them?
Photos of big places - made to look like little places. Weird and wonderful.
Can it really be five years today since I started blogging? Seems like a lifetime longer.
Mnngngn… three nights slaving over a hot monitor and several billion lines of ActionScript (99.9% of them subsequently trashed) are finally paying off.
Ed’s been staying with me, we’ve been building his website together. Had no idea where to start, but Ed described to me a navigation system which sounded like the OS X dock, so that’s what I aimed for.
I downloaded and tried out a couple of ActionScript implementations of the dock, but had problems getting them to work in Flash 8, plus none of them seem quite suited to what I wanted to do. So in the end, I rolled my own.
Starting from scratch, and some pretty scratchy ideas about the algebra governing beautiful motion, I hacked and hacked at a bunch of equations until I had something I liked. Then I accidentally took it a hack too far, and my Flash was demonically possessed. A few exorcisms and a lot of fine-tuning later and I’ve come up with a very nice rolling image display strip. Of course, this is only the first part of the site - there’s still lots more to do (like load in the high res versions of the images, and provide you with a loading bar to reassure you that there will be some images along eventually), but after three nights of struggle it feels like a worthwhile result.
Until the website is finished you can have some scrolling, clicking-good fun with my undulating ovulating flash image bar at theinvisibles.com. Like I said, everything in there has been done by Ed & myself, and absolutely all of the positioning, movement and scaling is done using a rusty spanner and an ActionScript cookbook, no poncey tweens or timelines here matey!
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