Behold the gracias blogomils.

The first is the this one of pictures of Old Hong Kong placed against the same scene taken in modern HK. A nice idea done well. Some of them are absolutely astounding.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/old-hk/

The best one however is this one. I really love this and have looked through all the photos in it more than once. It is a stream by some geezer who has gone around and asked hipsters if he could photograph them beside the contents of their bags. I’ve always been interested by whats in people’s bags. Does the contents of your bag say anything about you as a person? It is after all, all the things you think you might need. And it is private.. Or does it just show what kind of person we want to be? You might never use any of that shit after all. That’s whats so interesting. If you want me to judge you then please, by all means send me a photo of you and your stuff. Don’t mock it up please.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasontravis/sets/72157603258446753/

Note to all: I write this while waiting in what can only be described as the most awful airport chair in the entire world. Spelling and Formating may be a little screwed up for this reason. Why are airports so awful and uncomfortable when all that people is wait around? This is a question that needs to be answered but it’s not going to be here and it’s not going to be by me.

If you are interested I brought a very lovely and rather cheeky bottle of gin. I know exactly what you’re all saying, you’re saying ‘Neil, A gin and tonic without ice, surely not!’ All I can say is is that I agree with you but ice was just not available. Maybe something for the organisers to look into for next time.

Anyway, the event was really very good fun and I got to hear a lot of people I hadn’t heard in person up to that point. Some good stuff was played, some bad stuff was played, but still I found myself lugging a bag full of CDs home with me. Noma was his wonderfully inventive self and his magnificent drones shivered everyone of my internal organs. It also gave one of my companions a bad case of Tinnitus. Praise indeed. I recorded the show for posterity so let me try and fling it on youtube with some pictures of cats and link to it here.

Update: Well this is all very lame. After splitting and processing the quality of the audio was just too shit. Such a shame. Just so I don’t leave you hanging out on that limb I bring to you a video of Noma shot at a performance I wasn’t at by a person I don’t know. A person who likes to use After Effects if this video is anything to go by. If anyone was there could they tell me a bit about it. Sounds pretty spectacular. Good don’t you think eh?

It’s a little extension that manages to somehow peek into your accounts (in my case I think it was my igoogle homepage) and get all the passwords for your feeds (RSS, Twitter, Flickr etc) to display them all on one page. ‘Oh’ I hear you say, ‘A feed aggregator, how thouroughly thrilling’. I say tish to all you naysayers. The way this is interesting and better than all the other aggragators i’ve used is in its method of displaying stories.

It uses a magazine style template which is customizable and presents your fully formatted stories in a really nice and clean way. I admit that I may be biased because going to this from google reader like I am is not unlike how neanderthal man felt after his first blowjob. Or something. Maybe. Right?

Also exciting is that they have a beta of an iphone app available and they claim that an android app will soon be available from the marketplace. I will be getting that as soon as I can. No doubt it won’t work with android 1.5 but HTC says (no doubt erroneously) that I should be upgraded to 2.1 in the next week with an OTA update. More to follow on that. Anyways, check the video for deets.

Basically, it allows you to plan a journey to take in hundreds of traditional Southern restaurants and calculates the best route. It’s basically like my hand stamp map (see top of site) but for food and done much better and…….basically just done much much better. Elsewhere on the site you can find out more about each of these eateries and if this information could be integrated into the map then we would have ourselves a complete winner. I hear Southern cooking is the best in the world. I really want to go see now.

In my opinion this is a fair argument to have with both sets of rules being fun. But I warn all my future competitors! Do not ask to play this new rule set with me. You will be shouted at, embarrassed and roundly demeaned before I pick up my scrabble set and away from you disdainfully. This kind of wilful modernisation is not welcome in my Scrabble world.

The reason why this excites me much more than the ipad is that it seems created for invention, for creativity rather than for the expensive consumption of media. The courier, if it ever gets built, could be used for the collaborative design of pretty much everything, for scrap booking and for the sheer enjoyment of creating something new as well as the now workaday e-book reader and web browser. The ability to cut, paste, draw and paint all together on one screen and save it to the cloud where other users can access it and bring their own ideas to it is incredibly exciting.

But wait. I have major doubts. Even if it is a real product and it really gets released (the videos show nothing which current hardware could not achieve) there is one major, MAJOR drawback. This is Microsoft. I thought they might have turned a corner with the release of Windows Phone 7 details. It looked amazing but more and more info slipped out making it seem that MS was doing its very best to cripple the OS with no multitasking, no copy and paste etc. Here are a few ways the courier could turn out shit.

1/ Handwriting on a sheet of glass is difficult and I haven’t seen it done well ever.
2/ It really would be a Microsoft thing to do to make this with, and i’m having trouble typing this, ‘resistive’ touch screens. One of the most hated phrases in our language.
3/ I really don’t see a point to this device without 3g. It really needs it.
4/ It is vital that the interface is as smooth and zippy as the videos show it to be. If it’s laggy then there is really no point.
5/ The courier need not be razor thin or feather light since you won’t be going for a run with it, but it really cant be brick like.
6/ This I think is almost certain to happen and, to an extent, is happening already. Watch the video, it’s totally marketed at the professional to make their lives easier. As a ‘productivity tool’ (another of those horrible phrases). This is Microsoft down to a tee. They make their products appear really boring, really ‘business like’. People don’t want productivity, they want fun and (I hope) they want creativity. This is what Apple does so well. Whilst the ipad is not a creative tool its master stroke is to sell its ease of use. It’s probably the least ‘techy’, and therefore the most accessible bit of technology ever made.

I’m really bad at this but I’ll try and put a price on it. I think $499 would be too much for this. $399 would be a good figure I think. Lets call that £300-£320. I’d pre order one now if I could.

(The video is from engadget)

Let me know what you think of the new look and if you have any suggestions. I will hopefully be adding a video channel soon which will fill the ‘bells and whistles’ criteria of the new look. Maybe some new commenting features too. But they are seriously pissing me off right now so they may not make it out of the bin. Look forward to hearing from you.

But as you know dear readers, I am not one to be beaten by Richard ‘Creepy Uncle’ Branson. So I thought I would give ADSL a go. This meant I needed a BT land line. Why, I don’t know but need one I do. BT checked my line and said that it was working perfectly and just needed to be activated. ‘Great’ thought I, ‘this will be a nice and simple experience’. Such ridiculous hubris, of course, could not go unpunished by the God of shit storm known as British Telecom. They told me that it would take 3 weeks. They didn’t tell me why. Not even when I asked. When I asked if  all it took was for their computer system to update their records they answered ‘yes’. When I asked them if this would take three weeks they said ‘no’. Logic is not a friend to BT.

But here I am, simply bathing in information of all kinds that’s pouring all over me from a BE Broadband branded intertube. As far as I can report their 24 megabit service is excellent. I’m not getting anywhere near 24 but that’s all right. Its much better than Virgin’s 10meg service I was on last. Hopefully this will last. That is my story of woe and despair and I hope you accept it as a fair excuse for not blogging.

I have lots of things I would like to talk about. The ipad, the digital economy bill and the new Dr Who to name but a few. Hopefully I will get to all of these in time. Having just been to theheliumballoon for the first time in ages I’m actually quite shocked at how ugly it looks. Totally gone off the theme I’m using. Will have to look at getting a new one. Will consider paying the professionals to make me one I can be happy with. But this is all for the future. I’m excited to be back and look forward to hearing from you.

Laters

Glen gets mega dap for the sheer amount of time and effort he put into making some traditional Texan BBQ which I think converted everyone to the ‘Church of Food from the Deep South’. Thanks to Phil as well for the venue, food and organisational clout that went into the whole day.

Finally, thanks to members of my team who dominated the game of flag football we played in the morning. I don’t think any photos or videos exist of the game but all I really need to say is that we won. We won big. Behold the trophy Phil provided for the winners. It’s a golfer because it was the last trophy in the shop but that matters not! All that is important is that it signifies our glorious victory.

More posts next week. Normal service will be resumed.