So It’s The Final Countdown for my Holiday to Spain. We are leaving on the 1st May 2010 at some crazy early hour something like 2-3am! But we ain’t going to Spain in a plane oh no. We are driving to Spain, more to the point Alicante. As my friend Ben has a villa out there. There are currently four of us going, and we are taking two cars. It’s me and Mike in the Astra MK5 1.6 (Owned by Mike), and Ben and the other Dan is the Astra MK3 1.7TDS (Owned by Ben). So it’s Petrol (MK5) versus Diesel (MK3). We have all the essentials sorted like Travel Insurance, Breakdown cover, in case for whatever reason we have some form of electrical fire, or other issues.
The journey is going to be a very long one, but we are all sharing the driving and we are using GPS, we aim to be at the South of France for evening and get some rest there. As we want to be fresh before going over the border to Spain and mountain driving etc. Of course for that I will be taking an insane amount of pictures, mostly because of the epic views there etc. I’m taking all my photography gear, Nikon D200, Nikkor 50mm f1.8, Sigma 70-300mm APO DG, Tamron 17-50mm f2.8, selection of filters for lenses (Circular Polarising Filter) and plenty of storage cards. I’m going to use one of my light stands as a tripod, as I currently don’t have a tripod of my own.
As I’m also taking my laptop I will try and keep my blog updated with my holiday travels etc, as there is WIFI available in the bar which is near enough next to the villa apparently. But the main reason I’m taking my laptop is to download my images, then of-course for keepsake burn them to DVD.
We’re leaving together, But still it’s farewell, And maybe we’ll come back To earth, who can tell?
I currently own a Nikon D200 with a selection of lenses and other equipment. However one thing I am lacking is filters for some of my lenses, mostly my new wide angle lens which is a Tamron 18-50mm f2.8 and has a thread size of 67mm. Checking around many sites and seeing what was for sale, I finally found a filter I liked. I have bought filters before but most where for a selection of old lenses which I have since sold, and where made for those thread sizes. I originally did have a Circular Polarising Filter for my old Nikon Nikkor lens. However they wont go to waste as chances are I may end up getting lenses that fit them or just selling them.Filters also offer extra protection for the lens glass as well.
The filter I chose is a Hoya 67mm Pro1 Digital Circular Polarising Filter. As it’s in Hoya Pro range it is of better quality and overall build quality. The frame is low profile, so at extreme wide angle you wont get any shadows caused by the filter frame. The filter has better quality glass and better quality coating on the filter, than that of the lower starter ones. The use of Circular Polarising Filter’s is essential for outdoor photography. It deepens the intensity of blue skies; reduces or eliminates glare. Which overall aids to a better quality image. I managed to purchase this lovely little gem for a very nice price of £46. It was on sale from £120, so that’s like a massive saving of around£70!!
Really can’t wait to get this filter and try it out.
It would appear a rather funny image has appeared on the Transport For London Tube Website. It’s a picture of a cat with cheese on it’s head, with the slogan “Your Doing It Wrong”. Which looks to me like a rather smug comment at how they run their service of tubes and other travel related things. I wonder how it managed to get on their website. Maybe their site got hacked or the designer thought they would put some sort of Easter Egg on there, or a inside private joke or something. Who knows.
Those of you who are interested can view the image on their site currently here.
I have taken a screenshot of it here in case it gets pulled, as i don’t know how long it will be up there for etc. However overall it’s rather funny, and would be interesting to see what’s going to come of this new found goodie.
Edit
Apparently speculation is the site is being exploited somehow, as I have also been told earlier today there was a YouTube video of a cat standing up on their main index page.Edit Again
The picture on the TFL website has now been taken down, all that remains is the screen shot I took.
Decode is a modern exhibition up London. It’s art based around Human Interaction on modern Technology. It uses Human movements to invoke the art work to produce a reaction. This could be through simply walking in front of an exhibit or picking something up and interacting with the exhibit to get a reaction.
Decode looks at three current themes within digital design:
Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool.
Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence.
Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.
One peace called Venetian Mirror By Fabrica which looked like a mirror forced the viewer to slow down before a response was given. Venetian Mirror blends digital technology with traditional Venetian glass. When you walk up to the Venetian Mirror, your image doesn’t immediately appear in the mirror. Only if you keep very still, will your reflection slowly appear, like a photograph being developed.
I found Body Paint to be rather exciting. Body Paint is interactive performance, basically allowing you to paint on a virtual canvas. Using your body as the brush, a screen fills in for the canvas. Sensors interpret gestures and dance into a wash of colors on the screen, allowing for evolving compositions. Think of Body Paint not as a painting application but more of a full-body instrument that you can play with and interact with to create something beautiful.
Another exhibit called Digital Dandelion which was made by Sennep. The exhibit is based around you having control over the environment. The interactive exhibit allows you to blow away the seeds of a 3D Dandelion with an electric hairdryer in real time. So depending on where you point the hairdryer, it would alter the movement of the Dandelion seeds. This digital design was rendered mostly in Maya.
Check out the video that I recorded below on my HTC Touch Pro.
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On 16th of March Microsoft released a Developer Preview (DP) of Internet Explorer 9 at MIX 2010.
Now when every website designer thinks of IE they think of the days when IE6/IE7 was around. Those days where hell. Then IE8 came along which basically brought IE up to scratch with a few standards mostly ACID2, but of course a few qwerks.
But then IE9 was released. They have basically rewritten parts of the rendering engine. The whole JavaScript part has been rewritten. It’s insanely fast and they have not even finished tweaking it etc! It’s currently just slower than Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2! Anyway under IE9′s hood they have added GPU rendering and SVG support. Gone are the day of Windows XP Support! Internet Explorer Platform Preview requires Windows 7 (x86 or x64) or Windows Vista SP2 (x86 or x64).
Below is some Sunspider JavaScript Test results.
It looks like Microsoft is paying more attention to standards, as they are supporting HTML5 and CSS3, while also improving rendering speeds. IE8 Scored 20 points on the ACID3 test, and now IE9 scores 55 on the ACID3 test.
Overall IE9 is a massive improvement on IE8 and we can expect these results to improve! As this is only a Developer Preview, which is basically like an Alpha.
Note: This early Platform Preview is not intended for production use and is released without support.
