at the top of the dial

London's preparations for the various upcoming events continue. Yesterday I was around Waterloo and noticed quite a few people in demonstrable finery (morning suits, top hats, ladies in fine frocks and big hats).

Of course, they were on their way to the races - I suspect that some will not return in quite such composed conditions.

That event neatly precedes the Wimbledon season and then the home stretch towards the Olympics, with the parallel Cultural Olympiad festivities also kicking off right now.

Yesterday's Metro and Stannit both had wrap-around adverts from British Airways saying "don't fly" - which did make me smile. The premise is to stay in London and support the teams during the games.

The trick with all of this will be to figure out how to do it without turning into a tourist. London is a great capital, but there's a need to be careful and not get sucked into the mainstream tourist vortex.

I'll confess this happened to me briefly a few weeks ago, when we'd selected to go to a particular show which turned out to be truly awful. I don't recollect blogging about it at the time. It was not one of my finest decisions and we decided to leave after about 20 minutes.

It's that dilemma about having booked to see a show and then not liking it. Do you stay because you've paid or leave to get the time back? We left and decided that the show in question was a crass money spinner designed to extract cash from the gullible (oops).

So I'm hoping that there are not too many of those type of events in the run up to what will be a peak number of visitors to the capital.

Like many tourist rich cities, there's a sort of two tier economy between those that work and live in the centre vs those that are on a short vacation. I'm equally aware of this when I'm in other countries and don't have time to tune into the right frequencies.

So I guess I'll be just slightly more alert as the city gets remodelled for the next few weeks.

seeing ghosts

I took a few pictures during the music gig last Saturday, but have only just had a chance to upload them from the camera.

I hadn't really planned to take pictures and strangely enough, as we moved from further away to closer to the front I could sense my likelihood to get any sensible snaps diminish.

It was a combination of factors, I'd only brought a small camera and the density of people close to the stage (but not at the front) meant shooting through the gaps to get anything at all.

The singer above is Nerina Pallot, who played a good and quite joyfully delivered set, mixing her own piano and guitar based songs and accompanied by a small band comprising bass guitar and drums.

I know it's a rather impressionistic snap, which I took on automatic mode instead of the shutter priority I usually use at these type of events. I usually keep the shutter speed fast enough to prevent everything getting very blurry, which is a factor with a lot of stage lighting shots, even at pretty fast ISO ratings.

But here, using the camera's auto mode, I noticed something that I've also seen when I'm walking around galleries or sometimes in churchyards.

I call it 'ghosts'.

It's when, with a modern camera on its automatic setting, it thinks it has seen a face.

It puts up that little square display that locks on to the face to keep it in focus.

Some cameras (including mine), can also put up multiple little face squares.

It's sometimes quite touching to see an old portrait in a gallery or a stone carving in a churchyard get the squares appear. The camera is thinking it's seen person, and in a way it has.

Here, at the music gig, there was a different phenomenon. The camera would pick up the faces of other people in the audience. Weirdly, it would be the one's that were not so engaged, maybe just talking or looking around.

The reason was obvious. In automatic mode the camera was deciding what type of picture to take. Then suddenly it it would spot a nearby face )much closer than the artist on stage) and would flip into its portrait setting.

I think I'll go back to traditional shutter priority for music venues.

neither piety nor wit

The march of technology continues in the workplace. We had the Nokia cellphone, then the Blackberry and more recently the iPhone. Now we see the iPad increasing its corporate presence.

It started as a travel adjunct which would be used to view movie clips, then became part of the PowerPoint presenter's toolkit but more recently is becoming a note-taking aid.

There's plenty of new discussions about the choice of stylus and I'm starting to see handwritten notes being forwarded.

It will probably still take some time to mature and of course a short note will eat up even more storage and bandwidth.

But I suppose I'd better get one of those styli now, because just writing with a finger somehow looks wrong.

Another evening in Wales

East coast to west coast in a day. Me arriving late, just as the nearby clubs were getting going.

It had quietened down again by about 3 a.m.

Sunday's wash adds no mud to my boots

After last Sunday's photo of my feet in the Atlantic at Key West, I thought I'd do another seaside picture now that I'm back in England.

Let's just say that when I was strolling about on the south side beaches in Key West, it was about 33C and very sunny.

Back here on Sunday it was 'dramatic' and the sea also seemed to have gone out a very long way. I was around the area of England known as 'The Wash' which is that little notch at the top of East Anglia, around where it joins to Lincolnshire.

I decided not to attempt to dip into the water which was probably a little colder than that in Florida. It was also a fairly long hike across the mudflats. King John lost the Crown Jewels attempting a similar trip back in 1216. Admittedly I did have my Wellington boots in the car, but they were still clean from not being used at Saturday's music concert.

I decided they could stay that way.

oh float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair

I realised we are off to listen to some music in the open air tomorrow. That season has come around again, so I was burrowing around in the garage looking for boots.

Yep, I suspect its going to be muddy this weekend, so the relevant boots and plastic bags will be needed.

I found my posh Hunter wellies, but I think I'll probably go Dunlop. The Hunters are supposed to be the bee's knees but I have always wondered if they have been made a little too insect like in the legs. A tell-tale hint was that when I found them they were still folded down, which is a sign that they'd been too oppressive the last time they were used. The idea is that they are stylishly sculpted to the legs, but a side effect of this is that they can create blisters, which my economically prices Dunlops don't do.

The Dunlops may not last quite as long, but at around 1/8 the price, they still do a perfectly good job of keeping out the splosh.

Olympic Tickets and 9 Zones of travel

It's still some way off, but I have already received some tickets. I suppose I will have to pay proper attention to the travel advisories now.

The 9 zone Travelcard is a thoughtful touch. To be honest I didn't realise there was a Zone 9. I sort of thought it stopped around 6. Maybe it's because I'm an Oyster card user.

statutory feet shot

Here's a regulation feet shot from just before we returned to the UK. It's the same water that laps the shores of the South Coast of England, except this is the warm bit looking out towards Havana. It might look slightly shallow though, and there's a reason.

A day of contrasts having breakfast on a Hot Tin Roof accompanied by those cooling ceiling fans, looking out to the Gulf of Mexico and then much later a British cuppa back at home.

We jumped into our blue convertible to drive from the Southern edge of America back along the Florida Keys to Miami, before heading for the airport.

A kind man offered us seat upgrades for $50 each, then it was a movie, a nap, breakfast and back ahead of schedule to Heathrow.

Then the contrast...It was almost laugh out loud weather, with grey skies and bucketing rain. The shallowness of the morning's Atlantic could be explained by the quantity of water currently in transit from the sky to the ground.

But you know what? I think I'll post the sunset instead.

apple talk

I see that Apple has announced a bunch of new things at their conference. Some were fairly predictable, but I think it's interesting in terms of the changes that will affect the ways we use computers over the next few years.

I'll ignore the speed and capacity increases on some of the laptops, but the new Macbook Pro is moving closer towards the MacBook Air form factor. A high resolution screen (2880 by 1800), solid state disk and no DVD. My Air (1.35kg) is about a year old, but if the new Pro (2kg) had been available it might have been a tough choice.

Then there's the addition of allegedly usable speech dictation. I've been pleasantly surprised with the speech on the iPad, although it beams the speech to the cloud where Nuance processes it, which makes it still a slightly disjointed operation. It's pretty accurate though, as you can see with this spoken blog entry.

The underpinning for the speech is Siri, which is already on iPhones and will go to Macs. It seems to be part of the integration of the messaging and notification environment too, one view everywhere, which already works pretty well.

It looks as if Siri will also be making its way into cars for sat-nav and similar. My car already has voice recognition for sat-nav and phone dialling in any case, but I can't ask it 'Are we nearly there yet?' which I suppose Siri will support (in fairness, my car already tells me this both in distance and time)
The interesting thing will be whether the new "Eyes Free" for cars is fully integrated or whether it will be a separate device plug in like the iPod/iPhone. I see that about half a dozen car makers (e.g. BMW, Mercedes, GM, Honda, Audi, Toyota) are adding a Siri button to the steering wheel. It's still important for the sat-nav console to not become a source of distraction so I guess Angry Birds is out of the question.

Another related concept is streamed traffic congestion data - which is an idea that has been around for years- and is where the sat-navs in cars can send in data from their GPS that provides communal road status updates. Nowadays it'll be called crowd sourcing or similar and presumably part of the new mapping offered by Apple.

I noticed my car in the USA was Microsoft Sync enabled, complete with a Setup and a rather ominous Reset button. I guess we'll also get the war of Google vs Apple vs Microsoft as part of the battle for mapping. There's a whole load of new 3D imaging and so on, but I must admit I usually revert to basic 'North Up 2D' mapping when I'm in the car, except if I want to show off 3D pictures of London buildings to passengers.

I guess its different on a computer and I sometimes replay bike routes that I've ridden and GPS'd using google maps. (My Garmin Edge 800 is great for that)

Then there's the new Mountain Lion OS/X and iOS 6 releases for Macs, iPads and iPhones which I'm sure I'll use. The iOS has a few features that I've already had on my Blackberry over the years like - 'Do Not Disturb' (i.e. in a meeting), 'Reply with Message' (i.e. I can't talk right now but here's a standard courtesy text) and similar.

We also see FaceTime over cellular although my corporate world still uses MS Lync for ad-hoc conference calls and sometimes Skype, so it will be interesting to see how pervasive this becomes.

There's also some catchup items for OS/X like TV screen mirroring (at last) and hooray finally Aperture and iPhoto get the same database for their photographs. There's plenty of other new detail features, but the basic way to drive the system remains the same so the new stuff is sort of optional for usage.

I suppose these changes are part of the definitions for the next generation of computers.

• Speech enabled
• Very high resolution screens
• Very lightweight form factor
• End of spinning hard drives for laptops
• Always connected - even when 'power napping'
• Cloud dependent for certain functions
• No more DVDs
• No more ethernet plugs
• Not announced, but they should have an option for non-reflective screens

I can't see this being the end for desktop machines though. There's still a different feeling sitting at a desktop system (e.g. iMac) compared with a laptop. But maybe the next iMac should also include a video in from a laptop?

my next destination

did i mention the sunset?

street life without rain

The cashier at the clothing store didn't say a word as a siren tears the night in half. Hot air melts shapes as blue flashes bathe the street, reflecting razor grins.

We hear laughter washed with beer and shots of jello. The cops are standing by the small white shape. Someone climbs out looking both ways at passers-by and then into the eyes of the cop on the left.

We move out of earshot knowing that in five minutes the whole thing will cool down to just a warning.