I am back from the amazing Caribbean island of Mustique. Full photo gallery is at Flickr, here. More later…
Links
Now
that I have a Flick Pro account, I’ve been digging through my digital
photos to upload more pictures. This on the left is from a trip to Toronto this
time last year.
One of the most interesting things about Flickr is the tag system –
lots of commentators/webheads have written about how there are quite a
few new start ups adopting this idea, and you can see why. Tags
generate a very really cool mesh of meaning – they’re like little sign
posts, and you can follow them for absolutely hours and hours through
Flickr. It’s like visual orienteering, or one of those old Fantasy RPG
books by Steve Jackson etc. At the end of each paragraph, you’ve got a
choice: go left, go right (and keep you finger in the previous page so
if you die you can go back…)
These are all the tags I’ve used in Flickr. They themselves make quite
a good picture of all the things that have crossed my mind recently.
But I’ve changed each link so instead of searching my pics, it searches
the whole of the Flickr site. Hopefully will provide some good
beginnings.
2980
akiba
akihabara
anarchist
asakusa
bargain
barge
beach
birds
blackpool
bloomsbury
boat
britishstyle
buddha
busride
can
canal
cemetery
cherryblossom
chinese
chuodori
church
churchyard
citywall
citywalls
cloud
clouds
cntower
computer
couple
cranes
crossing
crossprocess
crossprocessed
demon
dinner
dog
dusk
famicom
fan
fitzrovia
flight
flower
fountain
furniture
games
garden
genesis
gothic
graffiti
grave
graves
graveyard
hachimangu
hacking
highgate
highgatecemetery
holloway
hollowayroad
horses
inokashira
ivy
jail
japan
japanesefood
kamakura
kenchoji
keyboard
kichijoji
koen
l33t
lake
lantern
laox
leaves
lendalbridge
libeskind
london
longboat
lost
lostintranslation
luck
mall
map
minster
mitaka
mooring
mum
nationalgallery
nature
neon
norbreck
ouse
oxford
pagoda
pandaz
paper
pc
portmeadow
prison
prow
rain
raindrops
rainy
ramen
reflection
river
rushhour
russellsquare
rust
rusty
sardines
seafront
seat
sensoji
sff
shibuya
shinjuku
shopfront
shopping
skyline
sunset
superpotato
taxi
tea
temple
thetube
tokyo
torii
toronto
toys
trafalgarsquare
train
tsurugaoka
tube
twilight
underground
upgrade
urban
videogames
walkies
warrenstreet
washi
window
windowpane
xprocess
york
yorkminster
yorkshire
Graves, Rust, Ivy and Flowers
Last
weekend a friend and I took a trip to Highgate Cemetery. It’s just up
the road from me, and is probably London’s most famous graveyard. Many
of the graves are Victorian, so there are plenty of angels about. It’s
also the final home of Karl Marx, who is surrounded by the graves of
Communists from around the world. Acolytes to the end.
Highgate
Cemetery is well worth a visit – it is beautiful, and in places it’s
becoming very overgrown, so you get the strange sensation of graves
growing out of the grass. Makes you remember that rememberance is not
automatic, that it’s a living process itself.
Learning to insert contact lenses
Current “High Scores”:
Right Eye: 8 minutes.
Left Eye: Gave up after 17 minutes, went to make dinner. (Removed Right
Eye lens in about 10 seconds, went back to glasses in case wearing one
lens lead to a culinary accident…)
The picture, while reflecting the state of my left eye after being
repreatedly poked for over quarter of an hour, is actually a brilliant
composite image someone’s made from Flickr. “50 people see an eye”
overlays 50 pictures tagged with “eye” and creates this very neat Mark
Rothko image.
Here Comes The Sun (…
…you’ll have to sing the lovely George Harrison guitar part yourself).
I
think it’s safe to say that winter is gone for this year. Contrary to
what oyu might expect from me, these aren’t the famous “hanami” cherry
blossoms of Japan, but some very fetching ones I saw in Oxford over the
Easter weekend.
[Also a Flickr test post. Which works 🙂 ]
A Pinch and a Punch for the First of the Month
It’s the 1st, which means my bandwidth quota gets re-set. Last month I was nearly 40% over, and all because I had lots of people looking at my photos. Now, I like people looking at the photos, but not when I get hundreds of e-mails from BlogHarbor about bandwidth. So I’m moving photo hosting to the wonderful Flickr.
Have also added an AudioScrobbler link, so you can see exactly what I’m listening to in quite wonderfully pointless detail. So now you can… err… ‘scrobble’ me. (Why are internet verbs so horrible? Google isn’t too bad, although it’s already a noun, but ‘blog’? ‘wiki’? Great services but linguistic car-crashes…)
And finally, a long over due hello to someone who links to me – Dolly Mixture. I knew her back at uni, and it’s always nice to see what people are up to. Plus, she’s over in the Far East (Kuala Lumpur), so maybe you can expect front line dispatches in the war on Hello Kitty.
And then there was an answer
“Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen” – Thomas Merton
So one of the reasons the “British Rain” pic (see below) was getting so many hits is that a US Catholic magazine (!) wanted to use it as an illustration. They found another picture in the end, but it’s interesting what quote they matched it with.
Something I can’t figure out
Help me! According to my stats, this picture below (“British Rain… Arguably the best in the world”) is the most popular article on this site by a mile. Why is this? Who’s linking to it? My stats program can’t help me on that. It’s as vague as a magic 8 ball…
Took the words right out of my mouth
Was given Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp as a present recently. It’s very funny and sinister. And it pretty much sums up where I am up to right now…
A New Year Message: “Contemplation, Loveful”
A pinch and a punch for the first of the month! Same to your modem, as my bandwidth counter has now reset, and I can update properly again. Working on another new post about Japan, but in lieu of that, a photo I snapped after doing the washing when we got back home, and it’s another label from some clothes bought in Japan. This time, a pair of my fiancee’s jeans… Lovely attention to detail. Things like this make doing housework/washing clothes interesting…
The Wired Jester 