The Scottish Play

A bit of a delayed write-up, but I wanted to comment on a trip to the theatre a couple of weeks back.

We went to see the new production of Macbeth that is currently on at the Gielgud Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. The production stars Patrick Stewart (Ola’s primary criteria for wanting to see it!). It was previously on at the Chichester Festival Theatre before moving to the capital.

OK, it’s Shakespeare, and it’s a pretty grim play. It may or may not be your cup of tea on those grounds alone. Personally, I like it. Macbeth was the first piece of Shakespeare I was made to read at school… at the age of 13… I remember whipping through it in an afternoon off, much to my teacher’s surprise (at this point I can sense some readers rolling their eyes and thinking “what a swot”, but that’s digital authenticity for you).

The production itself is absolutely superb; in fact, possibly the best thing I’ve ever seen on stage. Although the play remains clearly Scottish, the director has chosen to relocate it into a kind of Soviet / Stalinist reality – the costumes and set are clearly influenced by militaristic 1940s styles, the warfare modern. There are some marvellous set pieces in this production – particularly the scene where Macbeth demands answers from the witches and their spirits, and the banquet scene where the ghost of Banquo returns, brilliantly played as a cliffhanger over the interval. The programme notes that Macbeth is very much a play of our time in a “surveillance society”, and the sense of paranoia is palpable. Stewart puts in an intense performance, and the rest of the cast is superb, particularly Kate Fleetwood as a scheming and, latterly, disturbed Lady Macbeth.

If theatre is your thing, then I highly recommend this production. It runs until December 1st and should move to the US next year.

Technorati tags: Macbeth, Shakespeare, play, theatre, Patrick Stewart, London

Karting

We had a team event yesterday – lots of fun, although my arm is bruised today… I’d like to apologise to my team for reducing our performance so we only came 3rd!

More on Flickr.

Windy City

OK, well town. And this in the UK, not Chicago.

So it seems that we live in a hotspot (windspot?) for tornadoes.

We were getting ready to get out to work yesterday morning when we heard the wind absolutely whipping at the building. Ola actually commented on the noise. As we drove out of the car park we saw that a branch had been brought down onto the nearby bus stop in the street.

Coming home in the evening it turned out that the UK had been struck by a series of tornadoes, and one of them was in Farnborough. The major damage was about a mile away from our place. This follows earlier extreme weather conditions, making this the second time in a year.

I wonder what makes the place such a magnet for high winds…

Technorati tags: wind, tornado, weather, Farnborough, UK, England, news

Static

Follow-on to the the TV saga.

I decided to give the indoor aerial option a shot and plumped for naquada’s suggestion of a boosted DVB-T receiver.

Partial service has been restored in that we now have 3 fuzzy analogue channels (1-3). Interestingly we now get the BBC South programmes rather than BBC London, and I’d rather liked the London option.

Next step is to pick up a cheap DVB set-top box and see if we get anything digital through the walls and windows. Given the poor quality of the analogue reception, I’m not hopeful… although the DAB radio does get about 50% of the channels that we should see in our area.

In the interim, I have been watching some stuff online. We’re only 5 days into the month, and my ISP (Pipex) just emailed me to say that I’m at 70% of my bandwidth limit for the month. Wow. And eek.

Update: tried a cheap Philips DVB box that had good reviews. Unfortunately it fails to find a single channel. So, for now, it’s snowy BBC1, BBC2 and ITV through a set-top aerial. This digital 21st century living stuff just rocks… 

Technorati tags: television, DVB, TV, digital television, ISP, bandwidth

Where have I been?

Have I been a bit quiet? That’s because I’ve been here:

And enjoying sights like these:

And also spending time with our nephew:

More photos on Flickr, as usual.

Last week I did about 1000km of driving in Poland – the first time I’d driven on the “wrong” side of the road, too. Bit of an unfortunate start to the break, since I managed to leave Ola’s passport at home. Still, it all came together in the end.

Whilst away I also (finally!) read most of The Long Tail, and all of a really great, fun and highly readable book called the The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, which I thoroughly recommend.

I also explored a bunch of interesting new music on the iPod via the Song by Toad podcast, which is worth a listen. Episode 8 is stuffed with new music which I love (Emmy the Great, Monkey Swallows the Universe), Episode 5 has some other cool stuff (Alex Cornish, Thunderegg), and Episode 6 is just hilarious.

Back to it. Service to be resumed shortly.

Technorati Tags: books, holiday, photography, photos, poland, polska, music, reading, travel, vacation

The lantern goes dark

We’ve got no television signal.

We moved into our current flat about four years ago. The block was served by NTL (now Virgin Media), and we are not allowed to install satellite dishes, or I would have gone with Sky. I didn’t want to purchase a cable service… I’m happy with BT for the phone line with ADSL, especially since we live within metres of the local exchange, and I know that various colleagues have had issues with VPN over cable.

Here’s the problem: there’s no standard aerial connection into the flat. There is an existing NTL socket on the wall, with FM and TV outputs labelled on the bottom. 

A friend who lived up the road said that I could buy a cable-to-coaxial connector / converter, attach it to the TV output from the NTL socket, just plug the TV into that, and I’d get the standard 5 terrestrial channels. He was right. It’s an analogue signal, so we’ve not had Freeview or anything, but we don’t watch TV a huge amount, so it has been enough.

Unfortunately, as of last Thursday, the signal went dead. Nothing on the TV. Just a blue screen (i.e. no signal being received). It comes through the VCR, so I tried retuning that, retuning the set, connecting the cable directly to the TV instead and retuning, dismantling the outlet to check that nothing had come loose… nothing.

I arrived at one of several conclusions:

• Problems with our equipment? The TV and VCR are 5+ years old – but that shouldn’t make a difference. DVDs still work fine.
• Someone else in the block has had cable attached or fiddled with, and the communal router (which I assume exists) has been reset such that we no longer get a signal.
• Virgin have cynically withdrawn our ability to get a free terrestrial analogue signal through their network in an attempt to get us to sign up.

I phoned Virgin Media TV support, and explained the problem – I’m not a customer, but wondered whether anything changed on the network recently to prevent me from getting a signal from this socket? They wanted my customer number. I explained, again, that I’m not a customer. Oh, in that case, perhaps I would like to speak to the sales department?

Not really. I see from the Virgin Media website that their “M” package is offered for free… so long as I take Virgin Phone, which I emphatically do not want. I also assume that they will want me on a minimum 12 month contract, and we don’t expect to be there for that long.

So what are my options?

• Find out why we don’t have a coax socket to the communal aerial for the block. Apparently some of our neighbours do have connections to that aerial (but most of them take cable anyway). I can’t see a coax connection anywhere. Pretty sure that’s why I ended up connecting to the cable socket in the first place. The cynic in me suspects that NTL removed it when they plumbed in cable for the previous occupants. Don’t know where to start in trying to find out about this one.
• Buy an indoor aerial. I figure that this will suck. We live opposite an airport and near to various defence research sites, so reception in our area is notoriously poor.
• Sign up for the known-to-be-awful Virgin Media service, if it is possible to get it without the phone, and take a hit when we move.

Any other thoughts from my helpful readers?

In the meantime, we’ve been watching DVDs, and I’ve been using the Mac to see what is available online. Streaming BBC News 24 helps, but it gets a bit same-y. Ultimately, we’d like something we can watch on the TV, and not huddled over a laptop. I never did get around to building the Linux-based Media Server I’ve always wanted to own.

Oh yeah, and to add the domestic woes, we’ve had no hot water for three weeks, thanks to a boiler problem. Hopefully that will be fixed on Friday. Oh, and I broke the kitchen extractor fan and need to replace that.  Fun fun fun.

Technorati tags: TV, connectivity, Virgin Media, cable, television

Moo – the party

Last night I went up to Exmouth Market in London for the launch of the new StickerBooks by Moo.

An excellent party. I think it was Suw who commented that they promised us a “hot and sticky” party, and given the weather yesterday, that’s what we got.

The venue was adorned with various Moo products. I like the look of my own Moo cards, but I’m continually astounded by the quality of the cards that other people come up with.

It was also a great opportunity to pursue my efforts to meet people in my social network. I finally managed to catch up in person with Suw, Kevin and Leisa (although the latter took some finding!). It was also good to reconnect with Myk, Al, Kim, Hugh and others. I managed to share a fair number of Moo Minicards, but fewer than I’d expected to hand out. Maybe I’m not so good at this whole networking thing

  

There were enough people there that they ran out of name stickers, and for the crowd to spill out into the street and nearly block Exmouth Market. I hadn’t been to that particular part of London before – it seems like a nice area.

Incidentally, if you were there and are reading this blog entry, and wondering whether you saw me – I was the person whose superpower is “reckless enthusiasm”. Ola found that rather ironic. That sticker is now on our fridge, as a reminder that I’m supposed to be enthusiastic…

As for the Moo Stickers themselves – very nice. I’d already ordered my own first set before the party, but I hadn’t seen the finished product. I picked up a free book last night. They are the usual high quality product that we’ve come to expect from Moo, although a bit fiddly to peel out of the book. The books themselves contain space for stickers from your friends, and have some lovely touches (all I’m going to say here is: you ain’t seen me, right?). I think they are going to be great for general decoration, sharing my photos with others, and giving to my nieces and nephews. The size of the stickers is also likely to encourage me to take more close-up shots. I’ve been adorning my own items with a few stickers already.

LaughingSquid also has a review of the StickerBooks.

On a related note – the first real signs of possible competition to Moo have appeared with the new PhotoBox MyCard. These are normal size / standard form factor business cards, but the trick they do have is that they can be double-sided, with a collage of photos on one side. On the negative side, the range of designs is a bit limited, their site is not hugely usable, and they do not pull images from Flickr or other websites… given the quality of the product, ease-of-use of the site and niceness of the people, I have to say that that my loyalty to Moo is strong, especially after events like last night, so I think PhotoBox may have an uphill struggle.

Check out the set of shots I took last night over on Flickr. And then go and order your stickers. You’ll be their new best friend.

Here’s the official write-up on the Moo blog. They used one of my photos. Yay!

Technorati tags: Moo, Stickers, StickerBook, Minicards, Flickr, photography, party, moostickerparty

To the south and the west

Just back from a week away revisiting Cornwall – not quite as idyllic as last year in terms of the weather, but certainly just as peaceful and relaxing.

After an initial couple of days of reasonable weather, it turned cooler, cloudier and occasionally wetter. So, we took the opportunity to travel as far south as possible, to the Lizard peninsula. We had a tour of the small lighthouse there, too.

We also got down to Land’s End, the most western point in England. It is (barely) redeemed from sheer theme park tackiness by the fact that you don’t have to buy tickets for the various “attractions” there, and can simply walk along the cliffs instead. Unfortunately while we were there, it was very foggy and we barely saw the end of the land at all! We also popped across to Sennen Cove on our way back to St Agnes. One of the first people I worked for after university used to say that he wanted to retire to become a fisherman in Cornwall. I admit that I can see the attraction.

Do please check out my growing set of photos and let me know your thoughts. I think my work is improving significantly. Incidentally, if you have time, I recommend taking a look at the larger versions of each image.

I was working on my macro photography techniques whilst there, with the aid of a 60mm EF-S macro lens and the new book Macro Photography Photo Workshop by Haje Jan Kamps (of the excellent DIY Photography blog), which I do recommend – more to come when I get a moment, including some images.

Back to work today, with a beta class for an as-yet-unannounced, but interesting new product…

Technorati Tags: cornwall, England, Flickr, holiday, photography, macro, UK, vacation

24 hours of Flickr in London

Ola and I went along to Tate Britain last night for the London leg of the 24 hours of Flickr tour. I’d heard about it from Upcoming, via the Flickr group, and thanks to Heather Champ reminding HackDay attendees about it on Sunday.

What a great, great event! Lots of Flickr gear on offer, copies of the 24 hours of Flickr book, wine, canapes, and a great crowd of people. As regular readers will know, I like the opportunity to convert virtual contacts into real ones (and vice versa), so this was all good.

Some of the most interesting happenings:

• We met and talked to Kim from Moo. As I was trying to take a photo, she noticed me, wandered across my viewfinder, and waved! Good to see her again.
• I chatted to Iain and Nicky, also from Moo. I’d just met Nicky at HackDay. She did ask me “how come you’re not dead?”, after a weekend like the one just gone. Good point. Richard, the Moo head honcho was pointed out to me, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him, which was a shame.
• Lots of HackDay people there, either (still…?) in the HackDay t-shirts, or just hanging out for Flickr ones!
• I ran into Myk Reeve, a good friend from university who I haven’t seen in 10 years (this is revised from the 6 years I was telling people last night, I’m sure it is actually 10). Great to catch up with him.
• Ola talked to Daniel Eiba from Yahoo!, and also to Ben Cohen from Channel 4 News.
• We got to look around the fascinating How We Are exhibition that is currently on at the gallery.
• More faceball was played, this time the outdoor nighttime variant… don’t challenge Heather Champ. Missed out on taking a Flickr beachball home to try it out for ourselves, though.
• Collected a whole bunch more Minicards.
• Met lots of other people including Nik, a music student who is also a Mac developer, and Matthieu from France who just started a summer job developing open source software in London.

Very cool. I’m not even disappointed that my photo didn’t make it into the book. It really does contain some superb work.

See my photoset on Flickr for more, and here are some video snippets from OSDE.

Technorati tags: Flickr, 24 Hours of Flickr, London, Tate Britain, Heather Champ, Moo, faceball, events

Hard at work

Andy tries to get some work done

Originally uploaded by rooreynolds

Roo has already written up our lunch meeting with James, Adrian and Mark yesterday. He was taking notes, so his post is more detailed. From my perspective, it was an excellent afternoon and a good opportunity to do more real-world networking. Through my online networks I’m continuing to come into contact with some very interesting people, and I hope that we can keep those connections going.

Apparently, this is what I look like when I’m working – in this case, answering highly technical questions from a colleague. I manage to look pretty serious with it. Roo took far better (and more) photos than I did.

Back from a country break

I’m just catching up on the world following  a week away in Herefordshire. Photos will follow on Flickr.

An unbelievable amount of news. New Windows Live Writer. StumbleUpon bought by ebay. Dopplr gone beta. Fedora 7 came out. Google Gears.

I’ll get to it all eventually.

One of the best places to grow up

According to a recent BBC News report, my home town of Fareham is the 6th best place in the UK to bring up children.

That obviously explains why I’m such a balanced individual.

That is all.