a lot of stuff and nonsense from eclectech

Hooray to the folk at the 2006 NZ Juggling Festival. A few weeks ago a nice person called Jo asked if it would be alright to use the Tinfoil Hat video as part of the open stage night. We said yes and asked for a photo if possible. This arrived yesterday.

Splendid.

Labels: flash animation

I rather enjoyed myself and found many things to make me grin.

• The drawing of St Paul's Cathedral on St Paul's Cathedral. More buildings should contain idealistic self portraits.


• Unexpectedly ending up at the Technology 2.0 post-Emerging Tech gubbins and viewing the splendour of British geekdom with a glass of wine and some pistachio nuts.


• Stumbling across a British branded sex shop in Soho and imagining all the men in bowler hats, drinking tea, discussing the weather and awkwardly twiddling with their moustaches.*


• People laughing and playing hide and seek around Rachel Whiteread's Embankment in Tate Modern.


• Giggling to myself on the tube to Camden after being hit with a blast of my past from across the carriage.


• The Millenium Bridge. Aesthetically pleasing and practical. A thoroughly nice thing.


• The British Museum. Colonial guilt aside it's stuffed so full of splendid STUFF; a wonderful place to wander around.

Inevitably there were a couple of things I wasn't so keen on.

• Corporate tagging. Everywhere. It kept shouting at me; everything seemed to have a corporate link. Unilever explaining how it's like the installation at the Tate was verging on comedy gold mind you.


• Rushing about just a little too much and feeling like I had to leave everywhere, everything and everyone earlier than I would have liked.

Apropos of nothing, this is beautiful and gives me goosebumps.

* I like this image and am steadfastly refusing to imagine an alternative picture of the interior.

Update: Heh, a vaguely related article, even though I was in London for business and just crammed in some fun. I didn't get an Oyster card either.

Labels: blether, neat links, photos

Old skool web log time... have a few links that have caught my attention over the last couple of days whilst spending too much time reading and not enough sleeping.

First up a report about how students 'admit copying essays'. The part that caught my attention was "one in three admitting to copying ideas - rather than the exact words - from books or online sources." I assume I'm missing something, because in my day gathering ideas from various sources then writing about them was a legitimate way of writing an essay, not "a greyer area of potential cheating". Should I be returning my degree?

I got rather distracted by ID and privacy related shenanigans. I was astounded to read that ID cards 'could use Pin numbers'. I'm not happy about the intention to collect and store my biometric data, but to collect and store it and then use a PIN as security is nonsensical. I know, I really shouldn't be surprised....

I stumbled across some articles that I missed last year about how the DVLA database details have been sold to criminals. Only criminals with a reason for requesting them though, so that's OK. Let's not think about what would happen if it was the 50 odd pieces of information on the ID database rather than the limited set held by the DVLA.

To get my privacy hackles well and truly raised I also read about how the state plans to put your bedroom online. I don't know what to make of this. If council tax inspectors tried to take photos of the interior of my house to publish I think I'd have to play a little and print out obscene words and paste them round the walls.

On a slight tangent Freedom to tinker reports on how the powers-that-be in the music industry have objected to a proposal that would let people break DRM that "threatens critical infrastructure and endangers lives." Oh my. I'm reminded of a comment in this weeks NTK

"big media is a bit like pre-invasion Iraq - famously dictatorial, sitting on a vast stockpile of desirable resources - making it the duty of all right-thinking web-users (or "second superpower", if you will) to liberate these resources purely by force of technological superiority, despite the lack of any clear plan for what the old regime ought to be replaced with."

Heh.

Labels: disgruntled, news links, NO2ID

I think it must be around once a week that I find someone linking to one of my animations, images or toys saying "someone has too much time on their hands". They seem to like it and want to share it, but seem to be suggesting I shouldn't have had the time to make it.

I don't understand this. It always sounds rather accusatory and it makes me curious about what I should be doing instead. I have a suspicion people say it because I'm being silly, and we're not meant to spend our lives being silly. But I like it; I just need more time to be silly in.

Ah yes, I actually came here to write about lack of time, not too much. The number of emails I've been getting from people about animations and images and exciting projects has increased a lot recently. I try very hard to answer everyone promptly as I feel terribly rude if I don't, but it is getting to the point where if I reply to everyone promptly I'll have no time to make anything, and making things keeps me sane and happy. So, please do keep getting in touch, but bear with me if I don't always reply immediately. Thanks.

Labels: blether, penguin joy

I have been both busy and not-so-busy offline recently. The latter included a few days taking photos in Ardnamurchan, an utterly gorgeous place. It snowed, rained, hailed, tried to blow us into the sea and bathed us in sunshine, sometimes all within 10 minutes. It contains the best foghorn ever, cows with 1980s new romantic fringes, remote graffiti and galloping sheep. If that isn't nice, what is?


In other news, a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the upcoming legislation to remove the need for pesky things like parliament for UK government decisions. There's now a nice succinct site with information about the act and what you can do; Save Parliament!

Labels: blether, photos, scotland

30 seconds of penguin joy to be precise. 750KB Flash video of some lovely penguins at Edinburgh zoo yesterday. Enjoy.

Labels: penguin joy, video