bt tower about to fire an early christmas Tweet

bt tower's new clothes, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

We're going for a beer in a few hours to admire the new light show of the Telecom Tower from a perfect distance, sitting on the heated outdoor terrace of Mortimer (on Mortimer Street). We followed the upgrade of BT Tower's light features with much excitement in the past months, and were stopped in our tracks more than once last night gazing at the rehearsal show. Not only that the previous rainbow band at the top is replaced by a swanky LED display, but the tower itself will be illuminated at night much in the style of the cute, old rainbow and visible in all its alien spaceship splendor.

I am doubly excited. The tower will be more of a landmark at night than before, and the new LED display will showcast the official 1000 days countdown until the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, a new Olympics-related message going up every single day. It is the best yet exposure of a sponsor, and hopefully of the Olympic spirit, too. On a different note, Chris likes to point out that after three years of constant, shiny use, no one will mind that the display takes on the same function as the infamous Piccadilly Circus screens. I like to believe it will still look a bit better by comparison :)

But first things first. Let me celebrate its new life with a beer in one hand and a camera in the other. Though that makes me think I need a third to hold my cigarette and a fourth to light it.

ready for transmission, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

chevron: my first flickr gallery Tweet

my first flickr gallery, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Prompted by a good idea from the lovely freelance designer who's giving the simple MetaBroadcast website a much needed makeover, I looked at chevron photos on Flickr to spot some we'd ask permission to use as alternate backgrounds. And then I realized that rather than bookmarking my finds, I could put a gallery together—what better tool for a budding curator? Eventually, adding photos to the chevron gallery I started writing down ideas for chevron photos to take myself, so all in all the exercise proved quick and more inspiring than expected. Except, for someone with hundreds of Flickr sets, what is going to stop me from assembling hundreds of galleries in a blink? My camera, hopefully, in all its Canon G9 sexiness :)

u2 live worldwide (sorta) on youtube from rose bowl Tweet

U2 live on YouTube, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Not holding our breaths here anymore, though only ten minutes separate us from U2 going live on Rose Bowl, and in 16 countries, via YouTube. The image quality is terrible, one cannot tell the hand of a good live broadcast director, and instead of a MC we had Rocko (or something like that) from the stage building team (!) tell us that Antartica will get U2 tonight. Not what I heard, but an original messenger nevertheless, and the world might feel better knowing that penguins will hear Bono (no, they won't, unless they're good at manipulating IP addresses).

In the image you see U2 arriving at the stadium. That is, if you can tell their faces. The Edge went on at some point (live? recorded? hard to spot the difference in the half hour leading to the act) and told us that millions of eyeballs, or billions (same thing, I agree) were going to be on them tonight. Exciting! Historical! And a level of amateurism on both the side of YouTube and that of U2 that I haven't seen in ages. But, wait till we go live in three minutes. The world will come to a stop, right?

It reminds me of seeing Bono and The Edge on the couch of Jonathan Ross months back, promoting the new tour as it had 1) a 360 degrees stage and 2) a cheap ticket (35 EUR). They looked uncomfortable, if not fearful, had little to say and hardly any humor. And now we're live, with the same bad direction, and random changes in sound level. It is extremely underwhelming, far from the future of broadcast, and not able to make us feel as engaged as normal live events do on TV. Bad execution may explain why.

Either way, it looks like there's no U2 party going on worldwide. I'm off to bed.

when your computer slows down... Tweet

...panic! I didn't. In twenty years I've seen so many computers slow down over time that upgrade (memory, and then machine altogether) has been my only mantra. So when this machine started slowing down, even if too early in its life span, I shrugged, ground my teeth, and prepared to suffer until the upgrade. Even when it gets down to a crawl, I keep my cool. But since cool as a cucumber isn't my middle name otherwise, and my sysadmin knows it too well, he's been working at destroying this fake state of cool with a plethora of logical arguments that don't even move a hair of mine out of the cool. I've worked at this cool for twenty years, are you kidding me?! And then tonight he instinctively (mischievously?) said it breaks his heart to see how much time I waste. Implication being, I frequently complain about the lack of hours in the day and night to contain all my interests. And that emotional punch under the belt did it. One hour has been spent changing settings, monitoring CPU activity, opening and closing apps, and finding smart fixes for my Firefox. Though the obsession with opening a million tabs and keeping them so hasn't been cured or addressed directly, and neither has that unruly behavior in combination with processing large numbers of large photos, a few other tweaks should breathe just enough life into this laptop's veins to make it to the upgrade (to a new machine altogether) line. Since you can't count on your sysadmin to be so drastic, if Firefox is naughty (though never as much as Safari or Internet Explorer), start with Lifehacker's must have extensions. And I'll restart Firefox to see what's coming out of the past hour's work.

morning has broken... successfully Tweet

good morning, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

It's very rare that I should wake up before Chris, and need alone put me in that position. The need for a new batch of pills. The house was pleasantly quiet as I ground and brew our coffee, and a great tit sang crisply, perched on an antenna across the street, as I sipped my drink and gathered the patience to deal with NHS (if you're British, spare me the whole 'we love NHS' ode—some things are good about it, but most need serious improvement, and I, a poor Romanian, have seen better).

I don't know whether it was walking in the sun and its unusual warmth, recently reading and thinking about Nilofer's The Story, or both, but the same employees that managed to bully, humiliate, and anger me more than once in the past were not a problem today—their stupidity, when not contained, only amused me. I was processed so swiftly, in the end, that I got home with enough morning left to enjoy the proto-garden in its new, sunny location and feel as if I had just woken up.

proto garden has moved, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

lunchtime in trafalgar square Tweet

not safe for public use, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

It was so brilliantly sunny today that we took lunch away and stopped in Trafalgar Square. Some may argue that the fountains have ruined the previous simple and straightforward agora, while other may welcome the water feature (as an Indian restaurateur from Birmingham called his waterfall wall, no doubt, only to annoy the hell out of Gordon Ramsey). But wait, the fountains are not for public use. And what public use might that be? Looking? Photographing? Bathing? Drinking? All of the above?! Or is that sign rather saying that fountains are for private use?

london moves me, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

The place was littered with myriad banners announcing BFI's outdoor screening tonight, part of the 53rd edition of the London Film Festival. I guess we'll skip.

st martin in the fields, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

But when I looked away, there was plenty of proper eye candy around, so yay for me :)

do not feed the pigeons, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

I loved the sweet English employed by the anti-pigeon sign: Do not feed the pigeons. They cause nuisance and damage the square. I respectfully suggest: Do not feed the pigeons. Shoot them.

two technologies, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Not everyone was there for lunch. Some lost themselves in a newly acquired book.

trafalgar square nap, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Some had a rest. Why cover one's eyes, though, and not close them? Fear of sleep?

chatting with one's model, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

And some were doing their homework and chatting with the occasional curious model. The girls in the back, momentarily still, were living dangerously by making public use of that fountain.

starling on the hunt, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

And yet again, an Asian man behind me decided to feed the rare starling, while shooing pigeons.

feeding the damn pigeons, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

And then, getting off the bus and heading home, all my anti-(city)-pigeon smugness crumbled when the meager DON'T FEED THE FUCKING PIGEONS sign in Fitzroy Square failed to stop this kind woman from unloading most of her pushchair's worth onto the bloody rats. Just beyond those railings, in the shrubs, live glorious birds like robins and finches and thrushes and starlings. But who's got eyes for them?!

taking it easy for one day Tweet

late bloom, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

It's been a wild roller coaster of putting offers together, keeping the businesses on track, and living life at its full. The last proved the hardest but we kept our teeth in the goddamn sneaky fabric of it because that's why we moved away from corporate jobs three years ago: to live. And lived we have, though at the oddest moments: late at night, just before lunchtime, in between meetings—and, boy, are there plenty of meetings still to come! The autumn flew by in a blink, days are short and nights are freezing, and stopping to smell the flowers has become difficult, if only because very few are still standing :) But change has missed a couple of areas where we'd been doing great for a while now. On October 14th I littered the kitchen counter with notes leading to one of Chris's birthday presents, which was, in fact, an early Christmas present. He loved the silliness so much that the post-its stuck around until tonight, when he started placing them around the house, in fitting spots. Tired? Perhaps. Silent? Maybe. Up to date on juvenile behavior? Most def. And that, my darlings, keeps all the rest ticking.

merry christmas, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

this way, please Tweet

You don't feel like washing the dishes today. You'll do them tomorrow. No biggie. Until you wake up to a pile that's anything but quick, and so it somehow spills into tomorrow again. It is like that. Sitting on a pile of photos and stories for over three months is like that. The larger it gets, the more daunting it proves, and the more distant its coming to life. But stubborn is my middle name, and piece it together I will, slowly. The invite in the title is self-addressed. I caught myself slipping: forget that old stuff, start here, start now. Really? As if this wasn't MY written journal for ME. As if I stopped breathing that long. As if this was more of a start than anything I've ever known. And then again: if only I could smoke WHILE writing. Tobacco, or its inadequate sufficiency thereof was all that kept me away, indeed. If only I were as comfortable with eating from paper plates as I am with poor excuses. I guess I'm saying it's a fine day for washing dishes, its air so crisp that ears can pick the Morse code of flickering stars while eyes can track the crickets of the dawn. Now then, anyone for coffee?

augmented reality is spilling from sci-fi into real life Tweet

Augmented reality has popped up in conversations three times in the past week. As Wikipedia educated me a while back, it's about adding a digital information layer to real things around us so that our environment is expanded and, possibly, becomes interactive. In this sense, reality is augmented by computer generated imagery that one can generate or capture with special devices. For example, the virtual reality gloves and glasses, loaded with sensors, that sci-fi books imagined for long now, or this handy, potentially cheap device for making sense of your surroundings, presented by Patti Maes at TED as a sixth sense for accessing relevant meta information.

All nice, but why now and what can it do for us? Why would one need more information in a world drowning in information excess? Ironically, because it helps one make better sense of existing, if incomplete information, and benefits range from, hmm, more information, to more informed decisions. It has come to our attention now due to no longer being confined to the world of games and VR/AR gadgets—visors, headsets, gloves. No, augmented reality is now on some of our tiniest computers, the mobile phones: Monocle from Yelp (iPhone), Wikitude (Android, iPhone), and Layar (Android). Exciting, no? I will be coming back to this subject once I got to play with Wikitude, which only works with the iPhone 3GS not available in this household, or even Layar if I one get an Android (a tempting thought for months now).

The video below is an exercise in imagination to how augmented reality might work beyond our mobile phones. Is the world at large going to turn into our display? Is it going to become browsable? Will we escape to Second Life and the likes more often, or much less? We will, for sure, hear about AR more frequently, as it's one of those developments to split society into love and hate groups. Tune your ears :)

Map/Territory from timo on Vimeo. Here's a related article.

Update, November 13th 2009: And another sign that things are looking up for AR (a buzz word that will come to mean as many unconnected things as web 2.0 and such): the first augmented reality development camp to take place on December 5th in San Francisco (where else?).