Month: February 2007

It’s been exactly 100 days since I went to see the Indian movie “Don”. I’ve also snapped (and wirelessly uploaded “live”) to Flickr exactly 442 pictures from my cameraphone since then. (Flickr is the Don!) Most pictures taken like that are of relatively poor quality compared to what could be achieved with a “proper” camera, digital or otherwise, but I think there is a lomo-esque kind of credibility to cameraphone pictures; to blur is human. (The cameraphone is the Don!)

So I’ve taken a small sample of some of my favourite cameraphone snaps taken in the last 100 days since “Don”, tubing, bussing, shopping, eating and wandering my way around London and the ‘hoods. Done some minimalistic cropping and levelling in Photoshop and sequenced them into a multimedia photo montage with a Don kinda audio theme: Click on the green button above to load the Shockwave Flash object, it’s about 3.7 megabytes and shouldn’t take too long to load if you are on high-speed Internet connection. Otherwise you’ll just have to be patient. Turn up the volume.

Diamond Geezer sums it up nicely. Many Londoners (including those who pretended it was too difficult to get to work today 😮 ) enjoyed it while it lasted. As did many schoolkids who also had the day off due to teachers who couldn’t make it. Personally, I think the kids deserved to have the day off, as sadly it is a rare occasion of immense educational (and recreational) value.

I love the colour scheme used on the London Underground. Everything; maps, posters, artwork, mosaics. Anything officially connected to the tube explodes with primary and brightly saturated secondary and tertiary colours. Even the interiors of the trains on the different tube lines. I especially like the green on the District line.

I finally got around to upgrading my blog software. These pages are now powered by the very latest version of WordPress; version 2.1. Upgrading was a breeze, took less than half an hour, the most of which was time taken to carefully do a backup up all the pages and the database. The upgrade itself took less than a minute (using my hosting provider’s Fantastico scripting service), and then I spent a few minutes tweaking my customised theme template to handle the blogroll links correctly.

So a random cameraphone picture from the last few days to provide something a little less technically boring and blog-page self-centred. Actually, this is for Sanj:

Whilst I was at it, I’ve done a little spring-clean of the my right-most hand sidebar, where I had links to RSS/XML for “syndication”, I now have the conventional feed icons for the links to some of my feeds. Also, I collected together a few WordPress plugins that I’ve been meaning to get for a while, in particular you will notice that every posting now has handy little icons at the bottom right for those who have accounts at de.icio.us, digg or Yahoo! MyWeb, making it possible to bookmark and share postings with others. I haven’t quite worked out why anyone would want to do that, but you never know.

And finally, the ongoing war on comment-spam. After a fairly quiet-ish 2 years using Akismet alone, these pages have, in the last week or so, been coming under a sustained and aggressive comment-spam attack. So I installed the Bad Behaviour plugin and tightened up on my moderation rules. It couldn’t have come too soon, as Bad Behaviour and Akismet together caught over 4000 spam comments in the last 24 hours alone! (BB got about 1000 of those.) You can now see the number of spam comments caught here in the last two years if you scroll right down to the very bottom of the page, where there is an up-to-date comment-spam counter. I really hate all forms of spam.