Love Run 10k 2010

February 13th, 2010 by admin | Posted in Running | No Comments »

As a build up to the London Marathon in April I decided to take part in the ‘Love Run’ in Battersea Park. The event is organised by Action Duchenne a charity which hopes to raise awareness of Duchenne muscular dystrophy and gets its name as it’s normally held on the nearest weekend to Valentine’s Day. Action Duchenne hold similar events in Newcastle, Cardiff and Manchester on the same day as the London run.

The course is pan flat and made up of 4 2.5km laps of the park. The start is in a different part of the loop from the finish line so it made it really difficult to work out how well or badly I was doing based on my ‘lap’ times. I’m actually still a bit confused as to the course distance even now - I think it was closer to 10.5km.

The start line had distance markers saying lap1 - 2.5km, lap 2 - 5km, lap 3 - 7.5km. As I came past this marker at the end of lap 1 my watch said I had covered 2.5km in 10 minutes which is very quick by my standards. Probably a bit too quick as I felt pretty bad during the second lap as I think the picture on the right shows!

I started to feel better but not exactly brilliant on lap three. When I saw the even more confusing 9.5km marker I really put the hammer down which almost went a bit wrong when I thought I was going to throw up in sight of the finish line.

I crawled across the line pretty slowly in the end with an unofficial time of 48:12. I had decided to wear my timing chip on my watch strap which I think was too far away from the electronic mat which you run over to record your time. The conventional wisdom is to tie the chip to your shoe laces. I didn’t appear on the results list even as a non finisher.

I decided to run with my now traditional head band which attracted approving glances and sniggers in (roughly) equal measure. I’m a big convert to the practicality of the head band as well as the look although I won’t be wearing it for the marathon as I have something a bit special planned instead…more later on that.

New website for Carwell Casswell

January 30th, 2010 by admin | Posted in Interweb | No Comments »

Recently I was approached by Carwell Casswell a London based film production company, who were looking to develop a new website. Being film makers they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted visually so my role was to turn their mockups into a working website. Their business is producing high quality films including documentaries, music promos, corporate films and their own selection of shorts. They wanted a simple, smart website which wasn’t too content heavy as they didn’t want to detract from their business - the films.

I must admit it was refreshing to work with creative people who are not from a web background. The white postcard layout with a right aligned vertical menu are not things which would have occurred to me but it does lend a fairly unique feel to the site which otherwise might have been lost with something more conventional. The other plus side was that with limited space available on each page it kept the content simple.

Building the website was fairly simple as I didn’t have to work through a number of visual ideas for them to pick from. This speeded things up. The menu was the main tricky part as they wanted a really smooth animated effect and I felt that Flash should not be used as there would be nothing worse than some users without the correct plug-in being unable to navigate the site. In the end I used a jQuery effect called easing.

Making the jQuery compatible with all browsers was not all plain sailing especially Internet Explorer 6. Although IE6 is a bit of a dinosaur there are still many people in large organisations using Windows XP where it comes as the default browser, so it can’t be ignored just yet. The menu didn’t work at first in IE6 but I’m very grateful to Karl Swedberg for pointing out a stray comma (which shouldn’t have made any difference I might add) in my code which launched it into life.

I also advised them that the films themselves should be stored on a third party video site (they chose Vimeo) rather than hosting the videos on the site itself. They wanted to offer HD quality and if they hosted themselves they might have problems with users not having the correct plug-in or the video taking an age to buffer. The Vimeo server is going to be faster than their own (and save them precious bandwidth) and there is also the added benefit of having the films on Vimeo itself where more people can see and enjoy them.

You can see a documentary Carwell Casswell made with the Nairobi Orphan Project above outlining the predicament orphans face in the Kibera slums, Nairobi.

My Life as a playlist - 30 songs for 30 years

December 24th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Music | No Comments »

I was browsing through Dave Schneider’s new website and noticed he had written a page summing up his life as a playlist of his favourite tunes. Dave Schneider is a star of some of my favourite comedy shows including The Day Today and The Friday Night Armistice and I’m Alan Partridge. As it’s soon to be my birthday I thought it seemed a good idea to sum up my life in music. Unlike Dave I make no apologies if it bores anyone - it should be fairly easy to skim read or skip ahead and it’s my birthday so I don’t care anyway.

The first piece of music I ever remember was the theme tune to the low budget kids show Button Moon. Indeed, as a very small child my sister recorded me singing this song on an old tape recorder but getting the lyrics slightly wrong and singing “Button Doon”. This tape is no doubt being kept in reserve somewhere for a rainy day when it can be wheeled out to cause me maximum embarrassment.

Apart from TV music the first music I ever remember was the Bucks Fizz Eurovision entry Making Your Mind Up. My strict catholic mother considered the bit where the dresses get ripped off to reveal skimpy mini skirts to be verging on hardcore pornography and so banned us from watching it. This only made me want to see Cheryl Baker’s forbidden dance even more. Even back then I still thought the song itself was pretty lame.

Of all the musicals I have been subjected to Joseph and his Amazing Techniwotsit remains the one I will always remember. My mum used to like to play the whole tape at deafening volume when she was cooking and because I have heard it so many times I can unfortunately remember all of the lyrics. Any Dream will Do is even more nauseating now then it was back then as I have since become aware of the creature that made it.

When I was about 10 I remember my brother playing Autobahn by Kraftwerk. I was absolutely spellbound by it. It seemed so fresh (despite being pretty old) and weird especially as it had some pretty powerful analogue synths on show and went on for a monumental 22 minutes. Hearing Autobahn made me want to hear more electronic music and anything else which sounded weird or different which I could get my hands on. After discovering Kraftwerk I also started listening to other electronic pioneers including The Human League. Their first two albums were much darker than you might expect, The Path of Least Resistance being a good example of this.

The first record I ever bought was a 7″ of KLF - What Time is Love which I bought from Woolworths when I was 11 for £1.97. I really loved KLF who had some good tunes but also could be really creative and humorous. Altern 8 were another favourite of mine and their single Evapor 8 was the second record I bought.  Around this time I was regularly watching Dance Energy House Party (a show that not many people seem to remember sadly) hosted by Normski. I was also a big fan of 808 State (Donkey Doctor) who had recorded the theme music to the Channel 4 TV show The Word.

When I first went to secondary school I worked on a school project about the environment. Unleaded petrol was the latest thing but it unfortunately contained Benzine which they forgot to tell anyone about. With the help of two of my brothers I made a tape about this with Simple Minds - Theme for Great Cities in the background. This tape is probably being kept with the Button Moon one somewhere for the right moment.

During my early years of secondary school I started to get into all sorts of things including U2. I really liked Achtung Baby and especially The Fly. I even thought Bono was cool back then (true story) and really wanted a pair of those funny sunglasses although if I had worn them around town at that age I would undoubtedly have been beaten senseless by local marauding thugs.

The early to mid nineties was an incredible time for music. In my opinion things haven’t been the same since 1997. Back then their seemed to be a much greater need to innovate and be different which seems to have disappeared these days. This could just be me getting old mind you! Aphex Twin blew me away with his Didgeridoo EP and I also played the first two Orbital albums religiously - my favourite was Monday from the second album.

Around that time my favourite record label was Warp Records. The Artificial Intelligence series of albums were fantastic and I couldn’t wait for the next one to come out. I really liked LFO especially Simon from Sydney. Two other tunes came out on Warp around the same time which I played constantly by Laurent Garnier (Breathless) and Resoraz (Art of Time). I’m sad to say I don’t really like Warp (Maximo Park - nuff said) much any more. They ditched many of my favourite artists including Jimi Tenor (Outta Space) and the only act left I rate is Boards of Canada (Aquarius).

I have always liked Bjork - she’s always had a really great understanding of music and has brought something a bit different into the mainstream. I’ve always thought Madonna was a poor mans Bjork (Madge always tries to be cutting edge but never really manages it). I especially like Homogenic (Five Years is great) coincidentally produced with Mark Bell from the aforementioned LFO.

University was probably when I was most into music as I had plenty of time and I was living in Nottingham which had quite a big music scene. Around this time I started getting heavily into Detroit Techno especially Juan Atkins (Model 500 – I Wanna be There), Kevin Saunderson (E-Dancer – World of Deep), Carl Craig (Science Fiction) and Stacey Pullen (Silent Phase – Body Rock). I also remember getting heavily into Daft Punk at University having been largely dismissive (wrongly) of them up until then. Around the World is an amazing tune with an amazing video by an amazing director.

After University I started to listen to lots of different things including some classical artists like Philip Glass and Balanescu Quartet. Everybody raved about Steve Reich’s Music for 18 musicians album but I was always much more interested in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. I was also listening to a lot of old David Bowie stuff (Life on Mars) around that time.

I must confess that around 2001-3 I bought a lot of (what became known as) Electroclash records. I feel a bit embarrassed about it now for some reason!? It was DJ Hell who apparently came up with the phrase Electroclash. I was a big fan of his International Deejay Gigolo label and loved his Giorgio Moroder influenced album Munich Machine with my favourite track being For Your Love. Miss Kittin and The Hacker were also great and I still think that Frank Sinatra is pretty hilarious.

I was never that big on rock but Eye of the Tiger remains my training anthem to this day. There is something about it which can give me that extra push whenever I hear it. I can picture Stallone stuck in a barn in Siberia bench pressing an anvil – this tune is reserved for proper tough guys.

One artist who has really made a huge impression on me over the last few years is Max Tundra. I’ve generally become a bit disillusioned with music as it seems to me that most people are happy just knocking out the same old tired ideas again and again. This guy doesn’t though. Most of his tunes are wildly eclectic and combine several different styles at the same time. I’ve seen him play live many times and I believe Which Song from his album Parallax Error Beheads You to be a true anthem.

The last album I bought (but the first for some years) was Bird Brains by tUnE-yArDs. It’s pretty low tech and I had problems describing what it was like to the guy in the music shop – a sure sign that I’m on to something good. It’s a lady who recorded everything herself (mostly drums, ukulele and her great voice) into a Sony Voice Recorder microphone at home. My favourite track is called Fiya.

So there you have it 30 tunes for 30 years. I have a playlist up on Last.fm and hope to put a play list up on Spotify just as soon as I can gain access!

Estonia: Tallinn

November 25th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Taking advantage of the Easyjet sale which had taken me to Slovenia the previous week I set off for one of their furthest destinations - Tallinn the capital of Estonia. Estonians are Finnic people and share close cultural ties with Finland with Helsinki being only 80km from Talinn by boat. Estonia was also part of the Soviet Union and the first former Soviet Republic to claim independence. Having always been quite interested in former communist countries I thought it might prove an interesting place for a visit. Plus, the flights were cheap!

In Raekoja Plats (Town Hall Square) there is an annual Christmas Market which is one of the most famous in Europe. With over 50 stalls selling mulled wine, gingerbread, nuts and sweets there is plenty to keep most visitors occupied if not a little boozed up by the end. The Town Hall itself is one of the most recognisable landmarks in the city but is closed to visitors during the winter months.

Tallinn Old Town (rubber stamped by UNESCO) is the picturesque medieval part of the city which has not been restored as much as some places in eastern Europe and is all the better for it. It’s definitely geared towards tourists with lots of souvenir shops but it has managed to maintain a sense of authenticity. You can walk along parts of the city walls but not for long - it’s not all connected the way it used to be although there are a couple of viewing platforms you can climb up to for a decent view.

Tallinn is famed for its cafe and bar culture which was particularly evident during my stay as the weather was cold and I was quite happy to be inside with a warm drink and some tasy cakes.

Slightly away from the Old Town is Kadriorg. The Kadriorg park and Kadriorg Palace were designed for Peter the Great who has a somewhat modest cottage close to the Palace. The KUMU Museum in the park is one of the best art museums I have ever been to. There is a superb collection of more traditional Estonian art as well a lot of interesting modern pieces. The museum was Euopean Museum of the Year 2008.

Note: My camera finally bit the dust in Estonia so I wasn’t able to take any pictures. I have used some pictures from Flickr Creative Commons with each image providing a link back to the original.

Slovenia: Bled

November 20th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Just over an hour on a bus from Ljubljana is Bled a beautiful town by a huge lake in the Julian Alps. This is Slovenia’s number one tourist destination and can apparently get pretty crowded in summer. In November though I pretty much had the whole place to myself.

Overlooking the town and lake is Bled Castle which offers amazing panoramic views of the whole area. The castle itself boasts a Print Museum, wine cellar, herbal gallery, restaurant and comprehensive Museum. The Museum details the history of the area as far back as the Ice Age.

The most interesting period of local history is when the Swiss healer Arnold Rikli founded a world famous spa resort there in the mid 19th Century. The spa proved especially popular with the wealthy and a number of villas and hotels were built around the lake as people flocked to be treated by Rikli. His techniques were based on exposing the naked body to water and air and were largely opossed by the Slovenian medical community at the time. He apparently cured himself of a serious illness using his own methods on more than one occasion.

The other major sight in Bled is the Lectar Inn Museum which produces Gingerbread from honey dough in a old skool traditional way. Sadly this only happens during the summer so I didn’t get to buy any for my mum.

In the centre of the lake is the Church of the Assumption on a small island. You can catch a gondola across to the island or swim for it if you’re feeling really brave. The church has a bell which apparently brings you good luck if you ring it. This church is apparently very popular for Slovenian weddings.

Whilst in Slovenia I was based in Ljubljana.

Slovenia: Ljubljana

November 19th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Easyjet had an incredibly cheap sale during October so I logged on just out of curiosity and in the ended up buying some cheap return tickets to Slovenia. Slovenia is a country that has always interested me since my trip in the Balkans earlier this year and it also looked really picturesque and beautiful from the pictures I had seen.

The capital Ljubljana is a pretty and compact City and it’s very easy to walk between all the main sights. After some advice from my hostel owner I decided to walk up to Ljubljana Castle which over looks the whole town. From here you can get some pretty amazing 360-degree views. Inside the Castle is the Virtual Museum. I was a little confused as to what this meant at first - it was 20 minute 3D film showing the development of the Castle.

There was a huge party in Ljubljana the day I arrived as the national football team had just defeated Russia to qualify for the World Cup. This was an incredible achievement for a tiny country without any star players. There was a party atmosphere in the middle of town and a lot of dancing and drinking going on. Even the players on the stage seemed to be getting into it. I had been up until late the previous evening watching a certain other play off game unfold and the Slovenians joy was in some contrast to my own disapointment. The hot wine on sale worked wonders on my hangover though.

Ljubljana is pretty well served by some impressive architecture. As well as the Castle the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation dominates the main square with its salmon pink livery. Some of the locals I met complained that most of the buildings were from the Austro-Hungarian era and therefore Ljubljana looked too “Austrian”. Many of the most impressive sights in Ljubljana including the Triple Bridge and National University Library were designed by Slovenian architect Joze Plecnik (trained in Vienna) who worked in the City for many years improving much of its infrastructure and making a huge contribution to its current appearance. Whatever way you look at it I think that generally there aren’t too many modern buildings in the middle of town which has preserved the charm of the place.

Ljubljana has a thriving bar and cafe scene. In the evenings the both banks of the Ljubjanica become busy with locals sitting outside enjoying a tipple or two - even in winter it seems! I was lucky enough to try some good local food. Goulash seems to be popular, the generally meat dominated diet seemed quite appropriate at such a cold time of year. You can always get Balkan favourites like Burek if you’re trying to do things on the cheap.

One of the most interesting places to visit in Ljubljana is Metelkova which is an art gallery, bar and night club area which was formerly a Yugoslav National Army base until 1993 when some of the locals tuned it into a squat. During the day there are a number of art exhibitions and places to have a coffee. In the evening a number of clubs and live music venues open making it probably one of the coolest places in town. I wasn’t unfortunately able to go during the evening but the locals I met through couchsurfing raved about it.

During my stay in Slovenia I also visited the beautiful town of Bled.

Dowload The Media Whore for free

November 18th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Writing | No Comments »

I was digging through some old files and found some PDFs of The Media Whore. This was a project I put together in 2003. The idea was to write a satirical trade journal for the design and other creative industries. I put together the whole thing myself (with a little help from a few kind people listed under contributers) but I wanted it to look convincing as something which a number of people had worked on so I invented a whole fictional staff to run my magazine.

After I wrote it I had 200 printed and tried to sell them. This was not as successful as I hoped although I did get a couple of positive bits of press coverage in Design Week and Creative Week which I was quite pleased with. Anyway, this was all years ago so I thought I would offer this as a download to anyone who might be interested in it.

The version below is paginated so the pages are in order ready to go to print and are not in numerical order. You can print it out and fold into an A5 booklet easily enough. The only double page spreads are in the 8 page Baltic Design Supplement (Contemporary Baltic) and the two feature articles Creative Juices and Branding with the Enemy.

Download the PDF of this document

Download it and enjoy at your leisure.

Cabbage Patch 10 2009

October 18th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Running | No Comments »

Earlier in the year I got crocked training for the London Marathon. After months of problems with my Achilles tendon, heel and various other niggling injuries I have been slowly getting back into the swing of things and have been tentatively training again.

I’m lucky that I still have a place in the London Marathon for 2010 and this time around I’m much more motivated after missing the boat. A friend who lives in Twickenham suggested I have a go at her local run the Cabbage Patch 10 named after a local pub called The Cabbage Patch. The 10 mile (16km) run starts and finishes in Twickenham and loops around Kingston and Richmond crossing the Thames twice.

My ‘training’ these days involves a jog at the weekend with a couple of Pilates sessions during the week so I really wasn’t sure how things were going to pan out. After the first 3 miles I could see that I was running just over 8 minute miles and a bit of basic brain maths told me I was looking at a time of between 1 hour 23 minutes to 1 hour 25 minutes. I was fairly comfortable and thought that was a reasonably respectable time so I just decided to keep going as I was.

I recorded a time of 1:23:09 which I am pretty happy with. It does look as though I’m capable of going under 4 hours for the London Marathon which gives me something to aim for over the winter. The only down side is getting beaten by my friend by around 30 seconds - and she has been going on and on about it ever since! Somehow she got past me even though I was convinced I was miles ahead. Hopefully there will be a rematch at some stage…

Sisters are doing it for themselves

September 30th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Interweb | 2 Comments »

Back in May my sister asked me about starting her own blog. My sister has two small children and wanted to write about her experiences of parenthood - its peaks and pitfalls. To be honest I was a bit sceptical about her writing a blog mainly because I couldn’t see how she would be able to find the time to keep posting regularly while juggling a young’un in each hand, especially as I struggle to keep posting regularly on this blog with far less responsibilities to deal with.

The blogosphere can be a tremendously competitive and fickle environment where readers constantly demand new content or they look elsewhere. I offered her some advice but warned her that even with a lot of work it could be several months before she got any comments and warned her not to get discouraged by this.

Anyway, four months later she is posting most days and getting several comments per post. She has built up a considerable following in a very short space of time. She has even won a couple of awards from fellow mummy bloggers. I must admit I’m surprised by the speed of her success - I thought it would take a lot longer to achieve what she has but I’m not a bit surprised that she has been successful overall. I think there are several reasons for this:

The subject matter – Her blog sits within a considerably active blog community (parents talking about parenthood) but is still suitably ‘niche’ that her blog is getting noticed. It sticks to the one subject so readers know what to expect. When she realised she wanted to talk about other stuff she set up another blog for that.

It’s well written – she is from a writing and publishing background so she knows how to write engaging content which keeps people coming back.

Regular posting – she has been putting out new posts consistently since she started.

Commenting and link sharing – she has been looking at a number of other similar blogs (see her long list of links for the evidence) and commenting on them which in turn has led people back to her blog.

I’m not sure if she has any plans to monetize her blog or just write for fun but she’s even managed to get my mum looking at the internet so who knows.

Poland & Ukraine

July 6th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Whilst flying home from Croatia after my last trip in March I was flicking through the in flight magazine and I noticed that Wizz Air fly Kiev from London. Once checking online that the price of a single ticket was a pithy £40 my mind was made up. To get a 1400 mile (2253 km) flight for that money took any notion of not going out of my hands.

A friend of mine had always said how Lviv was a great town in Ukraine and I always wanted to go to Krakow in Poland so I thought I’d fly there first, pop over the border to Lviv and spend a few days there before moving on to my final stop in Kiev. So another fiendish travel plan had been successfully hatched.

Auschwitz and Chernobyl

Whilst in Krakow I knew I could visit the Auschwitz Concentration Camp the scene of the murder of over 1.3 million (mostly Jewish) people during World War II. I only had limited time in Krakow but my major reservation about going there was that it might be quite upsetting. In the end I decided to go and I was glad I did as it was very thought provoking and humbling.

In Kiev I knew I would be around 100km from Chernobyl, the scene of one of the worlds greatest ever environmental disasters. I knew that there was a nearby deserted town called Prypiat which was also part of one of many ‘Chernobyl tours’ run for tourists. I couldn’t get an concrete information on safety. I knew that the farm land in that area could not grow crops for another 20,000 years and the locals didn’t seem to be too keen to be moving back into that area any time soon.

I consulted the Kiev forums on couchsurfing and I was very lucky that a few locals replied and said that it was definitely NOT SAFE. I was told that if I went my teeth and finger nails would be most likely be experience some form of ‘damage’. Some tour groups also advise you to wear old clothes and throw them away after the trip but I can’t throw my face away so this was enough to convince me to give it a miss.

The safety of Chernobyl tours was a recurring theme of my holiday. I met quite a few tourists in Kiev who had travelled especially to go there and had no problem telling me that it was all no problem and that Ukrainian reservations were because of national embarrassment. Every Ukrainian I met told me that it wasn’t safe and that those tours are run to make money from foreign tourists who don’t know any better. Admittance to the average tourist attraction in Kiev is about £2 but a day trip to Chernobyl is £80. Anyway if you’re thinking of going you should probably do some research and make up your own mind.

Have a look at my other posts from this trip - Krakow, Auschwitz, Lviv and Kiev.