The Blog Swan

It’s no secret that my desire to blog was interrupted by the arrival of FriendFeed and Twitter in my daily routine.  The former allows me to aggregate not only content from those people I really like to follow online, but also allows me to push most of my RSS-isable online content to the same place.  I should probably just push most of it here (the flickr tab is a new introduction, as is the Twitter feed sidebar on this blog) but I haven’t found a sufficiently pleasant life-streaming theme for WordPress yet.  Twitter on the other hand really does allow me to push my ramblings, day to day thoughts, and status updates to the world in a way that is much more immediate (and in some ways pleasing) than blogging.  I don’t mind if you don’t get it, Twitter is fun, and a damn site more useful than MSN messenger.

The only thing about FriendFeed is that whilst it aggregates a lot of personalised content from my cohort of tech-savvy friends, it hasn’t quite turned into an RSS aggregator par excellence.  A vast swathe of my online time is still spent consuming RSS feeds in Google Reader.  So as an incentive to start blogging again (with a low barrier of entry ;)) I thought I would share a few of my favourite feeds that keep me coming back again and again, some of which hopefully are novel and useful.

I organise my reads by broad themes, and the first one in Google Reader happens to be ‘Arts’.  This covers, for me,  contemporary art to music (which I won’t *cough*Torrentech*cough* go into) to literature (and by literature I mean Sci-Fi ;)) and some stuff in between.

First up is the BALTIC forthcoming events feed.  The BALTIC is a fantastic contemporary art gallery on the banks of the Tyne, which splits Gateshead (my stomping grounds) from Newcastle (where I actually work).  Housed in an old flour mill on the Gateshead side, the BALTIC is one of my favourite places in the North East and every time I go I feel privileged to have such a great gallery so close to home.  The feed itself serves up good notice of forthcoming exhibitions, but for the real skinny on lectures, workshops etc. then the Facebook group or mailing list tends to have more details than just the exhibitions.  It would have been nice if they hadn’t switched their RSS feed URL with zero warning in August though.  A last post detailing the new  URL would have been a nice touch.  Or maybe a PURL for the feed perhaps?  It took me a little while to notice as new installations don’t come around that often!

Charlie’s Diary is the excellent blog of Charles Stross – one of my favourite British SciFi authors.  Aside from the fact that he writes great fiction, this is a man who writes his own blog engine, loves vi, predates Linux and once was gainfully employed crafting crufty Perl scripts to provide one of  the earliest online payment systems on the internet.  This man is not only an author, but a geeks geek, and politically astute enough to understand the ramifications of advancing technologies.  This blog is worth a read, regardless of whether you are a fan or not.

The final two links in this category deal with my current mild obsession which is digital photography.  Having recently splashed out on a very low end digital SLR (a Nikon D40 if you care) the chance to marry obscene technological geekery with something vaguely artistic has been a powerful draw for me.  It’s lead to a number of magazine and book purchases, but there’s nothing like the internet for free and useful information.

So the Digital Photography School feed is first up.  For me this is just the best site for a continual stream of information for my new hobby.  Split into 3 main sections the site slices and dices it’s articles into “Photography Tips and Tutorials”, “Cameras and Equipment” and “Post Production”, I really only look at the first of these.  I won’t be making any more equipment purchases other than a tripod, remote shutter release, neutral gradient density filter, polarising filter, telephoto and macro lenses (and the depressingly expensive  50mm AF-S f1.4G Nikkor that I crave) for a while.  OK so it’s basically so that I don’t add any more expensive items to my Amazon wish list, and the fact that I can pretty much work out how to use Lightroom by myself for now.  I am completely awash in a world of f-stops, ISOs, apertures and shutter speeds, and it’s this site that is helping me through it currently.

The second is a proper photography blog – the feed of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Daily Photo site.  This is a photoblog of local (well to me!) sights, with two main contributors.  Now when these girls say ‘Daily’ they mean ‘Daily’ I don’t think in the months that I’ve subscribed they have ever missed an opportunity to post a view of Newcastle and its surrounds.  Yes, there’s been an occasional repost, but not one that I’ve seen twice yet!  Everything is covered from the Quayside, the city centre, pubs, bridges, the lot.  Sometimes there’s views of the city and places that I’ve just not noticed, other times I’ve had to grab the camer and go out and grab similar shots.  The photos might not always have stunning composition, but it’s just nice to be reminded that Newcastle is a beautiful northern city, proud of it’s heritage and definitely my favourite city in England.  A few of my own photos taken over the last few months have ended up in this gallery on flickr but I need to take some more.  I’ve also got some photos of Gateshead here and the Great North Museum (Hancock edition) here.  Next time they invite reader submissions, I’m going to see if I can get one of my shots in…

So yes.. my ‘Arts’ section, not so large you see!  Wait until I get onto the feeds in the ‘Geek’ section eh?

Oh it’s taken a while, but the 24″ iMac arrived today.  Monitor left is attached to the old G5.  Monitor right is a secondary screen for the iMac.

I *still* have less monitors on my desk than the PhD students!!

I don’t think there’s much debate over this in our family.  I have inherited many useful traits from my mother that is for sure, but when it comes to geeking out, well those genes are all from my dad.

As if any evidence ever needed to be provided for this, here is a picture of his small, but immaculately clean and ordered electronics ‘den’.

I’d like to say I had his organisational and filing skills to boot, but I don’t.  Neither do I have his flair for electronics.  But I think we’re largely driven by the same desires to take things apart to see how they work, and then try and stick them back together again.  Although I tend not to care if they no longer work at this point, my dad is almost certainly not only going to have them working, but working better than before…

More equipment and general geekery can be found on Flickr

There’s just a touch of the ‘Fred Dibnah’ in him methinks :)

Pic courtesy of my sisters mobile :) You will also notice he sports a fine, trendsetting beard that I can only hope one day to emulate. I’m less keen to emulate the absence of keratinised proteins ‘pon the head.

And photo’s to prove it too at Flickr

OK opened the flickr.com account at last. There maybe some photos there for you who wonder what I get up to at the weekends these days.

Current photo galleries on the site are:

• Japan, June 2004

  • Tokyo
  • Osaka
  • Kumamoto

• September 2004, Andy Piper’s birthday
• November 2004, random pics of me
• December 2004, CEH Oxford Group (and others) Xmas bash
• February 2005, Saltwell Park, Gateshead, all snowed up