Dave Gorman is a gifted writer and documentary comedian from Britain. I first discovered him while living in Ireland. We watched his awesomely funny six-part BBC series “Are You Dave Gorman?”. Based on a Fringe show, Gorman accepts a bet to find 52 other “Dave Gormans”. The premise is amusing, but his presentation is fantastic, full of dry wit and illustrative charts. Here’s the only video clip I could find:
And he’s got a blog (and a Flickr account). And he’s had it for, like, three years. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it (er, not that way), but I’m subscribed.
Julie just spent five days at Fontana Del Papa, a cooking school outside of Rome (booked via the excellent folks at Responsible Travel). That’s kind of an anti-holiday for me, but she had a great time. She took a bunch of photos, and here are three of my favourites:
Via Digg (I think), here’s a straight-forward, well-illustrated article on ten ways to improve your photographs. I suppose these are pretty bog standard, but some of them served as good reminders:
Most people don’t take a single photograph without posing in front of a perfectly good scene. Don’t get me wrong, its nice to see someone was somewhere, but how many of those can you really look at and stay interested. The pictures feel extremely static and people always pose the same way. You might as well pose in front of a blue screen.
I don’t mind a few vacation snapshots and some of them can be quite funny, but I think it is a much better idea to capture the moment. People laughing and joking or having fun going after some activity is much more interesting than having them pose together in front of the camera.
You may find this article–about the photographic version of the phrase “fix it in post”–more interesting.
One of the highlights of our trip to Budapest and Vienna was our tour of the Hungarian State Opera House. I love theatre architecture, so I often try to go on these tours when we’re in a new city.
I took a bunch of photos, and they mostly sucked, but I was reasonably happy with these ten. One of the photos shows the air conditioning vents under each seat. These worked using huge blocks of ice in natural caves under the building, making the theatre one of the earliest buildings to have air conditioning. It was pretty muggy in Budapest, so I imagine these vents must have been a God-send for corseted opera-goers.
My step-mother is an avid painter, quilter and traveller, and she’s got lots of photos she wants to share with friends and family. “Friends and family”–remember those words.
For a Normal Human, she’s got decent aptitude with her PC. She worked with them in the latter part of her career, and she’s pretty skillful with the usual set of desktop apps. I got her set up with a Flickr account, and as you can see, she’s been uploading photos, adding descriptions, organizing them into groups and so forth. She mostly figured all that out on her own–she and Flickr can share the credit for that, I think.
Last week, my step-mother sent me an email saying that when she sent her photos to her friends, they could never see them. She wondered if she was maybe sending her friends the wrong URL or something.
After a little investigation, I figured out what the issue was. When she uploaded the photos, she was quite naturally selecting the ‘Private: Visible to Friends’ and ‘Visible to Family’ check boxes. This is total rational behaviour. After all, that’s her audience for the photographs.
Of course, in Flickr land, users need to have accounts and my step-mother needs to identify them as ‘friends’ or ‘family’ before they can view such photos. That’s pretty obvious to those of us who work with Web apps on a daily basis, but we’re only, like, 5% of the general population. Notably, in the pop-up help related to privacy, Flickr doesn’t indicate any of this.
I’m not trying to impugn Flickr or my step-mother here (she gave me her permission to blog about this little use case). I guess this is a little lesson in assumptions, and how web developers need to take care not to make too many.
More and more non-geeks are using these sophisticated sharing and collaboration online tools, which feature a whole schwack of new paradigms for people to understand. The web app needs to be many things to many people. It has to get out of the way of the expert user who’s ready to run, and it has to offer a hand to those taking their first tentative steps.
You know, I’ve never been to SXSW. I was invited to be on a panel there one year, but I had to go to Scotland. It’s clearly where all the cool kids are (another reason I haven’t been).
All whinging aside, Robert took some really great photos of Iggy Pop performing at Stubbs Bar-B-Q in Austin. The lighting is shockingly good for concert photos. When I saw this thumbnail, I thought Robert had visited a local wax museum. In my defence, Mr. Pop (nee Mr. Osterberg) does look, uh, well preserved.
