Just look at them!
Last Thursday I got an email saying that I won a spot at the iTunes Live London Festival to see Annie and Sam Sparro on the 21st of July. Woo! I didn’t even recall entering a contest, but apparently I did. The iTunes Live hoo-ha is a month long music festival of sorts put on by Apple. A different act (or acts) every night at KOKO in Camden which are all recorded and available on the iTunes Music Store at a later date. It’s a pretty neat idea. Plus, all the tickets are free… you just need to be picked.
I headed into Liverpool Street Station right after work last night and then high tailed it to Koko. The doors opened at 7:30pm and I got there just a few minutes after that. The queue wrapped around to the back of the building but it moved impressively fast.
Once inside, ticket scanned, iTunes Live passcard/lanyard in hand er around neck, it was time to stake out a place on the floor. I had never been to KOKO before and it lives up to it’s reputations of being one of London’s nicest music venues.
The show was brilliant! It was great to hear some of Annie’s new tracks in full and Sam was so incredibly energetic and had a red key-tar which was used during mash up of Sick and Daft Punk’s Around The World. I was pretty close to the front, but as my luck always goes three tall chaps ended up in front of me for Annie’s set. Thankfully everyone moved around a bit during the intermission and I had a better view for Mr. Sparro. A highlight from the intermission - a big screeen appeared that was showing a promo clip for iTunes Live material on the iTunes Music Store. One of the clips showed Amy Winehouse from last year and someone tossed a drink at the screen. No love for the Winehouse in Camden Town. Sadly I had to leave during Sam’s encore which started off with a cover of Blackbox’s Ride on Time. Alas, I had a train to catch. Hey I can always download it using the voucher code that was on the back of the pass card. What an age to live in.
I had an enjoyable sit down outside Liverpool Street and munched on some chips. I took a few snaps of the street before getting the 23:28 train to Cambridge. Cracking good night all around. Some photos are up on Flickr and I have video clips to upload as well.
When I go to London I quite often end up doing a fair bit of walking. Sometimes a lot of walking. I tend to just wonder where ever looks interesting, or somewhere I haven’t been before or somewhere I want to see again. With this, I can’t always exactly remember everywhere I’ve been. Being a map nerd and an even bigger London affection-ado I like to keep track of these things.
A while ago I started looking into various bits of kit to log my steps. I first started looking at Garmin eTrex personal navigators, then more simple GPS logging devices until coming around full circle and scoring an eTrex bargain on eBay about a month ago.
There is a bit of a learning curve with getting it to work on a Mac. First step was getting a USB cable for the eTrex. Then finding a driver that will work with the unit on a Mac. Then some software to get the data off of the device. I found a piece of software called GPS Babel that works a charm. It takes the data off the eTrex and will save it as any number of formats, including Google Earth .kml format. Perfect!
Since then I’ve been messing around with logging and working with the data. I took the eTrex to London on June 7th and again this past Saturday to track where I’ve been. I have both routes in Google Earth and now have the .kml files saved online so I can view them in Google Maps and embed them into posts. Neat eh!
Here’s my track from this past Saturday.
You can spot times when I use the Tube or a bus to get from places as there’s just a long straight line going between the stops. This particular day I started out at Holborn Tube, walked from there to Embankment (popping into Sir John Soane’s Museum along the way). Took the Tube from Embankment to Barbican. From there walked to Farringdon, up to Kings Cross and continuing to Camden with a stop into Old St. Pancras church yard. You can see the bus trip from Camden down to Waterloo where I had a walk around before taking the Tube to Bond Street. There is where it looks like my batteries died. That’s ok as there wasn’t much to log after that!
I’m going to keep playing with it and try out adding markers for start and end points and maybe some photos as well.
Have a look over at my Flickr page for photos from this trip.
1. Fish 2. Chips 3. Proper
Tonight I finally did it. I removed the plastic film from the front of the 1st generation iPod Nano I got in late October 2005.
It was a bit rough going. It had a bit of time to get really stuck on there so it came off in pieces. Imagine my surprise when I saw the iPod Classic I got last fall didn’t have the same protective cover! Yep, the cover on the Nano even outlasted an iPod upgrade. I’ve started using it again though as it’s tininess is rather handy.
