Daily Photo Digest: Week 3
Three weeks in and I miss my first day. Wednesday was a bit of a hectic one and I don't even recall much of it. I realised I didn't take a photo when I was about to fall asleep, so a little too late. On Sunday I went for wander around Tower Hill, mainly to go see All Hallows by the Tower. I fired up my camera and saw those three terrible words: No Memory Card. D'oh! Ah well, gives me a reason to go back again. Without further ado, here's the last week...
Sunday: I'm not usually one for dogs, but this guy was just so well behaved and happy looking I had to grab a snap. Was a quiet Sunday morning on the Jubilee Line. (iPhone)
Monday: The Central St. Giles buildings taken from Bucknall Street during a lunch time stroll. This complex of recent multi-coloured buildings stands on the area that was once one of London's first slums. (iPhone)
Tuesday: Market carts at Inverness Street market in Camden. (iPhone)
Wednesday: In lieu of a daily photo, here is a cat playing guitar.
Thursday: Looking down Turnpin Lane towards St. Alfege, Greenwich. This is a neat alley way that runs between market buildings. (iPhone)
Friday: Some post-work pool to celebrate a work mate's birthday. We started out on a smaller, UK sized table and then moved up to the American sized one pictured. We all reckoned is was silly big. Oh and I won three games. (iPhone)
Saturday: Every time I go to Deptford, I think to myself that I should go to Deptford more often. Went for a walk through the market on Saturday where I scored some Gameboy games. I spotted this shot and shop just past Tanners Hill. I'm not sure what the shop is/used to be as right now it seems filled with mostly old paint, hardware and cards advertising mobile phone SIMs. Plus I figured my dad would get a kick out of the name of the place. (proper camera)
Daily Photo Digest: Week 2
I got a little over zealous last week and included this week's Sunday entry on last week's digest, so one of these may look familiar. Second week in and so far so good with finding things to capture.
Sunday: Bird stencil on the lamp posts along Railway Avenue in Rotherhithe. They've since been painted over. (iPhone)
Monday: The top of the London Coliseum and the corner of the Chandos pub in St. Martin's Lane. (iPhone)
Tuesday: The Shard nicely lines up with a building in Borough High Street. (iPhone)
Wednesday: Detail of the awning brackets at Charing Cross Station. I was finding it tricky to get an interesting photo of the station. Taken on the 148th anniversary of its opening. This one was a bit planned so it was taken with my camera rather than iPhone.
Thursday: Gas lamps in Charlotte Street. This day was the first one I nearly forgot to get a photo. Luckily seeing these lovely lamps on my walk to Charing Cross from Euston Road and got a snap. (iPhone)
Friday: St. Paul's, a.k.a. the Actor's Church. A shot from a lunch time wander around Covent Garden. I had my camera with me on this day.
Saturday: I went on a walking tour of Mile End and Stepney. While we were stopped at Cressy Court (where Vera Drake was filmed) this cat came around and investigated everyone on the tour. So fluffy ^_^. I reckon this is my favourite of this week's lot.
Daily Photo Digest: Week 1
You may or may not have noticed dear readers that I've been posting a daily photo on Flickr since the beginning of this year. It's a one two punch of keeping up with snapping photos and sharing stuff on Flickr and here. Ideally I'd take the photos with my proper camera, but this embraces the old adage of the best camera being the one you have on you, so a lot of photos are from my iPhone. I'm hoping at some point to get myself and iPhone 4S mostly because the camera is so much better than my old 3G.
Here are the photos from the first week of the project. If ever I start slipping, feel free to give me a nudge to get back at it!
Sunday: a moon jelly fish from the Horniman Museum.
Monday: Walkway through Richmond Bridge.
Tuesday: Warhol'd Nutella on the side of a food stall in Camden.
Wednesday: Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road.
Thursday: City of London crest on the railings at the Honourable Artillery Company in City Road
Friday: Helpful signage in Chinatown.
Saturday: A view of the waxing gibbous moon in Trafalgar Square between the National Gallery and St. Martin in the Fields.
Bit of a Hack Job
H4XXOR by technochick, on Flickr
Not many people probably got to see it, but my site was hacked for a few hours yesterday. Instead of this lovely bit of interweb, there was a 'ha ha, you've been hacked' page complete with animated .gifs, horrid background music and the haxxor's MSN names. The music really was the worst bit.
I started right to work on sorting it out. With help from m'colleague Pat it was easy enough to sort out. He was able to break it down into steps for me which helped as I was a bit busying thinking 'oh f%#k'.
My WordPress login didn't work anymore, neither did my FTP account. Thankfully my cPanel login with my webhost did still work. Through this, I was able to change my FTP account and password. I FTP'd into my account and it looked like (as I sort of suspected) the index.php had been changed and not much else.
To be on the safe side, I downloaded my public_html folder. I grabbed a new key from WordPress for my config file. Then, downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress and uploaded all the files just to be on the safe side (and to have a clean new index.php). That sorted the front page so at least my site looked normal again and was completely free of music that heavily featured a poorly used vocoder.
Next stop, phpMyAdmin to grab a backup copy of the database. I checked the username table for WordPress and it had been changed (but they still left the display name as Andrea, lulz). Changed the email address and username on the account so I could use the I Forgot My Password option on the WordPress login page. Bingo, was able to log in again.
Let this be a lesson to me and everyone else to backup more often. Thankfully, once the initial panic was over, this was easy enough to fix.
Party Like It’s 1993
Picked up a new TV today. I think it's the first time I've ever owned a proper 'brandname' TV. That doesn't really matter to me, what matters is that it was on sale for £100 less than the original price, is 24", LED and has loads of inputs. It being JVC is really neither here nor there. Though it does lend itself perfectly to Fonejacker JOOVC references.
I'm doing that thing with a new TV where you don't settle on viewing or playing one thing for too long. You just want to see how everything looks on it. Going through games on my Xbox Triple60, I fire up Sonic 2 and immediately think back to what was probably my favourite New Year's Eve as a kid.
The Super Nintendo was my machine of choice in the early 90s and heck even still is most of the time. Saying that though, one of my favourite treats was when I'd get to rent a Sega Genesis from one of the local indie vidya rental places in Charlottetown. I don't remember the name of them, but there was one shop beside the Green Gables (the 'you forgot to buy some food now it's late' jingle anyone?) on University Avenue (where Jack's Pizza maybe still is?) and another one across from the Sherwood Shopping centre where I think the Subway is now (or is there still a Green Gables there? My rusty knowledge of C-town is really starting show here). Anyways! Remember when you could rent actual consoles? This place was different in that they didn't require you to put down some crazy $100 deposit for the rental.
Have always loved that design.
My parents were going to my uncle's place for new year's eve and I would have the house to myself, which for a 13 year old is pretty cool enough let alone having a Sega Genesis, Sonic 2 and Mortal Kombat to keep you entertained. I was in heaven. Sonic 2 being such a fantastic game and the Genesis port of MK1 being the best one. I played them both back and forth well into 1994 and had a grand time. My incredibly good memory of all the button combos for the moves and fatalities in MK could be traced back to this one evening. ABACABB, am I right?
Grabbing those bonus stage coins.
Oh the options!
Some things don't change. Here is is 18 years later and I'm still enjoying some Sonic 2 before the odometer rolls over on another year. And if I wanted, I could hook up my Megadrive (the Euro name for the Genesis, North American readers) and do up Sonic, Liu Kang, Sub Zero, Johnny Cage and the gang properly.
A Christmas Day Drive: Big Smoke Edition
Living somewhere where you can easily get around with any number of public transport options is a really great thing. When I got back to P.E.I. after my first holiday in London in 2005 I hated that if I needed to drive somewhere I had to do it myself. Yes there's flaws with transport in London... like the Tube strike today, but overall I think it's amazing.
Saying that though, I do sometimes miss driving. I really did love driving and having a car. Once in a while I get that urge to just hop in behind the wheel and just go where the four wheels take me. So for Christmas day this year I thought I'd take advantage of the far tamer traffic in London and do something I said I'd never do: go for a drive around central London.
I booked out an automatic VW Golf from Zipcar for 3 hours Christmas afternoon. Thankfully the one automatic car available was just a 20 minute walk away by the O2/North Greenwich Arena/Dome/whatever you want to call it.
Post-drive photo op
At first I was a bit shaky behind the wheel. Last time I had driven was in October 2010 and before that was December 2009. I was slow going at first and had a bit of sensory overload with all the things I had to remember to do while driving. Not to mention the bizarre traffic light set up here where there's about 3 lights for each lane. Which one should I be looking at?!
I hadn't planned any route. Didn't take a map or have any sat nav. That was part of the fun; I wanted to just rely on the London map in my head. Granted all I know of the roadways is from being on a buses and odd jaunts out of Greenwich on my bike. Still, I was pretty confident.
Setting out from Greenwich Peninsula I drove through Greenwich town centre, on to Deptford, then Rotherhithe and Bermondsey. The goal was to cross the river at Tower Bridge. Easily done as I just followed the route of the 188 bus. From the north side of Tower Bridge I headed along Lower Thames Street, Upper Thames Street and Victoria Embankment. After that was my first big traffic challenge: going around Parliment Square to get into Whitehall. I managed quite nicely. From Whitehall I went to Trafalgar Square, the Strand, Fleet Street, past St. Paul's, onto Bank and Bishopsgate. After this I just sort of let which lane I ended up in guide me and I ended up in Hackney for a while, which isn't all that terrible. I then went back into the city and headed for Smithfield and Holborn. I made my way down Tottenham Court Road playing guess which lane and then turned onto Euston Road and followed it into Islington and again back to the City.
I was going to try to drive down the Mall, so I went back down Fleet Street and the Strand but ended up being on the wrong side of Aldwych and was stuck with going across Waterloo Bridge. By this time I had been driving for about and hour and half and was getting pretty tired and hungry so I thought right, let's head south east and find my way home.
I knew this would be the trickiest part of the journey so I wanted plenty of time to get it done anyways. From Waterloo I went to Elephant & Castle and successfully navigated the mess that is the Elephant & Castle square roundabout. Driving down the Old Kent Road I was pretty content that I was going the right way. I only slipped up once in that at one point the signage said straight on for Dover or turn right for Lewisham. Well, I thought if I go to Lewisham I know how to get home from there so let's go for it. Nope. I ended up in some residential part of Lewisham. Thankfully I realised quickly I was going nowhere fast and back tracked. Funny enough, if I had gone straight I would have seen I was not far from the end of Deptford High Street and would have known exactly where I was. I reckon that was pretty good success.
Wrong turn was wrong.
There was only one other fumble to report and that happened at the junction of Faringdon Road and Clarkenwell Road. For all intensive porposes it looked like there were two lanes to go straight. There was a traffic light on each lane, both red, both with a straight ahead only sign and no other markings I could see, so that must be the case. Nope. I was in the lane for oncoming traffic. This is why I would only do this on a day as quiet as Christmas. Thankfully everyone was patient while I backed up and someone let me into the correct lane. No harm done.
Overall, there was more traffic than I thought there would be, car, bike and pedestrian combined. I think maybe word is spreading on how quiet central London is on Christmas day and everyone wants to get in on it, which is a bit of a catch 22. The experience of driving was fun, giggle inducing and a little bit nerve wracking at times but I'm still glad I did it. I rigged up my iPhone on the dash a few times and took some footage. It's just like watching someone play Forza Motorsport, kind of.
Also, cars have gotten way too filled with buttons while I've been a non-driver. That Golf was lovely to drive but the inside was a bit like a spaceship.
Is That a Neo Geo in Your Pocket?
Goodness, this one was a long time coming. For ages I've done this thing where I would look at Neo Geo Pocket systems on eBay, maybe bid on one and get outbid, forget about it for a while, then start the game all over again. For those who don't know (and that's probably most as it wasn't a particularly popular or long lived system, here's some back story to it.
SNK, known for making reams of fighting games, arcade machines and the Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD home consoles (mostly used to play ports of arcade fighting games) got into the hand held market a bit late. They launched the Neo Geo Pocket in 1998 in Japan. The screen was black and white and the system was canned a year later. As soon is it was in the bin, SNK launched the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1999. This was a nice bit of hardware. Its only downfall is that it doesn't have a back lit screen, but hey neither did the GameBoy Colour or the GameBoy Advance. Nevertheless, the NGPC was killed off by Nintendo's firm grasp on the portable gaming market. The system wasn't helped by the lack of a proper launch either. For some bizzare reason, rather than being sold in proper shops at launch, a deal was made with the website eToys to be the exclusive retailer before it was eventually available in brick and mortar shops. Oh the heady days of the late 90's.
Like its black and white predecessor, the NGPC was only on the market for a year. It was pulled in 2000 (2001 in Japan) after SNK was bought out. All the North American stock was sent back to Asia where the remaining systems and cartridges were repackaged and sort of rebranded to be sold as a budget 'pocket arcade' in Asia as well as North America.
Now as of this week I'm the proud owner of one of these lil' guys. I'm pretty impressed with the hardware itself. Not surprising with SNK building it that the controls have a nice hefty, arcade feel to them. Rather than a D-pad there is a thumb stick which is basically like an arcade stick for your thumb. Its clicky-ness is rather satisfying. The A and B buttons have a good chunky click to them as well. You feel that you can mash the buttons on this thing and it wouldn't even blink. Which is good what with all those fighting games available for it.
My 'starter kit' included a blue system, Metal Slug, Sonic Pocket Adventure and Pac-Man for games, and a nice case.
And just because I can't convey how clicky the controls are in a photo, here's a brief video:
Under the Warranty Wire
As of today, the iMac I'm writing this on is 1 year old. At least to me as that's when I bought it. Anyone who has purchased Apple kit will know that you get a 1 year warranty with new Macs. I've used this once previously to get the Superdrive in my iMac G4 replaced just before it ran out some seven years ago.
My second experiance with Apple repairs came with my current iMac. I had been noticing some dark spots on my display in the past month or so and they started to get worse. A look on the Apple discussion site showed that lots of people were having this same problem and getting the displays replaced. I thought I better get on that before my 1 year passes by.
I called Apple and got an appointment booked for very early last Saturday morning to drop my machine off at the Apple Store in Westfield Stratford (no, I'm not going to call it 'Stratford City'). Now I had to work out the logistics of getting it there. I brought my iMac home last year during a Tube strike. I was just that determined to have it for the weekend. It took some time for my arms to forgive me for that.
Not wanting a repeat of the arm pain and headache of lugging around a large box, I picked up a wheelie hand cart and some bungie ropes. This time I was going pro. It paid off. The trip to drop off the iMac was a breeze!
Ready to roll.
Waiting for the bus.
Squeezed onto the bus.
On the Tube
Bracing for Westfield Stratford
The gal at the Genius Bar booted it up off the network to run some diagnostics on it (I always reckoned that used some NetBoot stuff at the Stores), had a look at the screen and marked it down for replacement. Nice! And the staff were impressed with my pro setup to transport it. All in a usual day's job for me.
Empty box on a nearly empty Tube.
I got the call a few days ago that the work was all done and it was ready to collect. I didn't have the time to pick it up until Sunday afternoon and/or evening. There's no way it was going to be as quiet at that behemoth temple to shopping at that time of day. I braced myself and headed out today at 4pm, empty box and hand cart in tow.
The bus ride and tube journey were fine. However, Westfield itself was teeming with people. People not watching where they are going. People walking into the box I'm trying to politely wheel about. Then there was the queues for the lifts. Oh lord. You'd think people never used a lift before. The one going up would fill up, and people would keep pushing the up call button, which of course then just made the doors open of the one that's already full. I snapped and said 'someone has to stop pushing the call button'. The message got through.
The service at the Apple Store wasn't as top notch as last week. Too many 19-year-olds manning the Genius Bar. And by manning I mean, standing behind the bar talking amongst themselves, giving me and the large box beside me the odd glance and ignoring my 'hello's. I finally got served by a guy just passing who went and got my iMac and tested it for me. Huzah! But bless him, he had no idea how to lift one back into the box. I showed him a better way to do it. He said 'wow you must do this a lot'. Yes, yes I do.
Right! Back through the masses to Stratford station to get on the Jubilee line. But what's this? The platform gates are being shut and guarded by British Transport Police. Arse. A power failure meant Jubilee line trains weren't going anywhere. Decision time: do I hang about and see if it will get sorted soon or chance wheeling my cargo to the DLR to Greenwich and then on an overland train home. I figured I'd give the DLR a go. No trains to Lewisham. Arse. Canary Wharf and a change of trains it was. When we got to Canary Wharf there was an announcement that the Jubilee Line was running again. D'oh!
All in all, I got home a couple of hours later. It was a hassle, but to get a £299 screen replacement for £0 I think it was worth it. Here's to many more years of reliable service from my favourite lil' iMac.
It's home!
Suddenly Bagpipes
It was just before 1pm at work today. It was a bit quiet because everyone else was either eating or had gone out for some food or were in that 'I just ate and now I'm digesting and looking at FaceBook' mode.
Suddenly, I hear the faint sound of a bagpipe. "Is it just me or does anyone else hear bagpipes?" I asked. Not the most common question around these parts. Turns out I wasn't mad; there was indeed a pipe and drum band around the back of the building. I went out to take a look.
Ahh a piping classic.
At some point in the past week or so I got into a discussion with someone about piping. Ah, now I remember. Someone was saying they once worked with a Canadian who tried to teach them how to do highland dancing. He asked me if such Celtic things were popular in Canada. In response I told him that the part I'm from even has a bagpiping and Celtic arts college it's so popular.
Game Collecting Pro-tip #1
Keep those cartridge contacts clean,
And never shall you see
A flashing grey screen.
My recently eBay'd copy of The Legend of Zelda for the NES arrived in the post today, woo hoo! What's the first thing I did? Why I took it apart and cleaned the contacts of course. With clean contacts all my NES games work beautifully on a NES that has lived in a garage for the better part of this millennium. Even without replacing the 72-pin connector. I'm using a cleaning kit I picked up from Nintendo Repair Shop, it's worth it just for the proper screw driver bit to take the cartridges apart.
Get In Touch
Photos on Flickr
More...
- About to head out on a tour of Little Venice @walklondon @londonwalks 3 hrs ago
- Lots of interesting and free walks going on this weekend.: Walk London: Winter Wanders Weekend Website about new... http://t.co/hiplkBR 1 day ago
- Had a burrito for lunch for the first time in over a month. Feeling sleepy with a brick of food in my belly. How did I eat 'em all the time? 1 day ago
- Daily Photo: Crossrail cranes and Centre Point http://t.co/GRIfVQ0 1 day ago
- What? It's only 10:40?! I have to stop being so efficient at doing work stuff. 1 day ago
- More updates...
Neat Links
- Worker & Parasite (Eye On Springfield)
- Adventures in Depression (Hyperbole and a Half)
- Hark, a Vagrant: Kraven the Hunter (Hark, A Vagrant!)
- Travel Back In Time With Yahoo! Maps (Londonist)
- Should King’s Cross Have An Apostrophe? (Londonist)