Birthday Blog

Today is November 21st. My birthday.

Last year my other half laid on the best birthday experience ever; including all my friends, all my geekiness and nearly all of London’s Soho district.

It was fantastic.

This year has been – amazingly – even better. Friday night I was out with work for a huge, multi-celebratory knees up. Three birthdays, two leavers and one awesome award win meant that it was the perfect combination for getting the whole company out together. It’s a rarity for all of us to unwind like that and it was definitely well overdue for some of us. I guess I got home about 4ish maybe? But even then didn’t get to sleep until the very early hours (what with deciding to carry on partying with everyone at home way back in the vale). Brilliant.

Last night was my actual birthday party; friends old and new, a few work colleagues, best mates from home, some family (it’s my sister’s birthday today too) and it was one of the best nights out I’ve had this year.

A night of music from the 80s, filthy fairy cakes, beetlejuice-based hilarity, Marmite-flavoured chocolate… the list goes on.

Looking through my phone this morning there’s only a few photos to show off what a great night we all had (I’m sure others took many, many more), however I did find one video. One very special video.

Big love and thanks to Bryce & Camilla for today’s #vlomo10 entry. You guys rock… X

Fog

I shot this on the way into work Friday morning with the full intention of it being the #vlomo10 entry for that day. A timely Benny appearance at the 1000heads offices kindly put a stop to that however, so here is Friday’s original entry; slightly out of time – but nonetheless, still here.

Enjoy.

Oh – and that photo that I took?

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Place your bets please…

While digging around in the archives earlier this evening, I found this old footage of an aborted vlomo from last year. I remember filming it at the time and feeling unsure if I had the takes I needed to edit together the idea that I wanted, which is why I don’t think I got ’round to publishing anything it all. Perfectionist that I am.

So tonight I thought I’d try again with eyes that were a year older and ears a year wiser and it turns out, I had what I needed after all; inspired by BANZAI! I give you:

Big friendly hat tips to Dom and Joel for being such great sports. Sorry it took me so long to make you internet famous guys…

TV Dinners

Recently, I was kicking off about the lack of ‘sequence mode’ on the new Nokia N8. Sequence mode, for the uninitiated, is basically a way to set the device to snap every ten, twenty or thirty seconds (depending on your preferred setting), basically allowing you to create awesome timelapse videos direct from your mobile phone.

It’s quite a fun feature that’s been present in leading Nokia handsets for several years. Alas, it is lacking in the N8.

However, to my rescue, here comes super-talented coder, Iain Wallace. Shortly after I tweeted about the disappearance of one of my favourite modes of Nokias gone by, Iain reached out and asked if I’d be a tester for an app that would do just that. I said yes (obviously) and have been messing around with ‘Lapsed’ for most of the afternoon.

This is my first take, it’s not brilliant but, expect more in the future…

The app itself isn’t open for public beta (yet) and isn’t available to download (yet). Iain’s still very much in alpha creation mode (many new dev libraries required etc) BUT, eventually, we might see something like this on the Ovi Store… Maybe.