It’s not a particularly happy video, but then, the current approach to handling the global economy, global energy usage, environmental matters, and oil dependency is not exactly the stuff of joy and laughter. Make sure you have some time set aside to watch it as it is 34 minutes long – but then it covers the entire history of energy creation, discovery, production, and looks at the future and what the energy crisis could mean to life on earth. Not exactly something you can speak about in a couple of minutes.

Incubate Pictures created the animation, and if you want to argue about the information presented in the video, first make sure to read his own proviso.

Every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the data. in ‘There’s No Tomorrow’. The latest available figures were used at the time of production, which is why some years portray data for 2007, others 2008, etc.. Whenever presented by two contradictory sets of data, the more conservative one was used.

There’s No Tomorrow’ presents one widely held viewpoint – an admittedly gloomy one – though not the worst. The core message of the film should be remembered: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

What do you think? Did it get you thinking about the global situation? Did it make you consider your own consumption and environmental approach? Let me know in the comments below.

What? Yes, it’s true, my first name is not Alex. Yet I have gone through my entire life being called Alex. My parents wanted to call me Alex, but felt that “Mark Alexander” sounded better than “Alexander Mark”, and so it was.

Generally this is fine. Everyone calls me Alex, no one calls me Mark. However certain circumstances can become somewhat awkward as a result.

In college we had to use the first name on our birth certificate/passport. It confused me. Would my college friends call me Mark? Fuck that, they called me Alex. However in every class roll-call I would have to respond to “Mark Leonard”. Furthermore, the college inscribed my chefs knives with “Mark Leonard”. I still own those knives. They’re mine, but they don’t entirely feel like they’re mine.

Recently I’ve been told by different airlines that I should book my flights as Mark Leonard. So I now travel as Mark. That said, my credit cards are “Alex Leonard”, so I travel as Mark, but book as Alex. I have to watch out for that.

Now that I’ve moved to Northern Ireland I needed to set up a local bank account to handle money stuff. I met with Bank of Ireland and asked to set up my new account as “Alex Leonard” (per my Republic of Ireland account). Mark was never mentioned, but when my bank card arrived in the post “Mark A Leonard” was my name. A phone call later and I’m not allowed to have my bank account registered to Alex; Mark is my only option – as it is on my passport. I can not change that.

I can see that this will cause some sort of issues down the line. If nothing else it’s confusing for me to remember what situations I am Alex, and which times I am Mark.

It’s quite stunning, as most of his paintings are - there’s a certain fluidity, vitality and rawness to them that excites me.

However I highly recommend heading over to the original blog post to see a whole series of photos he took where he shows the painting at various stages of development. I found it quite interesting to see it grew over time. It’s great to have the artist baring the painting’s development for all to see, to see the layers building up.

For those of you interested, she’s a Seat Leon Mk1, 1.9L SDI Stella, just shy of 100k on the clock. She’s running well and came with a full year’s MOT. I’m pretty thrilled with it I must say. Looking forward to expanding the reach of my daily photo walks by adding a motorised starting push to them. It was getting difficult feel inspired on the same little stretch in this small town (although definitely a good exercise).

Anyway, this will also make it much much easier to get down to Dublin or visit my parents in Wexford. Will also be nice to drop in to Niall and Chrissie in Belfast which is only an hour away or so.

Photos!

Blog updates

So far I’ve written 19 blog posts. This number is possibly slightly artificially high due to the posting of multiple photos in the new photoblog section of the website. However, I’m still feeling quite good about it, considering I only wrote 53 blog posts for the entire of last year.

Photography

On this little resolution I’ve really surprised myself. I’ve managed to get out for my 2k photo walk every single day of the year, barring two occasions. One of the two missed occasions I had a late night wander round my house taking photos of random things.

I’ve even gotten out in the dark, when it’s raining. So I’m feeling good about that – and more importantly, I’m enjoying it an awful lot.

The best photos are available in the Photoblog section, and you can see other shots from each day in my January album on Google Plus.

Other Stuff

How about the other points raised in my general resolution? Some things not too bad, others nothing has really happened – such as music, but I haven’t sorted out my studio yet and am just waiting for my new (second-hand) car to be ready before I can collect my studio equipment from my parents’ house.

Anyway, this year I’m feeling more inspired by the start of a new year and am going to post about it as a result.

Some things for the year 2012

Photography: 2k/52/365

Do we really need more images cataloguing our world and lives, especially those taken by people without any real appreciable knowledge of the art? I’m not sure about that, but it doesn’t matter to me too much because it’s something I enjoy more and more as time passes.

I was reading Dave Powell’s blog post about his 2k experiment and I felt inspired. So this morning, following some discussion on Google Plus, I ventured out to walk two kilometres from my doorstep and take some photos. And I loved it.

I have a new photo backpack which, whilst extremely late for my birthday due to an Amazon mess up, was perfectly timed for today. It’s extremely comfortable to walk with.

Whether I will keep up something like my new 365project.org page or not is unknown, but the 2K idea is lovely and I’m really going to try to stick to that (rain or shine?).

Blogging

It’s all too easy to slip into the habit of handing over your thoughts to a third-party service like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. They’re useful services and certainly make things easy. However, at the same time they’re not mine. This year I’m hoping to give more to my life journal here on this blog. I can always share it out to my third-party service of choice (if you weren’t sure, it’s Google+ for the time being).

Work

A more effective work-life balance. Spending my work time working, and making sure I distinguish the personal time from the work time, even if it so happens that I’m sitting in front of a screen for both. It’s all too easy to let it all blur into one.

This isn’t an easy task, as I’m all too aware, but I’ll push for it all the same.

Other things relating to work mainly include pushing my coding abilities a bit more and improving the efficiency of my work-flow.

Music

A minimum of one original Ebauche release this year and a live set on Rathlin island in August of which I am wholly proud.

That is all.

Life

Spend more time communicating with the people I care for. Even if it just means dropping a short email or text message every once in a while to say hello.

I care for a lot of people. I feel a lot of love and trust towards the many fantastic people I’ve met over the years. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with and I end up, strangely, becoming more of a hermit. I’ll try. But please, never hesitate to drop me a line and say hello. I’ll be delighted to hear from you

Money

It’s one of those things that is hard to avoid. This year I’m going to wholly focus on eliminating my credit card debt.

There we have it

A little memorandum of my intents. Someone remind me to look back at this in 365 days time!

Definitely less than 2010, when I wrote 74 posts. I think in the first part of the year I had actually been more active, but from summer onwards I think I got wholly distracted by Google+ and most of my content generation and general thoughts were going on there due to the pure simplicity of it.

21,752 people visited this website

That’s a staggering increase in numbers for me. Up from 6,250 unique visitors last year. I’m not sure what I did to deserve that, but it’s quite cool

Thanks to all that dropped by, and here’s to a 2012 with more writing, both personal journal stuff, more photos, and most of all, more tech related stuff, especially WordPress useful functions (these posts seems to draw the most comments).

Travelled 44, 616 kilometres through 7 countries

This is just a rough assessment as per my TripIt stats. I would have covered a bit more ground than that with various trips to Kampot, Kep, Kirirom National Park, Ho Chi Minh et al.

Country-wise I stayed in or passed through Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, France, United Kingdom, and Ireland.

Lived in 3 apartments

From my old place on 6Z Mao Tse Tung Boulevard, to Warren’s house near Russian Market, to my current flat in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland.

Took 2,813 photos with my DSLR

This isn’t counting the photos I’ve rejected for being blurry, out of focus, or generally crap

A big step up from the 1082 photos taken in 2010, although I only got the camera in May of 2010.

Gained 471 followers on Google Plus

Sent 1,163 emails from Gmail; 2,687 work emails

Bit of a drop from 2010 on the work front, when I sent 3,015 emails. Was it a quieter year for work, not sure about that.

Listened to approximately 15,618 songs

My average number of scrobbled tracks per year is about 14,000, so I’ve listened to a bit more this year than usual. Probably helped along by scrobbling songs from my phone.

It was a tight race to the top this year, with only 34 plays between the top five artists. I hope Sunken Foal will be happy to be sitting in my top 10 too

My top 20 artists this year are:

1. Autechre – 490 plays
2. Venetian Snares – 486 plays
3. Radiohead – 484 plays
4. Loscil – 472 plays
5. Aphex Twin – 456 plays
6. Trampled By Turtles – 300 plays
7. Boards of Canada – 263 plays
8. Susumu Yokota – 233 plays
9. Woob – 232 plays
10. Sunken Foal – 227 plays
11. Gillian Welch – 209 plays
12. Rhythm & Sound – 203 plays
13. Lusine Icl – 193 plays
14. Brian Eno – 186 plays
15. The KLF – 184 plays
16. Hellfish & Producer – 182 plays
17. Cat Power – 178 plays
18. Lucid Dreams – 175 plays
19. Nouvelle Vague – 173 plays
20. Yo La Tengo – 168 plays

And here’s a lovely graph of my listening trends, courtesy of Last.fm’s Listening Trends in their playground.

Bought approximately 1,100 songs from Emusic

Simply based on the fact that I get 100 tracks a month, but I did take a month off. I definitely picked up a few other new album here and there, usually from Bleep, when they weren’t available on Emusic.

Will I change this pattern? It’s not particularly cheap at €30 a month, although that is a good deal for 100 songs (I’m on a legacy account since they increased their prices). Still I could pay GBP10 a month to Spotify for a premium account but not actually ‘own’ any of the songs and be somewhat more dependent on the cloud.. I’ll think about that one..

Searched Google 5,186 times

Fairly consistent, with July (travelling back to Ireland and being somewhat uprooted) being my quietest month. Per day my highest volume of searches happens around 6pm.

Met 1 special lady

Amen to that

No more numbers

Yes, sorry about the number overload. This is more of a personal reference. I might try to do the same next year and see how things compare year to year.

Fingers crossed I might actually find the time to create a new design for this blog too. I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas to make it easier to find the stuff of mine you’re more interested in, and generally refresh the whole look and feel of the site. Design concepts are half-completed!

Have a happy new year’s eve celebration, whatever you may be doing. Here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2012 for all my friends, family, and blog readers!

PS. Hat tip to Naoko McCraken, who I met at WordCamp Malaysia 2010, for giving me the inspiration to write this post.

I failed to find out whether there were other like-minded (eg crazy) people in the area that do the same Christmas tom-foolery, mainly due to my work overload in the weeks running up to Christmas day. So it was a solo swimming affair, but I was lucky to have an audience of two nature watchers sitting in their car who gave their car horn a mighty good tooting when I hit the water.

Here’s a small selection of photos/proof of the event.

Here’s to a warm, healthy, happy and prosperous 2012 for you and yours.

To do this I need to drop into the DVLA office, the nearest of which is in Coleraine. So I went searching for the following address on Google Maps:

County Hall
Castlerock Road
Coleraine
BT51 3TA

Check what I found:

See it with your own eyes here: http://g.co/maps/qvcdg