A fine fellow with a fascination with guy-liner presented me with a macro lens a while ago.  Gave it a spin around a garden on a sunny day

clicketty for bigger

As promised on the AmeCon forums here’s my pics from the weekend.  Some ok snaps, lots of point-click-hope shots but hope they’re of interest to some folk

If anyone spots one of themselves they particularly want get in contact and I’ll send over the high-res version.

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Very quick update testing both the WordPress app for the iPhone and the camera of the shiny fourth iteration of the beastie.

Thus far I’ve been very impressed. Still very much a fan of the Android system but the over all quality of the iPhone 4 is undeniable. It’s taken them a while but I think Apple may have finally gotten it right. Of course time will tell.

For now enjoy a dusk snap from a nearby park taken yesterday from the in-built camera

My housemate, while scouring a car boot sale, happens accross a most fine and worthy find. One of MC Hammer’s finest moments: The Addams Family Groove on 12″ vinyl single. First vinyl record I’ve gained in several years and quite possibly the finest – no small achievement considering Tubular Bells and The Beatles Red & Blue albums also feature

I have a theory that ducks have developed the ability to draw nourishment from the very air when the sun is not shining brightly enough to entice folk to come throw them treats otherwise why else would people only go feeding them when it’s sunny?

Read on….

The park near me has a nice duck pond lake inhabited by a number of mallards (the baby mallards are out and about now! *squee*), Canadian Geese, not-so-canadian geese, some other as yet unidentified (by my at least) ducks and a few Moorhens.

Upon a sunny day you might find not one but two mobile ice cream establishments (one traditional one Mr Whippy), a toddlers play group and many many people. On a sunny day many folk dust off their shorts and their spare scraps of bread and announce unto their family “Behold for today the sun tis bright in the sky to yea to the park we shall attend and yea many-a-duck shall we feed”.

Now this is all very good and nice but there is a small problem – the number of hungry ducks is dwarfed by the number of eager bread-laden folk resulting in some rudimentary bread-beaches forming around the pond lake. The ducks devour what they fancy and, quite reasonably, leave the rest. But, I find myself pondering by the pond, with all this out pouring of desire to feed the ducks on this indeed sunny day what about in the colder nay more frozen times?

I can only conclude that ducks and geese and other such pond lake dwelling souls have developed a mystical ability to not require food below a certain ambient temperature! Amazing, I know. Otherwise why else would folk ignore the poor beakers on non-sunny days? I’ve been to the park on colder nay frozen days and have none the less found the duck folk to be terribly eager to accept bready treats – almost as if they were actually very hungry. That must not be the case though otherwise surely everyone would be out throwing them some tasty treats in less clement weather!

On that thought I may dig up some bread and head to the pond lake for the sun is taking a constitutional behind some clouds today and I suspect folk will be less keen to feed the the duck folk today ^__^

While enjoying some time out on the town in Leeds there was a small mater of dispute between our gathered folk and a gentleman we later have come to affectionately know as Mr 70.  To call it a territorial dispute would be, perhaps, an overstatement but none the less the Tale of Mr 70 takes many (few) twists and turns in an epic voyage of loss, rediscovery and abandonment…. read on.

We had gathered in celebration of the end of Uni exams for some fine and worthy folk. This, as you’d expect, involved cocktails and enchiladas. Oh and tapas and let us not forget the chimichanga. Delicious. Las Iguanas, by the way, does great cocktails and latin food.

I’ve never understood why spanish / mexican style grub / culture is referred to as “latin” or “latino”. Surely latin would be more something associated with Rome, Romans or at very least Italy. Answers to this conundrum on a stamped addressed comment below.

Anyway, I digress. We relocated to a pub for some further fine beverage appreciation. The place was busy with few tables to be had but that was ok, for we had booze. “HARK!”, cried one of our number. “For that table… it has become unoccupied!”* We made our way to said table and gathered around it and yea there was much rejoicing.

Some moments later an elderly fellow approached our personal space and testily announced “I was sat there”.
The statement seemed informative and I had no reason to doubt his claim so I cheerfully replied “Ok… and now you’re not ”
The elderly fellow seemed in desire of further conversation and so continued
“I was sat there, I had a beer”
Now at this point it’s important to be aware that there was indeed what appeared to be an abandoned beverage on the table. We had shifted it to another, less desirable, empty table.
There was talk of having “only gone out for a smoke” and how this was “just rude” yet he “came here every day and never had this happen”. Aaaah, we thought, you’re a drunk. It all makes sense. Apparently because we didn’t all live permanently in the city centre we couldn’t possibly understand.

After the question “Would you like us to move?” was posed the drunken table-theivery victim grumbled to himself, retrieved his pint, and ambled away. I couldn’t help but feel that we had somehow wronged him. What if this WAS his table? What if he really did have some sort of time honoured claim to it? Surely if that was the case there would be some form of notice or labelling to that effect, maybe even his name. Then it became clear. The only identifiable marking upon the table was a small metal disc bearing a number.

So to you, Mr 70, I apologise for having savagely taken your abandoned table and relocating your lonely pint. I can only hope that you face not such rude and uncivilised folk as us again.

Epilogue:
Another table, occupied by a couple of indeterminate age but identifiably horrible dress sense, was later ‘abandoned’ in a similar fashion. I watched in confusion as the couple left two drinks and a mobile phone to enjoy a cigarette outside. Perhaps we were somehow in the wrong for concluding that a table that has had no occupation for 5-10 minutes would inexplicably want to become reoccupied by it’s previous tenant.

* quote may have been altered for dramatic purposes.

Ever encountered the hassle of archiving music in one format but needing it in another for your portable music enjoyment?  I have and spent this afternoon sussing out the most sensible way to do it (under Windows anyway).  Read on you, like me, faff with things like FLAC but need something a little more robust for on the road…

I’ve recently tidied up my music collection and got the tags right and started re-ripping my real-world CDs to FLAC. I like FLAC because it’s an open format and it’s lossless (meaning it retains the same full audio quality of the CD in a slightly compressed format) but it’s a touch on the chunky side.

For portability I have my Sansa Fuze that serves me extremely well but I’ll run out of space sharpish with FLAC files so Ogg, another open audio format, comes into play. Ogg is lossy (meaning audio data is cropped to significantly shrink the files but in way human ears don’t notice too much) so I can fit oodles of it on my Fuze. Problem is the faff of converting the FLAC albums to Ogg then copy them over. It’s a little laborious.

I started to hunt around for some tools that might do the trick. First stop: Songbird. Sadly no file conversion options on the go here. Next up DB Poweramp, a Windows audio ripping and conversion package. No luck here either as I have to convert to Ogg then create the destination folder on the Fuze (repeat for each album… ZZzzz….). Media Monkey has the facility but in the free version.. argh!

With great surprise my salvation comes in the form of an audio player / library that I shunned years ago: Winamp.

Winamp on a BIG monitor works well but gets very cramped very quickly on medium to small screens. That aside it does support copying to portable devices while trans-coding to the format of your choice all within the free version. The level of configuration you can dive into for your portable device is impressive. Permitted formats, by file extension, can be specified with anything that doesn’t match being converted automatically to the format of your choice.

Converting to Ogg isn’t supported out of the box however a happy Winamp plugin adds this and you’re good to go! I’d go into more details but hardly anyone actually reads SpaceCookies at the moment so leave a comment if you’re interested to know more.

Yes yes I know things like iTunes are much simpler and easier to use but if, like me, you’re one of the minority that demand full control over the quality of their music and aren’t scared off by a little tinkering it’s a great solution.

El Reg posted a piece yesterday on the surprising health of CD sales in the growing age of online music downloads and streaming services. It’s hanging on a lot better that was thought in the face of retailers closing and the easiness of buying through services like iTunes and zapping straight into your portable music player of choice *coughSansaFuzecough*. This got me to thinking that more so than occurred to me before the CD is my generation’s Vinyl.

The dawn of CD was greeted with a volley ‘oh look how small it is and harder to break’ along side ‘aaaaah it sounds rubbish’. Granted it didn’t help that mastering audio to CD was an art that took a long while to mature so CDs had poorer sound quality due to the content rather than the media. In my humble opinion a well mastered CD on average sound kit sounds better than a Vinyl – but it’s still a digital representation rather than vinyl’s physical capturing of sound which in the high-end of things should always sound better.

Times move on.. vinyl wanes in popularity as CD players become cheaper and more portable, CDs themselves become cheaper it gets it’s feet solidly under the carpet. Now digital downloads are nuzzling their mitts in too, now, I’m seeing some similarities to the CD vs vinyl argument.

Digital downloads are, by nature, again smaller physically (i.e. intangible) and harder to break (you can’t snap an MP3, only break the drive it’s on – but that’s ok, you can download it again) but also by the same token there is a quality trade-off. MP3 / WMA / AAC / whatever all are ‘lossy’ audio formats which means to get the file size down elements of the audio data is removed. The level of audio data removed impacts the quality of the sound. MP3, being one of the oldest lossy formats, suffers the most with quality degradation. I’ve played with legitimate MP3 downloading but always feel it’s lacking something so I’m returning to CDs for the most part.

With a CD I get the full audio quality which I can then convert into the lossy audio format of my choosing, rather than the music’s retailer’s, at the quality I desire while still retaining the full quality audio for home enjoyment. Perhaps most importantly though I’ve grown up with CD and feel at home with it, much like the generation or two before me hold vinyl in such high esteem.

Perhaps the time will come when downloading full-quality, or loss-less, versions of music will become commonplace but until then I strike a balance: listening via Spotify premium when something is new then bide my time to snare the CD once the price drops.

As ever thoughts and comments are open

Kinder Egg - Chocolate AND a toy!

1. You can buy a Kinder Egg whenever you want.

2. Ice cream is a valid foodstuff for any meal, any time of the year.

3. Getting new toys is no longer limited to Birthdays and Christmas

4. Staying up as late as you like incurs the wrath of no body (except Future You the following morning).

Throw me some other reasons – there must be more!  Commenting, as ever, is freely open

He’s behind you!