So Tim and I decided to do the Kona Cheddar Bikefest race this year. We'd been training (sort of) for months and were all ready to go. Here is my report on what occured.

I did the start, we were going to do 2 laps each, it was a running start round this track and then run to your bike and go, designed to spread people out as there was a thin bridge just past the start that people would bottleneck at. I didn't bother running very fast as I knew everyone would be piling up there anyway. There was a little climb just before the bridge and most people had their bikes set in too hard a gear from the pick up so had to run up that bit too, I had mine ready set low so went past most of them. Everyone was falling into each other waiting to go over the bridge as we were all bunched together, it was quite a laugh, pedals going in wheels, people falling into other people.

After the bridge there was a small climb and I started passing people. I eventually caught up with people going my sort of speed so stuck with them. Then on the downhill I was faster than those people so started passing them. I was going quite fast on the downhill as that is where I have a real advantage over most people, and was having a great time. It was going well until there was an unexpected largish drop, I went off it a bit sketchy and got a slow pinch flat on my back tyre. I thought I could finish the lap on it so powered on, but it got flatter and flatter and eventually I lost control and crashed. At that point I pulled my bike off the track and started changing the tube. All the slow people started passing me again and when I got going again I was stuck behind them all again, boo hoo.

First lap was 27 minutes. Second lap I knew what to expect more and had a good lap coming in about 17 minutes. Which was good as I was aiming to beat 16.50 set by someone I ride with on a previous year, so that target looked within reach. As I finished my lap and got back into the transition area I gave Tim a quick briefing as he started to set off; never go for 3 laps as the big climb near the start is pretty hard going and after the down towards the end you always feel like you could go one more, until you are half-way up, and also to watch out on the downhill for the drop that almost caught me out.

So Tim headed out and I sat down to fix my flatted tube in case I needed to use it. Riding it flat had really taken its toll and it had 5 holes in it! Anyway, 15 minutes came round and I got myself ready in case Tim needed me to take over. 20 minutes came and went, I knew Tim would be a bit slower than me but didn't know what to expect. After 30 minutes I thought he must have had a puncture, crash or some bike problem. After 45 minutes I assumed something had gone wrong as he could have walked/run back by that point. Then it came over the loud speaker for me to go to the paramedics stand, oh dear.

There was a cut off sapling stump on one bit of the track, in the middle, they had painted it yellow but Tim had gotten unlucky and hit it in an awkward way and come flying off, landing on his face and arm. He was sitting with the paramedics and one was looking after him. She was quite a cute girl and Tim was doing his best to chat her up, good on him. Anyway, we collected our stuff up and I went to find Tim's bike up the hill. Tim's friends came over from Bristol and drove us and Tim's car back to Bristol before taking Tim to A+E. In the end his arm wasn't broken, which was good.

We'll be back next year.
Posted 14 Sep at 12:40 in Biking0 Comments

A fantastic music video, in lush HD with a catch techno track.Posted 10 Sep at 10:28 in Music0 Comments

Rowan and I recently went to Portishead on an adventure and filming mission, after finding absolutely nothing of interest on Avonmouth or Severn Beach. We had a frustrating run-in with the Waitrose carpark attendant, for simply parking there. Hmmm.

We filmed a bit of footy and found an interesting sculpture to ride on. Warning: it is made of sheet metal and has obviously been used as a slide as its been polished to a very slippery finish.Posted 9 Sep at 14:16 in Biking1 Comments

Well, what do you know? The Guardian reports on a study that "finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music", "According to research, those who download 'free' music are also the industry's largest audience for digital sales".

As mentioned in my previous post, the people who download music (for free either legally or illegally) are those most passionate about music, the fans, and those who make the labels their money, despite what they claim. If the record labels has any sense instead of spreading disinformation about pirates ruining their business they would embrace digital distribution and a new way of selling their product. Yet strangely they aren't interested in the truth, about what is actually happening. This is strange because in the end it is hurting their business!
Posted 22 Apr at 14:08 in Music0 Comments

So here we are. I have finally built a new website. A lot has changed since I built my old site 2 years ago. My website design (form) and development (function) skills have without doubt improved, and so this is going to be a new base for making exciting things happen, including

- a section that showcases the best of my photography, with the ability to buy prints, and even license shots for use online or in print media.
- examples of my illustration work, an area I am very much enjoying at the moment as you should be able to see from the links above.
- an area to put my 'projects', the random things I get sidetracked with, such as building a bike light, making a flash-ring diffuser, and a whole host of miscellaneous creations.
- a portfolio of my web design/development work.
- an 'of interest' feed, including recently discovered sites, a feed from my twitter account and any number of other random widgets.

So watch this space, follow the changes and give me some feedback, not least because there may be bugs in this site.
Posted 17 Apr at 00:17 in Website Design0 Comments

I recently discovered, and started following Starts with a Bang on Science Blogs, a wonderful collection of blogs from a wide range of fields, dealing with not only science but the happenings in the writers' daily lives, and other amusing happenings.

SWAB (what a great acronym) had originally moved from here and I started going 'back in time' through their posts. I came across this post called 'The Arrow of Time' (I have a book on by the same name, on the same topic). It is something I have often thought about from time-to-time (no pun...). The basis of this concept is to explore whether or not the 'film' of the history of our universe could be played backwards and make just as much sense.

At least initially it seems fair enough to say that you could equally well run time backwards and everything would still make sense. The most cited example is the orbits of the planets, stop the record and set it going in reverse and the planets rotating the opposite direction makes - seemingly - just as much sense in Newtonian physics. Yet it doesn't. If you run things backwards, the apple that allegedly fell on Newton's head prompting the formation of his theories couldn't instead fall from his head back onto the tree in this reverse-time universe. If this was the case then gravity would be a repulsive force instead of an attractive one. And if that was the case the planets would fly away from the sun, and each other, repelled by this reverse-gravity. Leading to a universe very different to our own.

Things get even worse when you start looking at chemical reactions. The example Ethan Siegel gives is the example of cooking an egg, a non-reversible chemical change, increasing its entropy. And seeing as the second law of thermodynamics states that "entropy of an isolated system...will tend to increase over time" running cooking an egg backwards would lead to a decrease in entropy. The example I like to think of is that you have two containers of a different gas in a room. Opening the containers causes the gas molecules to escape into the room, bounce off the walls and shoot around until the two gases are throughly mixed. This is a non-reversible increase in the disorder of the system - an increase in entropy. The two gases would never self-separate and flow back into the containers from whence they came.

But what if we were to reverse this law? Well if we are saying time goes backwards, which in our reality it doesn't, then why can't the second law of thermodynamics work in reverse in this alternative reality? In that; entropy of an isolated system decreases over time? That is to say things become more ordered, by themselves. If we are going to do this then the exploration of the idea of reverse-time is fairly pointless.

I, just like others, initially started thinking about the concept of reverse-time to see if there was any impossibilities which would act like a time-diode, a conclusive law that could not work in a reverse-time situation, meaning that time could only ever flow in the direction it does for us, forwards. If you are willing to reverse established laws for every situation that doesn't work in reverse then every time you come to one of these time-diode situations you can just say; "Well what if we reverse that law, then it makes sense." and makes the whole exercise fairly meaningless; you will never meet a situation where you can't just suppose the opposite is true.

Still, it's an enjoyable thought-experiment to think about things in reverse, how all the laws relate to our physical world and the tools you could use to explore such an idea.
Posted 7 Apr at 20:00 in Science0 Comments

So, hello, it has been a ridiculous length of time since my last post. Lots has happened. So much in fact that I am not going to even attempt to report it all. So here are some photos. And I got a graphics tablet for Christmas, woo! So expect hand-drawn stuff soon.Posted 9 Feb at 20:00 in Photography0 Comments

On the playlist worth a mention right now I have Svalastog's album Woodwork. A fantastic selection of ambient 'experimental' tracks. Many thanks to Tim for letting me rip his CD, or not, I'm pretty sure I asked...



Also a current firm favorite is 20 Minute Loop. That link will take you to their band page/profile on bandcamp.mu, an absolutely fantastic service for groups and artists to self=promote and sell their music. The groups on there are mostly indie (independent: subculture music that is independent of major producers) or underground, and there is a wide range of genres to suit any taste.



The website is absolutely fantastic; purely from a web design point of view. The interface is really clean and a lot of the functionality is very well thought out and implemented. There are a lot of really smart features which, although I won't be 'borrowing with pride', should inspire me in taking my work to the next level, of both design and functionality. I am also very keen on discovering lesser-known music, or music I perceive to be more obscure, partly for the impression of getting away from the crowd, but mostly because I enjoy the process of finding and enjoying new music discovered in serendipitous ways.

One particularly appealing aspect of bandcamp is that people, both producers of and sellers of music, are experimenting with new platforms for the distribution of music. A lot of the tracks on bandcamp are free, some are 'name your price' (i.e. you pay what you want, even nothing, often with a suggested or minimum price) and some are the more traditional fixed price. The tracks are available in a plethora of formats so whatever your desire, platform or device you can get the music exactly as you would want it, meaning you can get to the important part; enjoying the music, as easily as possible. There is also none of that nasty DRM.

And all of this makes me happy, as I am very passionate in my beliefs that the traditional methods of music distribution are outdated and no longer relevant to our digital networked society. I'd go as far as to say that everyone is getting a bum deal; fans (customers) can't get the music how they want it when they want it, groups can't get the music to their fans, and the traditional labels are suing and complaining while stuck in the middle of a transaction they no longer understand or control, making things as hard as possible while ruining the enjoyment for both the fans and the artists. There are great opportunities for the new services which are appearing, and they truly have the chance to be, although I dislike the term, game-changers. It's an exciting time, and I very strongly believe that bandcamp has got it right.

Ultimately I welcome anything that brings the high quality and (largely) unknown group of independent music creators more easily available to more people.

Edit:
As a side-note I want to say a little more about the 'name your price' format. I think this is fantastic, and is being trialled by a number of larger groups, including Radiohead. It appeals to me strongly as my method of enjoying new music is in a 'sample and reward' format. I often find an artist which I think I may be interested in, and then download their music for free, from Bit Torrent usually. If I enjoy what I hear then I feel that the artists hard work and talent should be rewarded, so I will either buy the music, preferably from iTunes, or the group's website, though ideally I will 'donate' some money to them. Although this isn't strictly legal, I wouldn't have bought the groups music legally without hearing it more anyway.*

A lot of groups have this ability on their website as they realise that people do download their tracks for free, but as opposed to being heartless beings with an insatiable thirst for free shit, these consumers of music do care about the bands they listen to, and are fans, and understandably will give the groups money, voluntarily, for what they perceive to be good music.

This is why the 'name your price' format works so well, the people that pay nothing wouldn't have paid for the music anyway, and who knows, they might enjoy it and come back to give the artists something later on. The fans will pay, often as much as if they had bought the physical media, which means more money for the group than had the sale actually been of a CD (construction+distribution costs). And people like me can sample the music and reward the groups whose music they enjoy. There is no need for DRM if you are giving it away for free (if the person doesn't want to pay anything) meaning you aren't turning off your paying consumers through fiddly and inconvenient protections. And you no longer have piracy, as you are giving the music away. You can also accurately follow how many people are enjoying your music for free. Music charts, if that is what you are interested in, become more valid again as you can track downloads, whether paid or otherwise, as opposed to the music being downloaded for free invisibly.

May the 'name your price' format become a widespread phenomenon!

*It is an interesting argument to examine whether if a law is in place which a large portion of society is violating regularly and deliberately because they feel it is 'wrong' then which needs to change? The behavior of the society, or the law? Especially when the environment the law was first written in has changed as drastically as the industry of production of culture with the rise of the digital networked society. But that is a whole other topic.
Posted 28 Nov at 20:00 in Music0 Comments

I am currently working through a huge backlog of photos at the moment. And as I want to get through them before I pick the ones for blogging you will have to wait. In the meantime, though, I want to take this blog in a new direction with blogging more than just photos. To that end I will starting linking to, and talking about, other things.

To start us off I found this fantastic match calender on the dieline, a design blog which always has some really interesting ideas on it. About the match book calender the artist/designer has to say:

"The idea was to create as unique a calendar so that the process of its presenting would become an outstanding event. Alongside with this, it was important to expose the idea of "energy", as it is predetermined by the name and logo of the company. Each page is a month and it looks like a comb made of matches that correspond to the days."





I love this idea, it represents the passing of each day as something more significant. Time spent, never to be regained; as we all know, physical changes are reversible, chemical changes are not, and with the burning of a match, as with the movement of time, the original state is impossible to obtain again.
Posted 20 Nov at 20:00 in General Design0 Comments

I judged the BMX competition at the 360 Event that was held in Bristol, it was an awesome day, and the only sunny day for a long time. I also had a chance to shoot some pics.Posted 19 Sep at 20:00 in Photography0 Comments