“…It is not surface, it is not the last thing that needs to be considered, it is the thing itself” – Stephen Fry

Unformatted code is analogous to an essay without paragraphs – or perhaps a paragraph without punctuation: all the data you need to understand the ‘essay’ is there, but without the correct formatting it just appears to be a jumble of words without any real thought or structure behind it. To fully understand the program (essay) we must be able to decipher the constituent parts and understand them as separate entities as well as inter-related parts. In programming, formatting and indentation aid understanding – without them, this task becomes exceedingly difficult. It’s the same as how without punctuation, we cannot fully understand the context of a sentence or paragraph.

It was here that I wanted to write about whitespace and its importance in programming, graphic design and photography. However, browsing the Internet to find some good articles to plagiarise verbatim reference and cite correctly, I came across a great piece on the powerful use of whitespace from A List Apart. Focusing on the design of both web and print media, the theories found there can be translated to many different types of content: advised reading if – like me – you’re a newcomer to design and usability theory.

Clicking through to the author’s website I discover that not only does Mark Boulton work a leisurely 5 minute stroll from my current place of work, but he also creates interesting and beautifully simple presentations – my favourite of which is Better Typography; produced for the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo on the importance of typography in design. With its practical and usable examples and vivid depictions of the impact typography can have, I advise giving it a read. Mark’s kindly allowed me to mirror the presentation locally, and I feel that Paola Antonelli’s TED Talk is a perfect compliment if you’re reading about design and typography for the first time.

Finally, if anyone has a good book recommendation on design, usability, etc. it’ll definitely make a welcome addition to my Intelligence by Osmosis series.

Regardless, below are my top 10 lists of 2007. You know the ones – they proclaim to contain the best 10-or-so of something from the 12 months that have just passed? Come, soak up the nostalgia:

• The Best 19 Movies You Didn’t See in 2007 – Looking for the best independent films of 2007 that didn’t make it big? Well then, this is the list for you. A great list to accompany this is /film‘s ingeniously compiled 25 Definitive Movies of 2007. A ‘glass-is-half-empty’ kinda person? Well how about the 9 Worst Movies of 2007?
• Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks – I love this stuff. While it’s got nothing to do with 2007, it’s got everything to do with making your life just that little bit easier. This is the reason why I once read Lifehacker religiously: reading this list makes me want to resubscribe to their RSS feed. In fact, I will.
  
• Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007 – Watching these videos you may laugh (Don’t Tase Me vs. MC Hammer), stare in amazement/puzzlement (Daft Hands/Prison Inmates Performing ‘Thriller’), or simply cringe and wonder how it all went so wrong (Miss South Carolina Teen USA). The list could be refined though: where’s Chocolate Rain, Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and the Finger Painting Turtle-Kid?
• 10 of the Most Interesting and Entertaining Images of 2007 – The top 10 viral images of 2007. That means, that if you have an email address, you’ve undoubtedly seen these 10 times already.
  
• 7 Things We Should Pretend Never Happened – I knew I was going to agree with most of this list as soon as I read the headline for item number one: Huddled Masses Lining Up for Bullsh!t.
  
• D!ckheads of the Year – Like Ronseal, this list does exactly what it says on the tin. Erik Prince of Blackwater, College Republicans, Congressional Democrats and – of course – George Bush… all nominated by Rolling Stone for the honour of being ‘D!ckhead of the Year’.
• Top 10 Astronomy Pictures – I’ve never been a huge astronomy fan. Yeah, the Universe is fascinating and full of mystery; but there’s something inherently unknowable about it that – for some reason – distracts me from its splendour. Nonetheless, these images are truly captivating.
• Top 10 Most Pirated Movies and TV Shows of 2007 – Bored and trying to think of something to download and watch? I’m not as that’s illegal, but if I were (hypothetically speaking, of course) I would go here to see what films and TV shows were downloaded the most last year.
• Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 – From the Ashera GD hypo-allergenic cat to super CO2-absorbing trees, it’s been an interesting year in genetic engineering and Wired does the this round-up for us. If genetic engineering isn’t your scientific tipple, why not have a look at their Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007 instead?
  
• Best ‘Professional’ Photographs of 2007 – There’s UNICEF’s Photo of the Year, National Geographic News’ Top Ten Photos, and The Press Photographer’s Year Awards (my personal favourite, yet also the one with the worst website). Of course, it’s not just professionals who take captivating photographs, and so PhotoCompetitions.com has the definitive list of amateur and professional photography competition for your perusal.

As a bonus, have the following too:

• My favourite round-up of interesting links from the past year: Jason Kottke’s Best Links of 2007
• The best ‘personal’ round-up of the past year: The Girl in the Cafe’s The Year That Passed
• The best post detailing the biggest news stories of 2007: (cough-plug-cough) My Top 10 News Stories of 2007.
• Update (16th Jan) – The best single post of the entire year? It has to be Carl’s Why I moved from Boston to Nashville or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Everything in Snowclones – you had me at ‘sliced lolcats’.
  

Open Culture’s Foreign Language Learning Podcasts
http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2006/10/itunes_learn_fo.html

Last week, Lifehacker directed its readers to Open Culture – a website dedicated to (quoting the FAQ) exploring “cultural and educational media… that’s freely available on the web, and that makes learning dynamic, productive, and fun”.

On this website are audio and video ‘podcasts’ consisting of a wide range of topics including art and culture, technology, and even law and business school lectures. The section that got me reaching for the bookmark was the ‘Foreign Language Lessons Collection’. Here you can find a wide selection of podcasts to help you learn a new language – consisting of everything from Arabic and Chinese to Tagalog and Spanish!

Mind Hacks on Quinn Norton’s ‘Sixth Sense’ (and the loss thereof)
http: //www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/05/quinn_norton_has_her.html

Mind Hacks is a website dedicated to finding out how our brains – and consequently, we – ‘work’ through psychology and neuroscience. In this article however they discuss something different: the story of Quinn Norton and the loss of her ‘Sixth Sense’.

No, she couldn’t see dead people, but she could feel electromagnetic fields. How? She had a magnet implanted into her fingertip resulting in her being able to “know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like“.

Her Wired article on how body modification can extend the human senses is very insightful and her final journal post regarding the experiment is almost existential. Well worth the read.

Nature Photography and The Orton Effect

http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0106/dw0106-1.html

The ‘Orton Effect’ is the name given to a technique where – usually nature – photographs are given an almost ethereal glow through a method sometimes known as ‘soft focus’. You can see an example image here (courtesy of n8ive). It’s essentially the same as taking two photos and layering them together, one on top of the other – with one in focus and the other out of focus.

Not a new technique, this type of photography is also relatively well-known but nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to have an online how-to document to hand for reference.

Oh, and it’s named after Michael Orton who pioneered – or at least popularised – the technique.

As you can see, these are pictures of Torchwood being filmed… right outside where I work. It’s interesting to note that the Tardis is here – the first time it is to appear in Torchwood, so I’ve been told.

The quality of these photos are pretty bad for three reasons: they were taken on my phone; I wanted to get back to my office as I was starving; it was freezing and I was shivering. I’m not making excuses – I’m just trying to make conversation!

Anyway, there you go. A few photos for you Torchwood fans out there… wherever you are!

Did you know Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who? Genius! There’s an anagram of ‘Lloyd Morgan’ in this post somewhere… can you find it?

My recent trip there was an educational experience for me – a person who has never really photographed at night. It was definitely the time to experiment.

Photographing directly into the light to achieve silhouettes, post-processing into sepia with a ‘film grain’ style, increasing the saturation to make colours jump and blurring objects – all techniques I tried in order to see what results I could get.

Some worked. Some didn’t. All are here for you to see.

So, I may be what a lot of people call pedantic and slightly obsessive compulsive. No matter how much truth lies in this it is definitely true that I like to organise things, for better or for worse – and usually the latter, which annoys me! This blog acts as a great place to organise thoughts and construct plans. That’s why, this New Year I am going to use this blog as a regular place to organise and discuss my various plans.

So what are my ‘non-resolutions’ for 2007 then? They can easily be categorised into four broad categories: Food/Health, Work, Hobbies/Travel and Money.

Food/Health: I need to start a proper diet. Not diet in the 21st Century meaning of the word but in the actual dictionary definition of the word: a diet as an eating regimen. One that is healthier than my current one and that is more enjoyable. I’m talking more eastern fresh food and less western modified products; fish; prepared lunches; a lot less junk food and more experimental, colourful and flavourful cooking.
‘Menus’ would be a good idea too as with forward planning I can buy nicer, fresher, cheaper food from local markets rather than plastic-laden, reformed goods from supermarkets.
Playing sport regularly would be good too as my once weekly Squash sessions are turning into once monthly.

Work: A third of my life is spent at work: 8 hours a day, sat in the office, writing code and not progressing – just earning. Investing in myself is key to progressing whilst also earning. Building my work-life reputation and increasing my future worth will in turn further my prospects and undoubtedly make this third of my life more interesting and, dare I say it, fun! Courses, certifications and training will all help me to obtain this, as will offering myself up for opportunities that arise in work and at home. Also, enthusiastically working on projects outside of my day-to-day employment can’t fail but help.
As well as working, a further third on my life is spent sleeping. This leaves, after preparing for and commuting to work and preparing and eating meals, around 6 hours. I plan on rising earlier in the mornings and getting into work at a more respectable time, allowing myself to get home from work much earlier and hence reducing my travel time considerably (no rush-hour to contend with) leaving myself with more time at home during more sociable hours.

Hobbies/Travel: I want to learn to take much better photographs than I currently do, make good progress on my personal projects and travel more: all whilst still being able to sit down, watch a film and have a drink.
A big one though is that I want to make the Internet profitable for myself. How? I’m not quite sure yet, but I do know that I do not want to do it with auction websites and in an ideal world I would like to think that it could open up some doors for myself and possibly lead to another income stream.
Writing for an average of 30 minutes a day would also be nice but is ambitious. It’s not something I’m going to do straight away and give-up on within a few weeks, but rather something I want to work towards. Undoubtedly blog based, I hope this will be a method for me to improve my style and content here.

Money: The ‘big gun’ of my New Years plan and something that I won’t discuss here right now to avert a fully blown (and boring) essay.

I’ve given myself a fair bit to do here and the hardest part is going to be how to start and how to continue. I’ve come up with a simple, two step process for hopefully completing all my objectives or, at least, realising that it was futile: progressive goals and ‘freeware’ testing.

Progressive: These goals are the ones that I neither plan on or hope to achieve immediately and hope to achieve in the long run by working towards a goal slowly. These include writing; photography; project work; exercise; and my work plans.

Tests: You can download ‘freeware’ programs from the Internet to use for a 30 day trial period. When these 30 days have passed and if the program is something you cannot use or can do without you delete it and do not use it again. However, if you realise after this period that it makes your life easier, better, or is something that you cannot now live without you purchase the program and make it part of your life. This is what I plan on doing with a few of my objectives: testing them for a month and seeing if it was worth it or whether the goal was futile.
If after this month trial something has made my life better or I want to continue it, it will be a lot easier to continue as I would have already been doing it for a month. If I want to quit: I will.
The foundation of this test is: if something is difficult I can continue doing it with ease for a month (“I don’t like getting up every day at 7am but I’ll continue for a month and then give up.””) but when that month passes I may be used to it and it’ll be easier to continue (“I hated getting up before but now I’m used to it.”). Whereas if something was not enjoyable or not as expected I’ll simply quit (“I ate fish at least twice a week but didn’t enjoy it so now I’ll stop.”). This will be a better method for my diet, early rising and some of my money plans.

How are you planning on sticking to your resolutions or plans?

(Clockwise)
A beautiful white rose growing in my garden;
A hand-made road sign with ‘GOOSE’ written on it;
A one-eyed ginger cat sitting on a freshly made hay bale;
An old abandoned church that scared me;
Parking my car at home and wondering if I’ll ever live in another place where the view out of my rear-view mirror will be like this;
Jasmine, my cat;
The post box opposite my (old) house;
A little girl dragging her dog around the village fête’s dog show and thinking how it looked like a moving carpet;
Seeing some flowers in a traffic cone at a skip and realising that beauty can be where you least expect.

One is about EarShock – one of my ongoing projects – and the other is about how much I’m looking forward to using my camera again. Especially shooting in the RAW format.

EarShock.com has just had a bit of a face-lift. I’ve used the Joomla Open-Source Content Management System to organise the information, created a new logo and added a few reviews that I pilfered (yet referenced) from Amazon and other sites just to temporarily bulk up the website. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Regarding photography, I’ve decided that shooting photos in RAW is great. Really great. A RAW image on my camera is a lot bigger than a normal capture – approx 9Mb per photo. This is because a RAW photo is the digital equivalent of an undeveloped negative when shooting with a film camera. Nothing is applied to the photographs such as white-balance, colour filters, contrast and even saturation. You get the raw image and you edit it, as you please, on your computer.

Another great advantage is that instead of dealing with the usual 256 colour layers as in a normal photograph, RAW has 65,536 – allowing you great flexibility when editing the picture to emphasize or dull-down parts of the photo as required. I’m getting a RAW-fetish and I don’t even fully understand the medium yet!

Last week I saw one of the most beautiful skies of my life and decided to take a photograph. Below are two shots that came out well, edited slightly, but differently, in RAW. You can click on them to see a slightly bigger version.

I was slightly disappointed when I realised that round one was over and round two was upon us – I had planned to enter the competition and had a few good ideas for photographs I could send in. I completely overlooked the deadlines, forgetting that they were here already.

This seems to be happening a lot recently though: time passing fast without many things being achieved. Is this what life is like once you become settled into a full-time job? Do the working days just pass as a blur with no defined start and end? Weeks, sometimes months, going by completely inconspicuously aside from maybe a couple of memorable nights out seeing a band, going for a nice meal or just relaxing at home with someone when you’ve had a tough day. Apart from these events, the month is forgotten.

Away from my digression into whether or not I’m losing track of time, having a breakdown or maybe just completely “normal”, I was discussing the Photographer of the Year competition. So, the ‘Shelter’ round is over and the photos are up for the public’s vote here. I was slightly disappointed at the selection process – the theme is Shelter and it seems the judges have taken the most obscure definition of the word and applied this to the photos coming in to them.

There is a photo of the Aurora Borealis, a dog being held by a young boy and a landscape at sunset with a man sitting on a chair. Now, I know as an artist one is allowed to have some degree of ‘poetic license’ but I believe some of them are taking this right a bit too far. I can gladly accept that the dog is being sheltered from the harsh reality of life by the young boy (or some other pseudo-intellectual description trying to find meaning in a simple photograph taken as it looked good through the viewfinder)… but the Aurora Borealis? Shelter? I have to disagree on this one, and unfortunately it’s winning the votes by a very, very long way. Mainly, undoubtedly, due to the fact that it looks ‘nice’.

Take a look at the photographs and vote for your favourite, but keep the word ‘shelter’ in the back of your mind while choosing. It may not be easy to take a good photograph, but it’s harder still to take a good photograph relating to specific theme, so give those who took the extra time and effort some respect. Look at the colours depicted, the composition and the ingenuity. I voted for Michelle Nold’s photograph of a shack in Missouri after an ice storm. It’s beautiful.

So, Rock and Roll is upon us now and I would like to send in an entry. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to think about this and haven’t been out with the camera for a few days as I’ve been away. I think I’ll just send in a photo of Green Day from when I went to their 2005 American Idiot gig in Cardiff – maybe I’ll get lucky. I had thought of having a photo of someone throwing a television set out of a window or something similar: it’s synonymous with Rock and Roll and could have been made to look quite dynamic but would have required a fair bit of time to setup.

Well, enough moping about missed opportunities – I need to make this month count but doing something amazing: or at least memorable!