Tag Archives: flickr

Laoban Soundsystem: Xmas Mixing Event at CPU:798

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My friends at the Laoban Soundsystem will be installed in the Gallery tonight presenting their new venture, the Laoban Soundsystem. This is an open invite to all artists, musicians etc. to come along and show off what they are working on. Should be an exciting, energetic evening! Come along and see works in progress.

Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798

Friday, December 12, 8 PM – 12 Midnight, Free and Open to the Public

We invite all to come out to the launch of version 1.0 of the Laoban Soundsystem for a special Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798. This is a new type of media event where all are welcome to join, bring media, laptops, video players, cameras, and other recording devices. The goal is to mix media, explore what artists, DJs, musicians, designers, and architects are working on RIGHT NOW — successes, failures, and rough edges are welcome at Laoban events! The ultimate plan is for consumers to be producers by both mixing media, and by tagging any recordings they have with “laoban” when posting onto twitter.com, flickr.com, or other places.

flickr and China

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I use flickr to host most of the photos that appear on this blog. Unfortunately, flickr is now being blocked in China, so I’m afraid that if you are one of my visitors from there then none of these images will show up for you.

Aside from the annoyance this causes my visitors, this is a real problem for me for three reasons. Firstly, a large proportion of my writing uses images as a starting point and illustration, so not being able to see them in the context of the post to which they relate removes a lot of information that is necessary to the understanding of what I’m talking about. Secondly, as I am beginning to write more about Chinese issues, I hope they will be of increasing interest to Chinese visitors, so this issue will become more and more of a problem as this potential audience increases. Thirdly, when I’m working in China I will be subject to the same block that my Chinese visitors are experiencing, making flickr pretty much unuseable at that point.

My choices appear to be to either wait and hope that the block is removed, or to change the way that I store my photos, which will mean to stop using flickr. The latter would be a real blow, as I have found flickr to be the best, most flexible and useable image management system out there, and having been a member since April 2005, I have a lot of investment in it in terms of time and effort which it would be difficult to replicate on another system or to host myself.

That said, I think that realistically it’s unlikely the block will be removed any time soon given the alleged circumstances behind it’s original placement.

I’d be interested to know what other solutions people suggest?

Getting better (I think)

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Made it into work today. Didn’t really want to, but there’s just too much to do at the moment. I feel better than I did yesterday, I still have the sore throat and am sneezing a lot, but at least my body doesn’t feel like it’s been beaten any more.

Got to a meeting early today, so spent the time before it started taking some shots round Cambridge (it was a nice sunny day). It was one of those nice experiences, in that when I took a look at the pics when I got home I noticed many aspects to them that I hadn’t seen when I was taking the photos. I really liked the way Garage 1, Garage 2 and Garage 4 came out after being cropped drastically – very abstracted, the colours came through really well. Garage 3 was a bit of an anomaly, but I left it in regardless.

Also the rather unreal building in the background of this shot. And this shot is just a beautiful take on a fairly common subject (at least it is in Cambridge) – the fan of punts really makes the composition. Oh, and this one with the beautiful blue of the window – I like the fact that it’s off in one corner, not the main subject, but adds so much to the overall feeling of the pic. That’s what I think, anyway.