So yesterday’s plan to stay in all day reading Harry Potter didn’t go as planned. Stratford had a little rain overnight:

Here’s a before/after of the basin:

which is pretty bad, but further downstream it was crazy:

Not being one of the people who has to clear up, I found it very interesting. Plenty of kids, and some families, were having a great time splashing through the water on the main street, and the residents walking from their houses in wellies seemed in good spirits. These lads asked if I’d take their picture:

I emailed them a copy, although the initial address bounced back and I guessed at a correction, so hopefully they received it…I was also impressed by and jealous of this couple:

A passing child asked its mother why this was happening. The mother replied that it’s the kind of thing that happens after people have had too much to drink. Which might be true, although I prefer to think they were just having fun, but nevertheless they could actually dance. The cha-cha, unless I was mistaken. A salsa, I’m told. Isn’t that lovely? It was the best thing I saw all day

The BBC and various other organisations were filming, and there were crowds everywhere. I saw a canoeist set sail from the bandstand in the centre of town and finish a mile or so downriver.

Today the waters had receded from the main street, but parts of the basin and most of the far side of the river was still pretty bad:

and they were pumping out the Swan Theatre. My uncle lived here for ten(?) years and said he’d never seen the theatre flooded. I bet nobody thought it’d happen in July. Thankfully the waters didn’t quite make it to the Courtyard Theatre, so the RSC hasn’t had to close down completely¹. It hasn’t rained in the past 36hours that I’ve noticed, so hopefully the worst is over. The entire set of pics is here.

1. the main RST is closed until 2010; the Swan Theatre is in the same building, hence the flooding [↩]

I like interesting street entertainers, and two years ago heard about these guys:

Now that is what you call entertainment! I’ve been wanting to see them ever since.

I have shown this image to many people as a clear example of high-level street entertainment savantage. Your I-can-stand-still-for-ages statues probably bow reflexively, if they know their place. Strangely, most recipients cannot fathom why I would possibly want to see a live performance of two upside-down men clenching sparklers between their buttocks. I don’t understand: why would anybody not want to see such a thing? It makes no sense.

They’re called Skate Naked, and perform in Stratford occasionally. On Saturday I missed them by minutes, only turning up as they were collecting money:

Dammit. One day.

Sometimes you upload a photo to Flickr that you really like. So you give it plenty of tags, add it to as many relevant groups as you can find, and make sure it’s the top item on your photostream for a while. And nothing happens. It’s mildly disappointing.

And then one day you tag something with the word ‘pregnant’.

Ten days after getting back, I’ve finally finished processing and uploading our Lake District holiday photos to Flickr: the set’s here if you’re interested. I think Flickr’s Map view is cool:

Built-in GPS is one of the few features I’d consider upgrading my camera for - geotagging by hand in Flickr (or Google Earth via Trippermap) is time-consuming and sometimes tedious, but I do like looking at the results.

The Plan: a sneak attack:

But it is not to be. Oh noes!

Three hours of dancing, a four-mile walk and a seventy mile drive is probably enough for a day. I was also at a party last night, at which a friend ordered a coffee and received this:

That’s one small beverage.

A late notice for today’s Day In The Life at Flickr, in which you’re asked to submit five photographs from your day. Last time I was walking around Central Park, so today probably won’t be quite so exotic. It’s a fun project, and always interesting to see what other people choose to document.

Flickr’s new ‘Collections’ feature was released yesterday. It enables sets of sets, an option that some people have spent literally years asking for. It’s a neat little system, completely controlled from the impressive Organizr. Aside from the five possible levels of nesting, it lets you create a mosaic from images within the collection and displays this as the collection logo. I’ve set up a few here, and I think I was first to report a bug involving gaps appearing in collection names exceeding 15 letters. Ahem. The only downer is that you can’t currently display both collections and sets on your (newly grey) home page sidebar.

They’ve also added the option to display 5 large images on your home page, rather than 19 smaller versions. I rather like it.

I’ve just renewed my Flickr ‘Pro’ account for the first time in two years, as I was lucky enough to be given a free year when they were bought by Yahoo. I currently have 2,722 photos stored, and use the site on a daily basis. In the two years they’ve upgraded their site considerably with insignificant downtime, and have improved their data plans: I can now store unlimited photos with no constraints on monthly uploads. And all for $25/£13ish a year. With the possible exception of Google’s free Gmail, for me Flickr is the best value for money of any online service. I can’t begrudge them $25, in fact I’m more than happy to pay it.

Given the large signs indicating the correct motorway exit, the presence of a sat-nav unit telling me to turn off and my having driven the route many times before, I wonder how I nevertheless managed to miss the M69. Oh well, doubling back only added twenty-five minutes to the eighty minute journey
I had a great and busy weekend with Abi, including seeing Coriolanus at the RST, a social dance¹ and trips to the Butterfly Farm and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I knew nothing about Coriolanus before Saturday, but enjoyed it very much. It was surprisingly fast-moving and unpredictable, neither of which I’ve found to be common Shakespearean traits², and the production was beautifully lit and staged. I really recommend it, especially since balcony tickets are £12.

This was at the Butterfly Farm:

I don’t need to own anything with a name that includes both ‘giant’ and ‘hissing’.

1. that a whole bunch of my friends failed to turn up to, disappointingly [↩]
2. not a criticism, just an observation [↩]

It looks like Flickr has some major problem involving seemingly random images (occasionally) appearing in place of regular photos. I imagine the site will go down shortly - 240 comments in 40mins on this forum post - but if anybody meanwhile sees hardcore porn in my Flickr photos, it’s nothing to do with me. I assume they’ll have to rebuild the image caches, and I hope they do it quickly - there are some seriously angry people on the forums atm.

Update: It doesn’t seem likely they’ve been hacked - I’m guessing it’ll be massive corruption of the image database. I know Flickr don’t object to ‘adult’ images providing they’re kept private, but I’m amazed there’s so much of it stored on there.

Update 2: Heather and the Flickr staff are apparently on it, at 0600 in SF.

Update 3: People are mental. Sure it’s not ideal, but is it really the end of the world if a child accidentally sees a pornographic image? Do children actually get upset by that kind of thing? I think I’d just have been confused.

Update 4: All fixed.

Last night I saw Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova demonstrate at a social dance. As well as both having won series of Strictly Come Dancing, they’re currently British Latin Dance Champions and are pretty much the best of the best in UK terms. I’ve decided I don’t like them much: they’re both too attractive, pleasant (my dance teachers know them and say they’re lovely) and good at what they do. It’s just not fair

Despite arriving early the tables around the dancefloor were all taken, so we took seats upstairs. At first this was disappointing, but it turned out to be a great position.

There was an hour and a half of social dancing before the demonstration. Lynsey and I went downstairs for the jive, and in the middle of the routine I felt my foot collide with someone’s calf and slide down to slam into their toe. The lady limped off the floor and was in some pain for five minutes, but was very gracious when I apologised - these things just happen sometimes, neither of us had actually make a mistake. I still felt terrible about it, though - I’ve never hurt anybody that much before! After that I tried a waltz, foxtrot and cha-cha, all of which were mini adventures due to the sheer number of people on the floor.

The demonstration started, and most people headed downstairs. Our vantage point above the dancefloor, however, provided a superb view and was excellent for taking photographs without background distractions. Darren and Lilia danced all five Latin dances - the samba, cha-cha, rumba, paso doble and jive - and were unsurprisingly excellent throughout. Lilia changed between each dance, during which time Darren took the microphone and kept everybody entertained. They’re married, and he spent plenty of time winding her up - she got her own back by taking the microphone and telling stories of people recognising her but not him.

I took a whole bunch of pictures, and was very happy with some of the results:

(shame about that left hand, mind). This is definitely my favourite shot:

How on Earth does she do that?

My autofocus struggled slightly, so in some of the pictures I’m hoping the pose makes up for the technical quality. I wish this had been sharp, for example:

Afterwards they spent a long time signing autographs and posing for pictures, so Lynsey took the opportunity - unfortunately I’d forgotten to change back to my wide-angle beforehand, so couldn’t fit Lilia in. At one point afterwards they both looked up and directly at me; it was rather surreal to have the full attention of two people I’d only ever seen on television - I had to quickly think of something to say!

There was another hour or so of blessedly injury-free dances before it finished. I definitely need to work on my floorcraft as I found navigating the busy floor very difficult, and crashed into people on a number of occasions. All good fun, though. Apparently they hold such dances every few months, although not always with such famous couples demonstrating.

There were a couple of technical points I wanted to mention about the photography:

Continue reading ‘Social dance with Darren & Lilia’

A Flickr easter egg adds festive imagery to any photographs with notes containing the text “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard”. Clearly, there would be no point doing such a thing to fellow blogmeeters. Via BoingBoing.

Just thought some bloggers might be interested in how to embed an official Flickr slideshow into a post. I discovered it here and here and although neither post gets it quite right the commenters have ironed out most of the problems. The basic format is:

<iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=YOUR_ID" frameBorder="0" width="500" scrolling="no" height="500"></iframe>

The unique flickr ID is in the form of 12345678@N00, which you can find out from idgettr (or, if you haven’t set up a nickname on flickr yet, it comes after “http://flickr.com/photos/” when you look at your own images).

The flickr link takes various arguments:

• contacts - Photos from particular contacts? Not sure what this does.
• text - Unknown.
• tags - Display only a certain tag. Doesn’t seem possible to use multiple tags?
• tag_mode - Unknown
• favorites - Presumably it displays a particular user’s favourites, but I can’t get it to work.
• group_id - Displays photos from a group - the group id can again be found from idgettr. Use without a user_id.
• frifam - Include friends and family-only photos? This is clever, and will only display them to visitors who are checked as friends/family via their flickr cookie.
• nsid - Seems to duplicate user_id?
• single - Unknown.
• firstIndex - Unknown.
• set_id - ID of the set, found after http://www.flickr.com/photos/username/sets/. Use with or without a user_id.
• firstId - Unknown.

I imagine their uses can be found in the flickr api documentation, but I don’t have a key. Other sites suggest that “photoset_id” is an option, but I can’t get that to work at all. It doesn’t seem able to filter sets by tag, either.

So:

<iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=1234567@N00&set_id=9873987987&frifam=yes" frameBorder="0" width="500" scrolling="no" height="500"></iframe>

would display a user’s particular set, including friends and family images for logged-in friends/family. While the iframe is resizeable, the flash slideshow is fixed at 500 x 500. I can’t find a way to prevent it playing automatically, either. Mop fair pics example after the break…

Continue reading ‘Embed Flickr slideshows into a blog post’

The Six Word Story Flickr group collects images with a small tale in the title. I really like it, especially when otherwise uninteresting shots snap into new meaning. Some of my favourites here, here and here. It’s based around Hemingway’s famous short story, which he called his best ever prose:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Wired recently asked various authors for their own versions, and there are some terrific responses (via):

Gown Removed Carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

Tick tock tick tock tick tick.
- Neal Stephenson

There are lots more. My personal favourite is:

Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
- Charles Stross

They’re great fun to think up A few of my attempts:

Hand transplant. Worried. Mind of its
Lisa. Year ago. Talking to sky.
The bunny made me do it.
Motorway. Surprise sneeze. Mess on dashboard.
It’s not illegal if we’re siamese.
Vaccination study. Media hysteria. Empyrrhic victory.

Comments are open if you fancy a go…