tallphil

I’ve found a couple of nice colour scheme generators lately, I just stumbled across Colour Scheme Designer 3, which takes an established concept (complement, triads etc) but packages it all in a lovely product which is really intuitive – it even allows you to preview the scheme for people with different types of colour-blindness. Another cool tool is Adobe Ideas – an app more for the iPad than the iPhone, it has a tool to automatically generate colour schemes from photographs that works really well.
I know I shouldn’t until all of my current jobs are finished, but I can’t help but find ideas for new websites popping into my head…

A nice blog post on a (very) nice website designer’s website: David DeSandro explains why he likes Microsoft Internet Explorer 6:

• I enjoy a good challenge
• I like surprises
• It makes me think about people who are not like me
• It gives us [website designers] bonding power

I have to say, I like how even his blog posts are displayed in an innovative and interesting way…

A man goes to bed at night and turns his light off. 12 people died that night as a result… Explain!

A lady draws up outside a hotel and parks her car – she immediately realises that she is bankrupt – how?

We’ve had some brilliant weather in the UK recently, plenty of opportunities for rally-style handbrake turns on the way to work and lots of snowball fights!
The BBC have got a great photo up of Britain covered in snow, seen on the right. You can see their page here.

Fairbairns is a head race on the river Cam that takes place at the end of Michaelmas term every year. As I had taken the morning off work to race, I headed down to the river a little earlier to see our senior women’s VIII row. I remembered to take my camera this time and got a bit trigger happy, taking photos of nearly every crew that went past. You can see the whole lot on flickr and an abridged album of selected shots on facebook.
The results of the Fairbairn cup can be found the Fairbairns website.

The times have done a nice feature entitled Hubble’s greatest hits with some fantastic images up… Well worth a look!

This made me laugh for a long time – the fact that he’s doing it to a silent shocked audience makes it even better, and the final shot of the scoreboard is the icing on the cake…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJn5L1nrkL4

Fantastic post on b3ta by lustfish today, made me laugh out loud for quite a while… Enjoy!

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A few days ago I got an email from the president of the Cambridge Canadian Club asking if I’d be interested in being the official photographer at their Annual Dinner. I said yes because I was in a bit of an impulsive mood at the time, and any experience is good experience. Besides, I got to meet His Excellency James R. Wright, the Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom!

The dinner happened tonight, and was great fun! I learnt some pretty good lessons as I went over the photos – namely to not bother trying to shoot without flash inside at night (I thought I might be able to rescue the photos with post-processing, but the photos were so noisy that I had to discard most). I also definitely need a wide angle lens – anyone have a spare £400 burning a hole in their pocket?

Anyway, enough of the waffle – as per usual, I’ve put the photos up on flickr and facebook. I’ve also temporarily put the full resolution files up on the web here. I’ve also put the un-tampered photos up, straight off the camera (there’s quite a lot in here that I haven’t included in the other sets, because they’re rubbish) here.

Cheers for the opportunity though guys, I hope you’re happy with the results!

After a couple of months worth of work, the new Trinity Hall Boat Club Website is nearing completion…
The front end of the site took me about a week to create, but writing the code for the secure back end, where you can update basically everything that you can see on the site through a web interface, took a lot longer! Society websites at universities tend to live for as long as their creator stays at uni, but I’m hoping that the user friendly back end of this site will allow people to keep it up to date whether I’m around or not.

This site also has some useful features built in, such as users being able to book seats at Boat Club Dinners, and the collation of all of their information (college account numbers, phone numbers, ARA numbers) for easy society administration. Registered users can even search email addresses according to strokeside / bowside preference!

Now the site is live, I’m hoping that it will gradually come to life as it populates with content… We shall wait and see!