Vote for Created In Birmingham in the 2008 Weblog Awards

Created in Birmingham has been nominated for Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards.  Please go vote for it.

What are you doing still reading this?  Go vote.  Do it now and do it once every 24 hours between now and 17:00 on 13th Jan.

There’s several reasons you should do this.   CiB is a great resource for keeping track of creative endeavours in Birmingham.  It’s not run by the council or some company.  It’s run by ordinary people who are doing it in their spare time.  It supports artists and other creative types.  In return the Birmingham online community which is strong, is getting behind CiB to support and canvas for it in these awards.

CiB has featured some of my photos in the past so this is my way of repaying that acknowledgement and support.  It was a big boost to my confidence in photography to see one of my pictures up there.

Evening Commute by Ian T Edwards

As I write it is in the lead but that lead is constantly under threat from the other main runner, the blog of a Daily Mail journalist with dubious views on a variety of topics.  So vote as often as you can please!!.

Tuna Day

I’m never too sure about this blog.  It’s just a bit unstructured and without a real purpose other than a collection of stuff.  I’m also not very good at posting to it very frequently so there’s not enough to bring casual readers back frequently enough.  By the looks of my traffic it’s mainly people who’re picking it up via their RSS readers or some very specific searches that undoubtedly leave people disappointed by the lack of any useful content they were searching for.

So I’ve decided to have a crack at a daily blog where I post something about different song each day and where possible supply a link where people can hear it.  I’m calling it “Tuna Day” because it amuses me.

“Bunny Crimes”

X Factor with subtitles for the heart of earing

Picked it up over at The Word blog.  Made me chuckle.

I broke my Speedlite. Hoorah for the internet.

A couple of days back I managed to break the hotshoe off my Canon Speedlite 430EX.  Quite upsetting as it’s not a cheap piece of kit.  When this happens you realise that it’s only a few mm of plastic that hold two costly bits of kit together.  More on that at the end though.

However all was not lost. A quick search turned up a very handy page with step by step illustrated instructions and helpful comments.

I ordered up the part from H Lehmann’s in Stoke which arrived real quick and have just fixed it in about 20 minutes.  And I remembered to remove the batteries and discharge the flash before I took it apart.  That might have been lively.

So it cost me £11.50 as opposed to £180 for a new flash unit.  Result!!

When it intially looked like the flash was junked I did take a look at the new 430EX II which has a metal shoe rather than a plastic one.  Initially this seems like a good idea, but on reflection it may well be a good thing that the hotshoe on the flash is the point of weakness.  I reckon if the plastic didn’t give then it’d most likely rip the mount of the top of the camera or even worse.  Anyway I’ll be a bit more careful about leaving the flash on top of the camera in future.

Start it Up

Been a while since I posted anything.  This was going to be a thinky piece about youtube and stuff but I’m not so great at marshalling my thoughts today, so it’s another one of those “here’s a great thing on the internet” posts.  Well I wasted an evening laughing when I first came across it a few months back.

Stevie Riks is a comedy musical impressionist but don’t let that put you off.  He has a great range of characters and there’s tons of clips up on YouTube.  And he’s bloody funny.

As a starter I suggest Mick Jagger flogging his car, Macca making a cuppa, The Bee Gees and Bono trying to find a lottery ticket (you’ll see the punchline coming a mile off but that doesn’t make it any less funny).

Sorry if you end up wasting most of an afternoon.

Dropping science at the LHC

Picked this up from Word Magazine’s “something for the weekend” mailout.  The boffins at CERN drop science explaining how the LHC works in a rap that somehow is not cheesy.  Some might prefer they concentrated a little more on not bringing the universe to an end and didn’t muck about making daft rap videos but not me.  This video help make sense of it and the chorus is now stuck in my head.

altogether now – “LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone, ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions………………………”

Caught in My Shadow

“These streets used to look big,
this town used to look like a city,
these people used to talk to me.”

The best day out I ever had in Birmingham city centre.  Filmed in Pigeon Park (St Philips) in May 1991.

I’m in this 3 or 4 times.

The Turtles or The Terapins

Just been sent a link to a great music quiz. There’s a lot of bands out there with bad names. Given two equally ridiculous names which one is real and which one is fake?
A lot of them sound like 60s psych garage bands.

Whilst perusing the same site, amiright.com, I found a link to this cracking video where Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of 60s “Summer of Love” band The Turtles (remember Happy Together?) explain the problems they had with managers over the years. It’s a little complicated so a whiteboard comes in handy.
It was these management issues and contractual tie ups that led to them going under the names of Flo and Eddie when they left to join Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.

Flux Feast

Followers of the Birmingham Creative Scene will probably be aware of the Flux Festival that’s being run by Vivid at the moment showcasing various works from artists from the Fluxus movement.

I’m looking forward to the synaesthetic FluxFeast seven course(act) event taking place this week, on Wednesday 9 July involving SharedTable and the Maison Mayci cafe in Kings Heath.  A friend of mine is involved, hence the plug and it promises to be an interesting evening.

Always wondered what blue tastes off and what cheese sounds like.

Places still available but you need to book.  0121 766 7876 or email info@vivid.org.uk for tickets.

More details at the Vivid website.

An Early Example of lolspeak – circa 1987?

Preamble by Mike Wilkins, 1987, originally uploaded by H4NUM4N.

On a recent trip to the US I spotted this early example of lolspeak from 21 years ago, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I didn’t spot the subtlety of it at the time. I though it was just a collection of license plates from various states. It was only when reviewing my shots later that I noticed the message contained within, which when I looked at the title of the piece again it was clear that it was the Preamble to the United States Constitution.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It’s called “Preamble” and the artist is Mike Wilkins.