My parents were visiting for the weekend to get a taste of the Festival experience.

Friday evening we had a very nice meal at L’Escargot Blanc, but chickened out of the £20 “surprise” menu. It really was a surprise, only the chef knew what we would get, the waitress wouldn’t give us any hints, and the whole table had to opt for it. Given the name of the establishment, there was a good chance it might be snails.

Saturday we wandered around Bristo square before picking a random matinee show to go and see – Kate Fox News. Mostly an auto-biographical show based around the major news events in her life, her slightly bizzare up-bringing and, sprinkled with some poetry. Browns on George Street for lunch, very busy, great burger! Then off to the Book Festival to browse the books and people watch the odd mix of grizzled book fanatics, families eating ice creams, gin soaked publishers and people hoarding spare chairs on the lawn. We had tickets to see Rhapsodies in Red, White and Blue at 7pm so we went home to smarten up before heading to the newly refurbished (in a frantic hurry just before the festival) Usher Hall. Great performance, I don’t think I’ve ever since something with a a full orchestra and choir before. I loved the Copland and Gershwin, but some of the Ives was quite challenging. Back home for an excellent (and promptly delivered) takeaway from Zen Kitchen.

Sunday we had a bit of a lie-in and then got a bus over the Foodies Festival in Holyrood Park. I wasn’t quite sure what the expect, they had seemingly been giving free tickets out left right and centre. I was pleasantly surprised though! It was a good size, lots of different exhibitors and we signed up for a free rum tasting class – which amazingly wasn’t a complete sales pitch. Scorching weather by this point which just brought even more people out to the festival! My only nitpick was that they needed more seats, people were sunning and drinking all over the place. We saw my parents off on their train back south and then I joined Ria and friends at Reel to Real. Which was pretty schmaltzy, camp musical goodness with some clever interactions between screen and stage.

Great weekend.

From various backups and by re-doing a chunk of work I’ve managed to get bustrackr.co.uk doing something useful again. It even does sensible things like caching now!

A while back Lothian Buses fitted some fancy GPS tracking to all of their fleet enabling real-time tracking. Then LCD screens appeared at (selected) bus stops giving you a list of incoming buses and their ETA. All very clever. Then, at last they launched a web site which gave access to the same data: mybustracker.co.uk.

I think that making the website resemble the signs from the street is a poor design choice. Why not work with the medium you are presenting information over (the web) rather than trying to make it resemble something else? They constrain information into a tiny space, put it in a stupid font, make the background looks like all lcd-y, use excessive popups and it takes forever just to get to the basic information.

In shock news, this isn’t just a whiny post with no actual action. I present the beginnings of a “Bus Tracker API”. Think of it as a “cleaning” of the data for a fresh beginning. If we can get clean data out of the system then we can build a clean interface on top of it. My API is REST-ful and inspired by the flickr API. I have one method so far “bustracker.departures.getNext” which takes one parameter: the bus stop code. It shows you all of the incoming departures for a given bus stop. Here it is working for the stop nearest my flat. Feel free to change to bus stop code to another one by digging around the Bus Tracker website. I’ll hopefully have some other, more useful methods done soon and maybe some nifty google maps visuals…

Update: Source code now browsable at: http://code.google.com/p/bustrackr/

Edinburgh Council have a “Citizen’s Account” area on their website. I registered so that I could view and pay my council tax bills online. The process had been surprisingly painless until I came to add my council tax account number. I was presented with this stellar piece of form design:

Ignoring the incredibly sloppy layout bugs, it doesn’t look so bad, until you actually read the text:

Your account number is an 8 digit number which forms part of the 11 digit number to be found in the top right hand corner of your Council Tax demand. Please ignore the first digit and the last two digits of the 11 digit number. For example, if the number shown on your Council Tax demand is 91234567807, please enter 12345678.

(my emphasis)

Why, why, why are they making the user jump through hoops when entering a simple number? Why isn’t all this stupid number truncating done by the server? Entering an 11 digit account number (only once I notice) can be difficult enough without having to do a number puzzle on the data first. Council, you must try harder.

I saw Foo Fighters supported by Nine Inch Nails and the Silver Sun Pickups at Meadowbank the other week. It was part of T on the Fringe – the music part of the Fringe events and was an awesome concert. It was a long afternoon event (5-11) but the venue is a good size and there is plenty to keep you occupied. It almost rained a couple of times but for the most part we managed to keep pretty dry. There is a shed-load of pictures on my flickr stream and a video of Dave rocking out – surprisingly good quality from my new camera.

Billy G is the ‘hood! I’m looking forward to seeing him tomorrow night.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Scottish Society for Computers & Law annual lecture by Professor Eben Moglen entitled “The Global Software Industry in Transformation”. It was a very interesting lecture, mainly about the version of the “GNU General Public License” or GPL as it’s commonly shortened to. Eben is a computer scientist turned lawyer is a fantastically gripping speaker. Valley Technology (my employer) I am proud to say was a major sponsor and publicist for the event. Some of the guys I work with worked very hard recording audio and video from the event which is now up on archive.org to watch/listen to. I also took a couple of pictures which are on flickr.

Wahey! William Gibson is doing an event at the Book Festival in August. I’m booked myself a ticket already. Hopefully I can get a signed copy of Spook Country whilst I’m there.

Last week I attended the Friday Coffee Morning’s “end of term” drinks, hilariously dubbed “beer 2.0“. Whitespace had generously donated their boardroom as the venue in their very swish offices. Met up with a few of the regulars who I hadn’t seen for a while and caught up with Nico who is off to Iceland soon. Mike and Jamie had also generously sorted out free beer and food. Behold all of our ugly mugs on flickr.

Well, the Highland Fling is over!

It was a great day with very interesting speakers covering a great range subjects but centred around Web Standards and “Progressive Enhancement”. Progressive Enhancement (as I understood it) is the opposite to “Graceful Degradation”. If you plan your project with the bling included and then go back and undo the bling to provide functionality to less advantaged users (Graceful Degradation) then 9 times out of 10 you won’t get the time/money to actually undo the bling. If, on the other hand you plan your project so that you get the core functionality working across the board and then add the bling, you’re much more likely to finish with a system accessible to all. This was the message I got from Norm from Yahoo’s talk. It’s a shame he had such a bad throat, he could barely talk!

Some other good speakers were:

The intro by Jeremy Keith – an excellent speaker and drew lots of parallels with literature such as Pattern Recogniton and Neuromancer. Props!

Andy Budd’s talk on the future of CSS was exciting but about the only thing widely supported in CSS3 currently seems to be the opacity elememt. Other interesting elements that will be supported eventually are border-radius for rounded corners and box-shadow for drop shadows. The Advanced Layout module looks like it will blow the current css layout methods out of the water with it’s grid system for layout and re-ordering of the content. Slightly dis-heartening was Andy’s complaints about the workings of the CSS Working Group: the snail-like pace it operates and the possible influence of Big Business on it’s decisions.

Drew McLellan’s talk on Microformats was a bit dry but still good to see them getting pimped.

James Edwards came across as the Grumpy Man of Web Standards with a talk about when to use Ajax (never, if he had his way). He had a point though, and hopefully people will take notice and not just do Ajax for the sake of it.

Andy Clarke ended the day with a nice chatty presentation about what exactly “Progressive” enhancement is, relating it to progressive in the music world. Some interesting anecdotes from the world of freelance designers including a snippet from this standard contract that explicitly lists the browsers a site will be compatible. Also very nicely designed slides, as you’d expect really. Andy also sits on the CSS Working Group as some kind of invited member, he talked of his frustrations with the slow process but also made good points that the working group has to consider not just CSS used for screen rendering and the can of worms that internationalisation is.

There are people I’ve missed and lots of stuff I’ve forgotten already but there are lots of others writing about the Fling. Where do I sign up for next year?

I went along to my first Edinburgh Coffee Morning today at a startlingly early 8am. Met up with Nico on the way who was cycling to work, I should really start doing that. Anyway, the coffee chat was excellent. Talked to lots of different people: designers, developers, teachers, advertisers. It’s an eclectic mix of folks and makes for a good range of topics, generally about web “2.0” (god I’m sick of that term). Let’s see who I can remember: Johnnie Walker, Mike, Ewan, Phil and lots of other people who’s names I can’t remember. I’ll definitely try and make it next week.

The Pixar : 20 years of animation exhibition has arrived in Edinburgh. We need to go and see this.

My parents were visiting last weekend (and Monday) and we managed to cram in a lot of sights and eating out.

Saturday

Went out for a brilliant lunch at Centotre, a swish Italian place on George street. We had to wait a while for a table but it was certainly it. I had some gorgeous pasta with really spicy rustic sausage stirred into it. Then a super-chocolaty desert that was all very well presented. Highly recommended. Kerry had to work in the evening so my folks and I went to the Cameo to see Notes on a Scandal. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Judy Dench is rather menacing when she gets to play a villain and Cate Blanchett is, as usual, gorgeously serene.

Sunday

Had breakfast out with Ian and Neil and then toured the many second hand bookshops in the South side. I picked up up a load of retro Bond paperbacks which I intend to do something clever with, and Felaheen by JCG.

Monday

Killed time in National Gallery on the Mound, playing with their very intuitive touch screen “library” computers. Caught the free galleries bus out to Stockbridge. Saw Off the Wall and Geometry in Art exhibitions at the Modern Art and Dean galleries respectively. Had lunch in the Modern Art cafe, good food and a good location. We took a very meandering route back into town by walking up the Water of Leith footpath through Dean Village and emerging at yet more second-hand bookshops where I got More Eric Meyer on CSS for 2 quid, bargain! In the evening we had Tapas out at Barioja and Kerry had her first drink (of alcohol) for three months!

Web events seem to be sprouting up all of the place at the minute in Edinburgh! I’m attending the Highland Fling conference in April which sounds very interesting. Refresh Edinburgh has also appeared out of the wood-work to hold an event on the day after Highland Fling. Plus, there is Barcamp Scotland happening in March, based in Appleton Tower no less. Interesting times.

Update: Also Web Security Conference Day for Windows Developers from scottishdevelopers.com, thanks John.

Saw these guys performing a version of the Mario theme tune.

Gamers are everywhere these days.

Joe has a great post about Waterstones decision to break out of it’s (totally insane) e-commerce relationship with amazon.

“The new website will embrace employee blogging, a dramatic reversal for the company that emerged last year as the first British company to sack an employee for blogging.

Joe Gordon, 37, who worked for Waterstone’s in Edinburgh for 11 years, was dismissed for personal commentary regarding his day-to-day life at the bookstore on his blog.

However, Mr Giles said HMV’s new digital approach would not extend to rehiring Mr Gordon.”

Man, that is priceless.

Kerry and I had a Random Day Off on Wednesday this week. It was ace, we totally slept in and then went out into the gorgeous weather for lunch at Howies on Victoria street. I had brocolli and pea soup and then chilli chicken escalope on foccacia, or something. Whatever it was, it was damn tasty. Kerry had corn cakes to start and then some kind of squid thing, which I refused to try in my stuberness.

After lunch we went to see the Anatomy Acts exhibition at the City Art Centre. It was pretty cool, rather gruesome, but very interesting. Lots of models and paintings of the insides and outsides of bodies, medical instruments and very old, very elaborate anatomical texts. They even had some doctor chaps wooden operating trolley from eighteen-oh-something that must have seen a fair bit of blood spilt on it, as the wood was a good browny-red shade on top. It goes over three floors of the gallery and was a lot larger than I was expecting, especially for a free exhibition. They even have some modern medical imagery stuff from MIR and CAT scanners on a big screen which reminded me of the Visualisation course I did at uni.

A great day off, and it made the week seem really short!

So I’ve been totally slack and not blogged about the De La Soul (up inna’ hizzy) gig. I went to see them last Friday along with James & Catriona and Alex and they rocked. It was the most fun I’ve had at a gig for ages. They got the crowd totally worked up and everyone was bouncing and having a great time. There was lots of “Hands in the air if you love hip-hop!” and “Is the party on the left? or the right?”. Masterful crowd control stuff. It’s not until they started doing their stuff you realise how much material they’ve done and how consistently awesome it all is. It was a great night. Such a shame Kerry couldn’t make it as she was ill. I had to tone down the “awesomeness” when I got home so she wasn’t too jealous :). There are a few (not brilliant) pics up over in the pictures hizzouse.

Wow, this week is a busy one. This morning Kerry and I went to view a flat on Lauriston Street that was really, really nice. We’ve asked for an application form and everything, heres hoping we’re the only ones going for it. Wednesday is Serenity premiere night (if I every get back in touch with Erin) and then on Friday we’re off to sunny Prague for James’ stag weekend!

We though it would be best to actually see something in the festival, seen as how we live in Edinburgh. After reading a cracking review in Metro I’ve booked tickets for “Basic Training by Kahlil Ashanti”. Looks like it will be fun.

Toot, toot. De La Soul are playing at Scratch in September and we got tickets.

I had the afternoon off yesterday as it was Kerry and Is second anniversary. We went to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Bresson was a photographer who craved anonymity and would never stage photographs; instead he wanted what he famously called the “decisive moment”, when the click of the camera captures a moment of unexpected drama. He was brilliant at catching this decisive moment, illustrated perfectly in the photo to the left. He manages to get the shot when the guy has both feet off the ground above the puddle. The exhibition was good, it wasn’t just photos taken by Bresson. It had photos of him and other biographical photos and items to view. It was a little pricey at £5 but hey, it was a treat. Magnum have all the photos Bresson took whilst working for them online to browse (and buy). After the exhibition we dodged a torrential summer downpour and got expensive ready meals and fizzy blackberry wine from M&S for dinner. A great way to spend an afternoon off.

Update: Looks like Joe beat me to the Cartier exhibition 🙂

On Friday night Kerry and I met my parents, who were up for the weekend, at Fishers down on The Shore at Leith. Now, I’m not normally a sea food fan but hey, you gotta try something different now and again. I had a wee haggis thing to start and then spicy grilled monkfish with pitta bread salad. The starter was tasty but very small, the monkfish was gorgeous. I’ve never had it before but I’d certainly have it again. To finish off I had a lemon and ricotta cheesecake which was obviously home made and great after the spicy monkfish.

Saturday was shopping day and we hit the sales early. I got a couple of shirts in Next, some jeans in H&M and Kerry bought me a denim jacket in Gap. We were pretty knackered by lunch time so we went for lunch in No 28 Charlotte Square, a National Trust property that has a bistro and restaurant. Out the back, in between Charlotte Square and Princes Street it also has a secluded courtyard with tables. This was great to get a break from the hustle and bustle of the sales. It wasn’t bad value either. You could get soup and a sandwich or panini for about £6. We did a bit of non-clothes shopping in the afternoon and lurked around in waterstones before getting a taxi over to the south side and sitting around in Assembly for a bit. We then went to Khushi’s for Dinner which was aces and certainly an experience. The atmosphere is very friendly, the food is great, service was quick and it’s great value. Definitely recommended.

Kerry and I did a bit of the Make Poverty History march on Saturday and then mooched around the meadows for a bit, soaking up the atmosphere. It did feel good to part of something big, the amount of people involved was huge. When we got back to the Meadows (thinking we were the last to go around) there were still five huge queues of people waiting just to start off! I took lots of photos, which are available to view in pictures. We didn’t see any of the “trouble”. Although when we were waiting for the bus home, five police vans screamed past us towards Buccleuch street, probably something to do with this.

Kerry and I went to the see TES tonight at the Film House. He was showing a re-editing of the ‘The Warriors‘ with a live hip-hop soundtrack. It was prety damn cool. I’d never seen the film before but Kerry loves it, and now I want to see the full version. He was powering everything off a powerbook aswell, which added to the geek factor 🙂

In August the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival has loads of free (I think) screenings of upcoming game footage and talks by industry types. I missed it last year for some reason but heard good things about it. More info here.

I was just cleaning out my camera memory and came across this beauty:

I saw it roughly sprayed on a wall on the promenade down at Portabello in July last year. Someone certainly has a sense of humour.

I found this interesting site on current Edinburgh architecture and future planning for new buildings. The image above is of the new “Connery” filmhouse which is re-locating to Festival Square. It will certainly be very different once that is built.

After talking to Jed (our local friendly lawyer) I figure I should make my position clearer on the whole Joe firing issue. I understand that what Joe did was most likely in breach of his contract and can easily be called Gross Misconduct. It’s just I expected a company such as Waterstones, that sells books, to have a slightly more open-minded approach to this whole thing. A minor reprimand would have been a more apropriate response in my opinion.

Also, stop the presses, Joe has made the front page of boingboing. They’ve quoted a bit of his post where he talks about me, I wish I’d gotten on to boingboing under better circumstances.

I left Waterstones over 6 months ago now and it was basically going downhill when I started about two years ago. Higher levels of management were imposing more HMV-like directives down through the structure and it was all getting very ‘un-bookshoppy’ in my opinion. But hey! I’m glad I don’t work there now because my fellow mate/blogging/geek Joe Gordon has been fired for blogging about working there. OK, he made some small criticisms about the management style but nothing that would warrant a full dismissal. Apparently it was ‘gross misconduct’ and ‘brought the company into disrepute’.

I really do feel for Joe, he certainly brightened the place up when I was there. But he was so frustrated with some aspects of the business that were being imposed. He had to vent somewhere and his blog turned out to be an ideal outlet. His venting was not a frequent thing, after all his blog is based around his satirical magazine, it’s not just a personal blog.

After I stopped working in waterstones I realised how crap it is. I only ever go in there now to talk to people I worked with and get the latest goss. Shops like Blackwells or Ottakars just have more soul. Waterstones is just like a shell that has books and I till in it. OK, this may be a little all-encompassing. There are some renegade branches out there, or ones that have enough clought to get away with stuff (like Manchester Deansgate) but Edinburgh – East End just seems cold. Anyway, I buy most of my books online now from amazon or second stuff from the nice wee shops in Edinburgh.

Joe also seems to have lots of other support on the internet: here, here, here and here.

My good pal Alex has recently been promoted within Waterstones to a buying position based in big ol’ London. He moved their yesterday, on the train, more of an advance party I think. He’ll most likely be without any kind of ‘net connection for a while, but has just got a new bling-bling mobile that comes with a ton of free picture messages. Being the enterprising geek that he is he’s going to put those free picture messages to use with the free photo log service provided by phlog.net. He’s already started documenting his adventures including a blow-by-blow account of his delays on the train journey down. Have a look at what will no doubt evolve into an interesting small-ginger-man-in-London photo-blog.

I especially like the ad on the back of the bus in the last one.

I’m always taking snaps of any cool stencilling or grafitti I see around town. I’ve been meaning to setup some kind of site for them all and I’ve finally got around to it. Check it out here: http://urbanart.cyber-junky.co.uk.

Kerry and I saw these chaps in the meadows last Thursday. They’re the Royal Company of Archers and had a whole section of the meadows cordoned off for their competition. They were firing proper hefty arrows an impressively long way at a wee target.

Last night was Beltane night, a celebration of the start of the summer. About 15,000 people all pile up onto Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Its a pretty amazing experice, this was the 3rd time I’d seen it and theres always something new each year. It was ticketed for the first time this year and it seemed to go very smoothly, no over-zealous security or anything. Anway, I took lots of photos. You can view them here.

Kerry and I went for a mooch around the Dean Gallery yesterday. There is a very handy free ‘galleries’ shuttle bus that you can jump on to get around. Free bus and free galleries, lovely. The exhibition on at the moment was ‘the 1960s’ and had pop art, scottish art from the 60s and was jolly good.

Across the road from the Dean Gallery is the Modern Art gallery which we didn’t get time to go in, but I did take some pictures of the perplexing scuplture/earthworks in its gardens. You can view them in the gallery here.

Lots and lots of light fluffy snow, spiralling down from the clouds.

Lots and lots of snow, and its very, very cold.

On Friday morning me and Neil went to queue for the free mtv awards tickets. There were supposed to be 3000 distributed amongst all the HMV stores in Scotland (there are 15 branches I think). Afterwards we heard that there were actually only 2000 and 800 went to one branch! Anyhoo, when we got there at about 8:15 am we were greeted by this:

ruh-roh
Needless to say, we didn’t get any tickets.

Invitation to Edinburgh Flash Crowd :: Flash Crowds :: We came, we were seen, we confounded

Aha! found an Edinburgh smartmob meetup possee:

http://smartmobs.meetup.com/members/899

A few of our buddies are involved in the BackNet project in Edinburgh. Their aim is to provide a community-run network, mainly utilising wireless technology. Adam has just drawn up a nice map of the current nodes and their coverage. Although it doesn’t look much this is quite an accomplishment, a few nodes are also coming online soon that will hopefully link up the nodes in my area (the bit at the centre left) and the cluster at the bottom.

There was a huge (~8,000) anti-war march in Edinburgh on Saturday. Me and my man rick went out and pretended to be professional photographers, mincing about amongst the police vans and camera crews at the head of the procession. View my haul of pics here in the gallery.
No doubt Rick will develop his mountain of film and scan them in at some point, what with him being an SLR man.

Oh yeah, I also went into StarBucks for the first time on Friday. I thought I’d try one of these Frappuccino things everyone is always ranting about, and MY GOD they are sickly. I only got through about an eighth of the damn thing before I slung it in a bin.

…lots of snow.

The super good lemonjelly are playing in Edinburgh in March!

tour dates here