Tuesday, February 19, 2008, 11:13 PM
I was out with a friend this evening, and we were slap bang in the centre of London and running out of time, imagination, and looking for affordable, convenient places to eat. We walked past the front of a Garfunkels, and I realised I had walked past these restaurants thousands of times without even contemplating going in there. It's a form of food racism, similar to what I feel for Angus Steak Houses - I don't even come close to entertaining the thought of eating there - such an abstract concept, you might as well suggest grabbing a quick meal at Phones 4U.
Anyway, assisted by a couple of pints and reassured by the branding, I snapped out of my reverie, and suggested that we go in 'just to see what it's like'.
I'll save energy on this entry, and just cut to the chase - Garfunkels is avoided by every Londoner because it is a truly horrible place to eat. In fact, you don't even have to consume food to realise that it is nasty.
I have experienced National Rail ticket inspectors more engaging than the staff, and the proudly-priced food arrives staggeringly fast (destroying the illusion that 'someone' 'made' it) and has all of the taste of a sheet of A4 paper. You receive the bill as you take your last mouthful, and you are practically ushered onto the street, along with the rubbish bags that they are carting through the place. To call Garfunkels a restaurant is to call Robert Mugabe a politician.
All I can do to gain closure and put the episode behind me is to give you an anagram of the name of the place: Falser Gunk
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Saturday, February 16, 2008, 08:32 PM
This fascinating picture is on of many similar images you can obtain if you use Google Maps to look at the southern part of the Arizona city of Tucson.
B52 bombers sitting in the hot desert air, swatted like flies by the massive hand of history. Basically, in the thawing of the Cold War, the Russians and the Yanks were in a quite standoffish position where both parties wanted proof that their weapons were being put beyond use. The Americans gallantly suggested that they put them in a place where Russian spy satellites could pick up the images, which is why this airbase was chosen. When you think about the effect that war and politics has on the landscape, it truly is remarkable - even the Great Wall of China is a (slightly more elegant) symbol of a clash of civilisations.
These B-52s are still being used, actually. The ones in the middle have been disembowelled to begin recovering the metal from the airframes. Why? To fuel civilisation's massive demand for mobile phones. Basically, the grade and quality of metal from a 20th century airborne killing machine is available at a far lower price than getting the metal out of the ground. And these bombers are made of exactly the right metal to make mobile phone circuitry. So next time a cheery Phones4U salesperson hands you your new Nokia, consider that a decent part of it may once have spent its life disgorging bombs over the treacherous skies of Hanoi, Kandahar or Baghdad.
Image: Copyright Google Maps
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Thursday, January 17, 2008, 10:16 PM
This is not a detail of wiring from an improvised explosive device from a war-torn country, nor is it the output of a 13 year-old's half-hearted attempt to twist some wires together in the science class. This comes from a pair of soon-to-be ditched MP3 headphones from Sony, which used to be considered one of the world's great brands - a name that people bought with gleaming, spangly reassurance.
First, I'll take a look back - I still have a Sony hi-fi that I bought at the time the Berlin Wall came down, and it hasn't once made me think about buying another CD player - it is quite simply a sturdy, great-performing bit of kit, and it has not gone wrong despite spillages, children, and even a drunken attempt to 'play' a beermat instead of a CD during my first year at university.
Since then, every Sony product I have bought has seemed more and more ephemeral, culminating in the catastrophe of wiring that is the headphones you see here. The wires have unravelled and the sound just about works if you pinch them together. Problem is, walking round with your fingers pinched on a wire makes you look bizarre and slightly threatening.
At the risk of sounding a little curmudgeonly, there used to be an age when products were made by people on the company's payroll - a Volkswagen car would be made by a VW employee, an M&S sandwich made by an M&S employee, a Nikon camera made by a member of Nikon staff etc etc. Now, frankly anyone can do it, and big brands outsource to big factories in China who will make any brand you care to ask them to. Aiwa one week, Sony the next. And it isn't the fact that the manufacturing has gone to China that is the problem - it is the murderous cheapness that oozes from all of the components and construction. These headphones are what someone in a Sony boardroom wanted to make. This was deemed Good Enough.
Sadly, the much-diminished force that is the Sony brand was still strong enough to make me part with £30 for these supposedly superior headphones, and frankly, their £29 profit will be the last money they make out of me. Over to Samsung.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008, 07:39 PM
Dogs and lasers make such a good combination that, frankly, I think it should be done more often...
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Tuesday, January 1, 2008, 04:51 PM
Happy new year to you all - I hope that the year is feisty but well-behaved for you all.
I thought I'd start the year off with something technical and factual - a bit of a photographic sermon, as photography is one of few subjects on which I can consider myself knowledgeable, and I've wanted to write this for a while. If you are easily bored, or have an aversion to technical matters, then feel free to skim-read this.
Everyone always tends to ask me how many megapixels my camera has, as if I will offer up some fantastical number well into double figures. Well, I have actually just taken a step back in number of pixels, and I'm all the happier for having done so.
I have just sold my 10 megapixel Nikon D200 (along with its sizeable entourage of lenses and gizmos) and replaced it with an 8 megapixel Canon EOS 30D. It's partly about freeing up some cash for a new computer, but it is also about taking a step up in quality.
If you are a camera nerd, you'll know that the Nikon D200 is basically a D80 in riot gear, constructed in the same vein as a Warrior armoured personnel carrier, but ultimately just a 10 million pixel DSLR. The thing is about these pixels, is that the more you want to put in your camera, the smaller they have to get, natch. Problem is, smaller pixels aren't necessary a good thing. They aren't as good at catching the light, and therefore their accuracy is suspect when there isn't much light. Therefore you get something called 'noise', which looks really nasty when you look up close at the image. Noise is what happens when there is not enough light for the pixel to be sure of what colour it is meant to report. Take a look at this crop of a picture of my daughter:
She isn't suffering from a nasty skin complaint - she is just suffering from having been photographed with a 12 million pixel camera (a Canon G9 in this case), and you can see how poorly it does in low light.
Another thing to realise is that going from 10 million to 8 million sounds like an awful drop - I mean, to lose two million anything is a bit of a blow, but in this case, when you look at the dimensions of a 10 million pixel image: 3872 x 2592 (multiply one figure by the other and it will make 10 million) and compare them with the dimensions of an 8 million pixel image: 3504 x 2336, it doesn't quite seem such a big difference.
So next time a salesperson or an overzealous geeky acquaintance tries to wow you with their latest 12 million pixel novelty, you can brush them aside, safe in the knowledge that less is more. In case you had any lingering doubt as to whether 8 million pixels could be 'sharp' enough for you, just look at the shot below, where you can first of all see the entire image, and then see how sharp the detail is. This was naturally taken on my new EOS 30D...
And now the detail:
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