It always falls in April, my annual pick of the best/favourite photos from my Flickr uploads. Like my tax return, I’m late sorting this year’s out but here they are – featuring kittens, pigeons, flowers, volcanic Gomera and Lanzarote, a steampunk wedding, Spaghetti Junction, Loaf’s Tom Baker, backward clocks and a dodgy looking fiancé in a fez. Slides below or Flickr set for scrollers. Previous years here.
These LPs and 12 inches are just gathering dust so if there’s anything here my Brum chums might want, then it’s all yours – collection from B30. I can offer a very mixed vinyl bag from all eras and for all, er, tastes. (The close-ups, btw, are Paul Hardcastle’s Rainforest and Sister Sledge Lost In Music.) [Update: all gone. I heart the Internet.]
I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while but needed to let my feelings settle down a bit…
The first bit of code I ever wrote was a simple program in Basic on a BBC Microcomputer back in 1984 in the tiny school computer room next to the tuck shop. It did very little but ask me questions in a never-ending loop about my answer strings but I did think: ‘Blimey, that’s pretty cool. I got a machine to talk to me!’
I was rarely out of the computer room after that and told everyone I was going to be a computer programmer – and more likely a systems analyst! – when I grew up. (Pretentious, moi?)
However, my gender got in the way of such ambitious plans.
So this happened… out of the blue on April 13, Pete said: “Will you marry me?” And I said are you serious!? And he said yes and I found myself saying yes back and promptly fell into the wall during the ring bit – but that’s another story. It’s discombobulating but in a lovely way. See Pete’s post for more articulate words. I expect he will produce a scribbled whiteboard brainstorm on how to nail this thing in June. I’m on honeymoon duty, naturally. 
I’m spending January in London for work. But my Fridays are free for random work, meetings and hopefully a bit of Friday School. So today, on Stef’s recommendation, I tried out Google Campus and met with Andy Bull, author of Multimedia Journalism to chat about brand journalism training.
My one line review of the free basement cafe of Google Campus as a coworking space is: busy Shoreditch hipsterish beardy semi-friendly MacBook hangout with good coffee, lack of food (only two ham croissants left at noon) and superfast wifi but crap phone reception.
Here are a few pics…
So that was 2012: work was good, travel was good and life was good. That’s 2013 jinxed then. Here’s what went on in 2012 in the form of a quick(ish) roundup…
New Year opened with me standing agog at my first sight of a horse and hound (non-fox) hunt in the North Cotswolds. Two weeks later, I was on a train headed to the Cantal in France to snowshoe Europe’s largest volcano. The month ended with the inaugural Friday School – my invention of a weekly freelance training programme involving a moveable cake-fuelled feast of learning.
Today was a first for me – being a speaker on the social media panel at the NUJ’s one-day conference on the enjoyably menacingly titled New Ways to Make Journalism Pay II. I’d originally signed up to attend the event before I realised I probably had something to pass on from my own experience of shifting from print to online, hence ending up on the stage with this view of a packed room.
Our session took a purely Q&A format but, as prep, I’d put together the five things that have helped me get to grips with digital content work. Here they are… Continue reading
My first-ever animated gif is of a series of pretty glitches that appeared in a video with chocolate entrepreneur Jo Fairley, co-founder of Green & Black’s. She’s generating rainbows…
And here is a glitch still of the lady herself in a room snowing colour pixels… Continue reading
Okay, so I’ve tried ScoopIt, Bundlr and Storify but not Pinterest. Let’s see how the curation element of new RebelMouse works, which is similar to Pinterest. So here’s my social media splash page, which pulls in my blog feeds, selected tweets and clipped content, and which I’ve customised. It looks ok and took about 30 minutes to set up and sort, but there were some glitches and hitches…
Plus points…
Inked by Pete Ashton using his new iPhone app Manga-Camera and captioned by me from a real-life event.
