Yes, You Are On Google Street View

In lieu of having time to write up anything about my adventures, have some hookers:

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Wii Prayer

A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord...especially if they have a Nintendo Wii, complete with special Cross controllers and a Kneeler (all the fun of kneeling and genuflecting...in your own home!).

Yes, seriously, someone's making a game of this. Well, I think so anyway - if it's a spoof/hoax then it's being pretty thoroughly carried out.



If the minigames are good enough, I'll almost certainly be buying a copy of this. After all, WarioWare barely has any storyline at all and that's still one of the most popular Wii games..

Ina: AssItalia

Somewhat unfortunately, I appear to have a fantastically* handsome rear end. This makes it very difficult to walk backwards for any extended period of time before I am stopped by a well meaning stranger and have to spend five minutes bashfully accepting their compliments.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more acute than in Italy. On a recent short visit to Bologna and Ravenna, the locals were particularly impressed. In particular, the Ryanair attendants were so thrilled they made me wait around for nearly an extra hour just so they could call up some more friends to stop and stare.

This started off fairly innocently; someone would walk past animatedly chattering in Italian about (I presume) my posterior. We'd go into bars and the waiters would immediately comment on this (again, I presume - my Italian is a little flaky).

However, things started to get a bit creepy when the artists and architects got involved. What started off as harmless stained glass graffiti:



Soon turned into the defacement of historic cultural buildings:



Whilst I'm naturally flattered, this is a bit worrying and I'm not sure I'll be showing my face (or rear end) in Bologna again anytime soon. It was, however, nice to win the annual 'Ass of Italy' award - a moment I'll treasure and have on my CV for many many years to come:



More Italy pics/stories later :)
Xx

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* Understand that here I refer to both definitions of fantastic; 'great' and 'surprising'.

Mandelbulbs

The geekier (or artistic) amongst you will no doubt have seen the mathematically generated beauty of Mandelbrot sets such as the below:



From a simple equation this wonderful pattern emerges again and again, no matter how far one zooms in to the image.

That's not the cool bit.

The cool bit is that a few fractal fanatics have recently been experimenting with 3D Mandelbrot sets - nicknamed Mandelbulbs. They haven't quite got the true three dimensional formula worked out yet, but the various approximations in use are already producing some fantastic graphics.

On with the pretty pictures, click for super-size (and I do mean super-size, one of these is 7000x7000px):

The basic form


Gateaux


Honeycomb Heaven


Lost Ruins


Cool or what? For those of you interested in the maths - using hypercomplex numbers - there's a bit more detail here and some pseudo-code is provided here.

Go See Some Jazz

As anyone within range of my various streams of communication will know by now, this week is London Jazz Festival - and it's fantastic. Unlike a traditional jazz festival, this is spread out all over the city and instead of catering to any kind of elitist crowd is happy to move between hip-hop, classic vocal tracks, poppy piano and experimentalism; in addition of course to the more standard contemporary jazz which is played at a superb standard by a range of up-and-coming stars and established legends.

Personally, it's the former I've been a lot more excited about seeing - I know Sonny Rollins is great but I've heard so many of his albums, collaborations and live tracks already that I'm not going to get much new out of it. A 12-piece jazz/hip-hop youth collective last night, on the other hand, presented me with an entirely new sound; one that I've never come across before (presuming it even exists) and am really looking forward to hearing develop over the coming decade.

I'll post up some reviews of the more special shows I've seen shortly, but if you're near London (or prepared to travel) then there's fantastic gigs on right up until the evening of Sunday 22^nd November (when I'm hearing Marcus Miller play from Tutu - the album he wrote for/with Miles Davis). Get in touch if you want some recommendations/company.

You don't need to know a lot about jazz to come, it's not that kind of crowd - and I've rarely brought a newbie friend along that hasn't enjoyed some part of the show. Give it a try :)

Common Sense

I've not blogged much about my new job - partly because I'm fantastically busy all the time and partly because when I'm not working I'd rather not think about work; fun though it often is.

One thing that's really impressed me at Thomson Reuters is their sensible working attitude. I haven't seen much of people prioritising their tasks based on what will make them look good; endless internal meetings that have little point; and clock-watching managers that care more about the office dress code than the quality of work:



Take, for example, this line from a recent email around our flexible working policy:

"We will focus on output and on what needs to be achieved; inputs such as where work gets done, and the hours worked, are not as important."

Perfect! Although, perhaps not so applicable in all cultures, as a German colleague pointed out:

"Send such an email in the German companies I've previously worked and you're fired before you can count to 3.

Anyhow, back to work...
Xx

Time Machine

I don't quite remember where I found this image, but it's utterly fantastic. I'm definitely going to do a copycat job sometime this week - I'll post up the results :)


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