I’m off work for the Easter break at the moment so it felt like a good time to get in a blog post. I’ve had an active month catching up with friends and going to concerts, with Grizzly Bear and Beach House at The Roundhouse being the highlight! Just started on a new website design which I’m enjoying working on and should hopefully be able to post here in the next month or so. Also put a few more photographs up on my Flickr page recently, so feel free to take a look. Here are a few bits and bobs from the web that have caught my eye and imagination in the past month:

- Have to start with this. At long last, my beautiful home city of Bath was inducted on to Google street-view!

- Some songs: Radar Detector by Darwin Deez, Beba by Pantyraid, and Happy New Year Luie by Ronnie.

- Awesome herb-growing postcard designs.

-  A truly inspirational TED talk from Raghava KK about art, life, and following your heart.

- In praise of nothingness.

- Great article on the photographer/street-artist JR from the Observer.

- I really want to buy a print of this creation of C215’s.

- And finally, if you haven’t watched any of Merton’s hilarious Chatroulette piano improvisations yet - where have you been?!

I’ve had one of my photographs that I took in Laos very kindly selected and used on the cover of a journal in the USA. I’m extremely pleased to actually have a published photograph, and it gives me hope that I can get more published in future. A larger selection of my photographs can, as always, be viewed on my flickr account.

In other news; I got an actual proper job! I’m going to be a Support Engineer at a company called dotMailer in Croydon. It seems like a really great company that has a top-notch growth strategy and will reward hard-work and commitment so I’m super stoked to get a position there! All in all I’ve had an amazingly good week (and my thanks go to all the people who made it so).

I’ve always enjoyed creating my own personal birthday/thank-you cards rather than buying mass produced ones, though as I’ve got older I don’t always manage to find the time to make them. I’ve made a few over the last couple of months using Photoshop & Illustrator and I thought I’d post them here. Each card style is a bit different from the other two.

- This first one was for a friends birthday. I wanted this card to be business-card sized so I could transport it easily in my wallet. I chose to use ants (because they are small and fitted on the card) carrying a strawberry (to represent the birthday present).

- The next card I made was for my friend’s wedding. I wanted to keep it simple so decided to just use Illustrator to make a black & white line drawing of the bride and groom; tracing their heads from photographs I found. On the printed version the image itself was a little smaller, I’ve just enlarged it here so it’s easier to see!

- Finally I made a card for my brother’s birthday. For this card I found a suitable photograph of him from Facebook then replaced each of his friends’ faces with the faces of famous people who had the same birthday as my brother (but obviously from different years), which I listed inside of the card. I think he found it quite amusing!

That’s all I have for now but I’ll undoubtedly make more in future. On another note, I know I don’t update this blog as often as I used to, but you can find more regular updates featuring my musings and links to things I like on my Twitter feed.

It has been too long since I added a new post here. I have been in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for a few months, but I still should have posted something over the last couple of weeks when I’ve been back. I have managed to go through the vast number of photographs that I took while on my travels, and my favourites are now available to view on my flickr account.

Cambodia - Of the three countries that I visited on my trip, I found Cambodia the least enjoyable, relatively speaking. I felt that there was a larger percentage of the population that were out to take advantage of tourists, and there were a lot more people bugging me wherever I went than there were in Laos or Vietnam. However the country itself was beautiful and the Angkor region in particular was just mind-blowingly spectacular. In all I only spent 10 days in Cambodia, but I did enjoy it, particularly relaxing in Kratie towards the end of my time there. My favourite photos of Cambodia can be seen here.

Laos - After Cambodia I moved in to Laos. The first place I got to was an island called Don Deth, which was absolutely beautiful, and not too busy. Just from my first few hours there, I knew that I would have a great time in Laos. In general it is much less developed than both Cambodia and Vietnam but the capital city Vientiane was very clean and well presented (even during the 3 day water fight at new-year). At the end of the trip we took a small plane from Luang Prabang in the north of the country to get to Hanoi in Vietnam. I would certainly like to come back to Laos again someday. My favourite photos of Laos can be seen here.

Vietnam - I spent the most time in Vietnam, working my way down from the North of the country to the South. It was definitely my favourite country of the three, and I saw some amazing sights, while also managing to avoid the start of the wet-season by staying on the coast for the latter stages of the trip. Highlights include Ha Long bay, riding motorbikes around the tombs of Hue, the energy of Ho Chi Minh City, and the old French town of Hoi An (my favourite place of the whole trip)! Just like with Laos, I would be surprised if I don’t go back to Vietnam again someday. It was all just an absolute feast for the senses and the mind! My favourite photos of Vietnam can be seen here.

I have now added some of my photographs to the projects section of my website. They are mainly images that I have taken in the last year or so with a Nikon D80, but a few were taken with my old Nikon Coolpix camera. The ones that I have put on the website are some of my favourites although more images are available on my flickr page. I will continue to add more photographs as I take them.

Other things;

- Some truely incredible photographs of the Sun. Apparently it’s unusually calm at the moment!

- I like intricate designs and organic architecture, and as such I like this funky looking fractal sculpture/room.

- Sebastian Campion has created a museum souvenir that makes good use of the Web and social connections.

- A video about designing floating-head movie posters.

I’ve not posted on here for a while. I thought I’d wait until I’d completed my latest project; a diary that can be tagged with friends and other data on Facebook. See my projects section to check it out. Now I’m tempted to try my hand at creating an application for the iPhone soon also, partly because it will be interesting and also because it would nice if this could happen to me (wishful thinking is dangerous).

Also;

- Some things I’d like to have one day… Toast with anything I want on it and a revolutionary HD Camera.

- An awesome bit of software that analyses an audio file and outputs an xml description of it’s content.

- YouTube videos; Classic Adam Buxton, I loved this when I was a kid, Bill O’Reilly can’t accept being wrong.

The creative review blog featured a piece of work by an artist named Nedko Solakov the other day. The work looked interesting so I went to his website to view his other projects, and I found many of them to be extremely clever and engaging. In particular I enjoyed the photographs of the projects that involved writing and drawing comments, such as ‘Good News, Bad News’, ‘Toilettes’, and ‘A Pass-Controlled Story’. Even the homepage itself has an amusing little note for the user who has a large enough monitor! This type of annotation also reminded me of the (temporary) graffiti that I created for one of my final year University projects.

A couple of other arty subjects that caught my attention recently were Julia Mariscal’s ‘Writing Spoon‘, a really simple and elegant object, and Bruno Taylor’s ‘Playful Spaces‘ which, amongst other things, makes waiting for a bus a bit more enjoyable.

This week I purchased and read the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons - primarily because of seeing the recently released trailer for the upcoming film and the huge amount of positive reviews the novel has received. I really enjoyed it, and it has definitely upped my anticipation for the film. I’d recommend it to anyone as a great read that really makes you think about humanity, conflict, and defining good & evil.

A few online items that caught my attention recently;

- These Aurora concept videos are well made and quite fun to watch.

- An awesome carpark design.

- Lightning in slow-motion. I like the way it spreads out, searching for the earth, before sending all its energy down the chosen path.

Lastly here are a couple of little things that I drew this week;

- A rough image of Rorschach, inspired by the Watchmen character. I just felt like trying to draw something really, so sketched this in about 20 minutes.

- A little comic-strip depicting what happened to me when the phone-lines were being changed the other day. Again it’s nothing spectacular, I just wanted to try making a neat looking little comic in Illustrator as a test to see if I could!

My new website is pretty much finished now but there’ll probably be a few adjustments that I’ll make as time goes on. I need to add some more past projects to the project database as well, and I will continue to add new creations upon completion. There have been a few moments where the incorporation of Wordpress into the site has slowed me down, but problems were overcome and I now have a clear, simple, fully functioning website!