Sunday, January 13, 2008

Flickr, Flock and a Front Door.

I took the photo above a couple of months ago with my Nikon D200 camera, along West Street in Erith, early one Sunday morning - click on it to enlarge. It would appear that some of the local low lives (of which there are burgeoning numbers) had stolen and burnt out some poor unfortunates' moped. I uploaded the picture onto my Flickr account and thought no more about it. Recently I was checking my Flickr statistics, to find that several people had been downloading this particular shot and marking it as a favourite. Amazing - it certainly was not intended to be any form of art - just a Chav knackered moped!

I don't know if you can recall back when I first started writing the Maggot Sandwich; the first handful of entries were submitted using an application called Flock - a free and open source web browser based on the code from Mozilla Firefox, with additional functionality added that enables direct access to Blogs, photo sharing sites and loads more Web 2.0 applications. When I last played with Flock it was not mature, and lots of features were either broken or unavailable; this has now changed and it is certainly worth you downloading it for free and trying out. It is not for everyone, but it is certainly worth investigating. Flock is available for free download for Windoze, Mac OSX and Linux.

I had a bit of a problem on Friday morning; I was just leaving the house when I experienced a primary failure of the residential ingress / egress control and security system (the front door lock broke!) This cost me the thick end of £180 for an emergency locksmith. Ho hum.

Below is a video taken at last years' FarnFest music festival; you may recall I took some photos that you can view here if you have not already done so. Ian was standing in for the band Oxide's singer who was unavailable - and rather a good job he made of it too. Sorry for the slightly duff sound on this clip - there were technical troubles with the audio feed to the camera I am led to understand.



Despite the use of professional camera, the operator definitely had a bad case of the shakes, if the footage above is anything to go by. It was however a very good gig. You can see my original blog posting here. Captain Colin of the Polstar Group website has already commented accordingly. Do check out his website - he has a 500 ton, 150 foot long North Sea trawler for sale!

This weeks' main video clip is from a band you probably have never heard of. Excuse the mullet haircuts and general fashion dodginess - this clip dates back to 1983. The band were somewhat of a cult in the early to mid eighties, though they are still together and gigging today - they were regulars at the old Marquee Club in Wardour Street. This track "The Ceiling Speaks" is the opening number from their second album - ladies and gentlemen, I present Twelfth Night...

2 comments:

  1. Well I don't like to be a "neggy" but for the cost of the cameras the quality is terrible!

    And there is no excuse for the poor camera work. Next year I should offer my services, it sure wouldn't be any worse!

    Still it was a great gig and although from this vid you wouldn't know it, the sound quality at the gig was great. Which just goes to show:

    LIVE MUSIC RULES! :)

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  2. Pewty I'll kill you!
    #Blush#
    Great gig that, amazing staging and very friendly.
    A pleasure to play.
    HOPEFULLY Xenon will be playing there this year (I mailed them a couple of days ago) so we wait in hope! Actually; HEY MAGGOT SANDWICH READERS check out the Farnfest website and ask them to have us! LOL!
    Was a tough gig 2 hours full on with 36 songs where I had to learn in about 2 weeks (if memory serves me).
    'Ard feckin work!
    Oxide were playing The Bear and Ragged Staff in Crayford last Saturday and I would have LOVED to go but was driving back from darkest Devon via the wilds of Somerset so couldn't face it sadly.
    Xenon are playing The Railway Hotel in Bromeley (right opp' the North Station) Friday 25th get your srses down there!

    Back to your posting, I can't believe that a photo of a burnt out moped can be some bodies favou….hang on…lets think about this. Who in their right mind wouldn't want to see a burnt out moped? The scourge of the age, 'ruddy kids pop-popping about thinking they look cool when they look like multi-coloured Mekon look-alikes. It's not a bad photo and the colours are quite nice but it's…a normal photo in my opinion. Strange that it's the most viewed!

    Just a quick point you sorta sing the praises of Flock but not actually what it does. Ok you can click on the link to find out but why would you if you don't know why you'd want to find out?
    Or something.

    Broken front door to Pewty Acres?
    My god the loss to the nation could have been instable! Still at least you've got the shark filled moat, the electrified barbed wire, the minefield, the automatic chain-guns etc. Then of course you've got the teams of SWAT and tactical Response ready to swoop in on any interloper. Going off on a tangent I always think it's strange that people have big wooden doors for the front but "flimsy" half glass half plywood backdoors. Ok I hold my hand up, I have that but that’s only cos I had to get a backdoor fitted quickly and that’s all I could afford. Don't get me started on double glazed doors, is it me or do they seem cheap and nasty? Maybe cos I've been seeing a lot of houses recently but 90% of the doors seem to be double-glaze and they all seem crappy. They all can't be cheapy ones..hmm…sorry having a Meldrew Moment for some reason!

    I'd buy that boat if I had the money!

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