It wasn’t long ago I was waxing lyrical about Picasa and Picasaweb. Not to be accused of sticking to my guns though, I’ve switched to Flickr, and there’s a few reasons why.

Firstly, I’ve decided to give iPhoto another go. Although I have Picasa running on Windows XP under Parallels on my iMac, it’s nice to just use an OS X application. Also, a lot of my worries with using iPhoto have gone away now I’ve tried it on a ‘real’ machine (I need to post a rantette about my Mac Mini another time…) Picasaweb does have an iPhoto exporter, but it’s not the same tight integration it has with the main Picasa application.

Flickr’s integration with iPhoto isn’t any better than Picasa’s (in fact, you have to pay for the 3rd party FlicktExport utility if you choose to use it (which I did)), but since I was changing one part of my photo solution, it was worth looking at all of it at the same time.

The big plusses for me about Flickr are really 2 things - the community and the new capacity / bandwidth limits for ‘pro’ users.

The community aspects are great because I can see what my friends & family are up to, provide feedback, and they can do the same. This is good for me as I experiment with my still new digital SLR. Flickr provides some great web feeds that I use to keep track of what’s going on.

The new capacity / bandwidth limits are also compelling - unlimited on both counts. This allows me to upload the full size images for all the photos I really care about keeping, and at the same time share those full size images with anyone that cares.

Flickr’s still not perfect though. The slideshow behaviour is pitifully poor, and was almost a show-stopper for me. They really need to sort that out. Also, the UI I think could do with a few tweaks to make it as usable as the Picasaweb interface.

Now I just have the task of going through all my photos, finding the ones I care about, cleaning them up, collating them into sets, and uploading them - that’s a fair size project to keep me occupied in the new year.

As anyone who knows me understands, I’ve faced some challenges over the last couple of years. One or two I’ve mentioned on this blog, most I haven’t.

Throughout though, I’ve maintained faith in one thing. Recently my former colleague. JR, put it better than I ever have - the universe conspires for us, and not against us.

The last few days have seen a sequence of events happen, and things have fallen into place ‘just so’, to support such a faith. Is this faith in a god, or humanity, or luck? None of them really, but what exactly this faith is targetted towards is actually of little consequence. How I choose to live is what is important, and living as though the universe conspires for me has this strange knack of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the moment, with the little understanding I have of this world in which we live, that is enough for me.

And when I have weekends like I have just had, I say ‘thanks’ to the universe, and continue walking my path.

Apparently the world has a new fastest diesel vehicle - the JCB DIESELMAX. I’m not convinced. Everyone knows the fastest diesel, on the motorway at least, is the Astramax van. I should know, I drove one for a couple of years. Mine wasn’t white, but I was still a fully paid-up resident of the outside lane. Oh, those heady days….

Short post this one - in the last couple of weeks I went to Fort Tyron Park in New York and Crested Butte in Colorado, and of course took photos. One new thing though, these photos were taken with my new Nikon D50 Digital SLR camera. Now I just have to figure out how to take good looking photos without just cheating and using the automatic modes.

One of the things I enjoyed about my time living in New Zealand was the music scene there. Since NZ is so isolated (geographically at least) from the rest of the world, they have a somewhat alternative way of doing things when it comes to bands. People there have this quaint thought (!) that its actually quite nice to go and see your favourite bands play live, and not have to be a million rows back in the crowd, or have to ring Ticketmaster like crazy at 9am on the day the tickets come out, or have to go cap in hand to a less than celubrious chap shouting ‘Buying! Selling!’ outside the venue on the night of the gig. Add this to the fact that not that many international bands come a-visiting, and its not surprising that you find NZ makes its own music scene.

Most kiwis (native New Zealanders) that have some interest in popular music will be fully aware of the latest goings on of 10 or 20 different home-grown bands that the rest of the world has probably never heard of. These bands put out great records, put on 500 person shows, love their fans and their fans love them. How civilised. Occasionally these bands will even ‘break’ overseas - The Datsuns, OMC (ok, for one hit), and of course Split Enz / Crowded House are notable examples.

One such band that I brought back home in my heart were Minuit. Minuit are ‘breakbeat’ (i.e. mostly electronic-based and interesting drum rythms) with a great female vocalist (not dissimilar to Moloko’s Roisin Murphy.) I managed to pick up their debut The 88 in my time down under. Its not quite as polished as mega-budget northern hemisphere productions, sure, but I have this unnerving knack of playing it at regular intervals and whenever I do it gets me dancing around my apartment while putting a smile on my face.

I was pretty excited when Minuit released their second album, The Guards Themselves earlier this year. The one slight problem is they don’t have an international distributor, so what with moving country and Amazon taking 2 months to deliver from NZ (!!) I only just received my copy today. But it was worth the wait - mostly more of the same retro synth, nod-your-head breaks and get-under-skin vocals from Ruth but with a little more confidence.

Like any self-respecting interweb-aware band of our times, Minuit have a Myspace Page where you can listen to tunes, watch videos, and make yourself a ‘friend’ of the band (I’m a bit of a luddite and only discovered what Myspace was a couple of month’s ago when Wired had an article on it.) Myspace is taking the music industry by storm, completely changing how people find out more about the bands they like, and find new bands like them. Its with this breaking-down of geographical boundaries that New Zealand bands might be more easily able to break overseas, and if Minuit ever manage to make it to New York, I’ll be first on the TicketMaster phone line..

Today is the first anniversary of the London Bombings. As I blogged a year ago I was on one of the trains that was bombed, and being involved with this event has unsurprisingly had quite an effect on me and my family.

For the first few months, I tried to put the horrible things I had seen, and the fact that I had been so close to being killed or seriously injured, out of my mind as much as possible. I didn’t have nightmares or panic attacks, and I carried on pretty much as normal. I did start using the Underground again, but living in central London allowed me to use busses, or walk, much more than I had done previously. Throughout the rest of my time living in London I did go somewhat out of my way to avoid the Tube.

In November I was visiting New York and found myself on a Subway train that was stuck in a station, and the doors didn’t open. I started to feel uncomfortable, and then after a couple of minutes the doors opened and I could get off of the train. Almost immediately I started to shake violently, and felt I was going to be sick - I was having a panic attack. The feeling lasted about 5 minutes and then gradually faded, but it made me realise that I had been effected by my experiences that summer’s day in July.

I didn’t really know what to do about it though, but I did look up the London Recovers website setup by Peter Zimonjic (thanks Peter!). One of the things that came out of that was groups of survivors from each of the trains had started arranging informal self-help meetings. I went along to one of the Aldgate meetings in January and found it very useful. One feeling I had had was that I was alone - my family and friends were extremely supportive, but I didn’t feel able to share completely my experiences with people I cared about. Furthermore I had so many unanswered questions about that day. Meeting up with some of the other people on the train allowed me to talk about stuff I didn’t want to share with anyone else, and also allowed me to get a better picture in my mind of what had happened.

One particularly interesting thing I learned that day was that the ‘4 month delay’ feeling I had had was very typical. I talked to one gentleman who had actually been physically injured by the blast. For the first 4 months he had felt euphoric with the relief of being alive, but then suddenly one day his emotions had crashed. When I spoke to him in January he was getting better, but still was massively emotionally effected by his experiences.

After January, life didn’t really lend itself to doing anything more than that one meeting with the travelling I was doing. I continued to feel uncomfortable travelling on the tube, I was noticeably ‘hyper-sensitive’ to loud noises, and got very upset when I heard helicopters (due to all the choppers circling around in London after the bombs went off.) These are all classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD), as I have since learned.

In April though I moved to New York, and one of the things a very good friend of mine made me do when getting here was to go to see a therapist - New York having suffered its own tragic events of 9/11 has a significant number of people who can help with PTSD. I’m really glad to have done this, its helped me look analytically at my feelings and thoughts. I’m now pretty much fine with the New York subway (which I use every day) and I noticed the other day that helicopters no longer seem the carriers of evil I was associating them with previously.

Today itself though has obviously been hard. I managed to take the Subway this morning (despite originally planning on walking) and it was harder than normal. A smell of burning in the office later in the morning made me pretty anxious, but it soon passed. I know today has been hard for my family too - they know how close they were to losing me last year.

Looking forward, I know that I will never forget my experience and it will have an effect on me for the rest of my life, but I know that I’m dealing with it a lot better than I did last year.

My only frustration is that we still don’t really know what happened. I know these things take time, but part of me feels there should be more publically available information to explain how and why the 4 bombers did what they did.

But to finish on a positive note, I’m incredibally pleased that in a lot of ways London didn’t change because of last year. It continues to be a thriving multi-cultural centre of the world. I hope in the years to come that Londoners remember July 7th, but as much as they can that they can live their lives as though it never happened.

I’m British, working in America, for a German company, and part of my team is in Russia. I reckon if I told someone 20 years ago that this might happen in 20 year’s time, I’d probably have been thrown in a loony bin.

Or as one of my Russian co-workers put it, I’m a victim of globalisation.

… you’re walking down the street, see the number ‘256′, and in your head you vocalise it as ‘two fifty-six’. It’s a long and slippery slope…

It was with some sadness today that I read that the BBC’s weekly music show, Top of the Pops, is to end its run of 42 years.

Top of the Pops was without a doubt one of the programs I watched the most as a child. My sister is 7 years older than me, so in 1983 when she was entering her teens and I was 5 I was surrounded by the Thomson Twins, Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran, etc. There were certainly darker periods (the late 80s and an excessive amount of Stock, Aitken, Waterman come to mind), but TotP was the one time of the week where I could sit for half an hour and actually see the bands I liked perform (I was a big fan of No Limits on BBC2, but that only had a brief run, and later on I quite enjoyed Chris Evan’s TFI Friday)

I’m surprised the BBC haven’t found a way to keep ratings up. Sure, the internet and satellite TV offers ‘yoof’ (like the Janet Street Porter reference there?) a million different ways to see and hear bands, but there was always something magical about artists getting up on stage and actually performing live (and in periods of TotP’s history often not miming.)

ITV’s similar CD:UK show remains and I now hope that it will keep going. Yes its for kids, but so was Top of the Pops, and I hope the internet doesn’t kill off all these kind of shows.

For a while now I’ve been a little envious of people using Flickr to have fancy photo galleries online. I’ve almost used it a couple of times, but for me the whole idea of using a web site to manage pictures just didn’t work. I’ve used Picasa as my photo library and I wasn’t prepared to move away from a desktop-based client to handle my (more than 1GB worth of) digital photos.

When I bought my Mac Mini I was hoping iPhoto might be amazing, and I was considering using it and .Mac to host photos. iPhoto just didn’t work for me either, and I kept using Picasa, and my Photo Blogger Blog (which Picasa integrates fairly nicely with) to publish the odd photo now and then.

But a Photo Blog isn’t the same as an online photo album, and what I really wanted was for Google to add online features to Picasa so that I could manage a web photo library from a desktop client.

Someone at Google must have been listening, since they’ve done just this, and its free. The first 250MB costs zilch, and if you want more its $25 / year for 6GB of storage. That means I can have my entire, full resolution, photo library online, share subsets of it with the world, and yet still have a local client for editting, viewing offline, etc. Flickr, your time is up [1].

My online Picasa gallery is at http://picasaweb.google.com/mike.b.roberts and this replaces my Photo Blog.

[1] OK, Mac-weenies will still use Flickr because Picasa doesn’t have a Mac client yet. But you can still upload/manage photos using the Picasa web interface, and I doubt it will be that long before a Mac-Picasa is released.