(p.s Big thanks to Derek Mantle for making a logo for the festival at super short notice.)

A Cocktail in a Box

When i moved to my village I was told no one delivered food as it was so far out. Now having been here for over a year i have found a reasonable Chinese, Indian and Pizza restaurant that will. The demand is obviously there.

But how times have changed. Along with restaurants we now have a number of supermarkets all vying for our custom. This has become a time that with a simple internet connection and good plumbing, you need never leave the house again.

So when Nik Butler @loudmouthman introduced me to Sam Wilson’s Cocktail in a Box idea where she supplies through the mail, all the ingredients, tools and recipes needed to make a cocktail.. I wasn’t at all surprised.. Well not until I saw the standard to which she was actually doing it.

When the box arrived I left it till the evening (a more conducive time for me to drink) and it gave me quite something to look forward too.

I am primarily a wine and spirits drinker, then it’s real ales and finally cocktails. Not because I like them the least. Far from it. Cocktails incorporate all the drinks I enjoy the most, it’s just that i never seem to have all the ingredients to hand when I fancy. And who really remembers to shop for the little bits that are the finishing touches.

So when I finally opened the box containing my ‘Cocktail in a box’ ‘Cosmopolitan‘ I was not only impressed by the quality of the ingredients, but the way they were displayed immediately made me think of people who I would like to treat.

It is really an indulgence and I love the whole ritual around making and shaking, then sharing and drinking. If you watch the video you will see i am impressed by the fact there is enough for two good sized cocktails. I am thinking that perhaps I too should have been sharing and not hogging the goodness all to myself..

Next time i will.

 

All you need to know is at CocktailInABox.com

If you do plan on having a cocktail party without the hassle of shopping for all the ingredients.. Don’t forget me.

A moment with Tony Benn

Today whilst passing through London and before descending into the tube, I just happened to pop outside Euston train station  and spotted Tony Benn sat on a bench lighting his pipe.

I was on the way down to Southampton to pick up a car and although I have no idea what made me pop outside the station after getting off the train, I am glad i did.

I was not going pass up the opportunity to chat with a lifelong hero of mine so I wondered over and introduced myself.

We had a brief discussion about the National Union of Journalists before I suddenly remembered I had in my bag a pro stills camera, a web enabled mobile phone and a mini video camera.

Although Tony Benn only had about five minutes to catch his train to Preston he was kind enough to humour me as I conducted a short interview on video.. I then took a few stills and showed him how easy it was using Qik to stream from a mobile phone.

In about three minutes we were done and a slightly amazed Tony Benn took my card and invited me to get in touch so I could introduce him to more of this technology.

It was a really great start to the day for me. Totally unexpected and I was glad I had my ‘geek’ bag at the ready.

I have been a fan of Tony Benn and his work for a while now and am so glad to have finally met him. Not only that, but as a great bonus I now have his home number and hope to do a more in depth interview in the future.

Here is the same video on YouTube

..and my thoughts on Qik straight afterwards.

I Got Hacked!

I guess it was bound to happen.. There I was happily tweeting away (on twitter obviously) and @jopkins told me something was up with my site.. I myself tweeted what had happened and @loudmouthman of Reduced Hackers was as ever the most easy to hear over the twitter static.

He told me to call him and I did immediately. Less than eight minutes later my site was back up and Nik had fixed it in the simplest of ways by first assessing all of the possibilities and then simply dropping a new index.php file onto my server.

He gave me some invaluable tips on how to protect myself in different ways from other possible attacks and did all of this whilst simultaneously dealing with a client in another part of the UK!

I have changed all of my passwords that could have been compromised but we won’t know for sure how they got in until we get the log files back from www.nxs.nl. Needless to say I have backed up again and realise i am more than a little lucky. Lucky because in about ten years of having websites this is only the second time that this has happened.. The first time was a nightmare. The difference now, is that with a single tweet, an expert like Nik came to the rescue and sorted it out in around half an hour. 

Nik is also the reason I have a Drobo sitting under the desk humming away casually backing up all of my data to protect against just such an event like this.

Not wanting to give him too much advertisement, the hacker is Turkish and had placed a page protesting against what he was calling..  ’Stop Bush Crusade II’. I am wondering if I was targeted as @Delboydare suggested because I have a short photo piece on Kurdistan.. We may never know.

Thanks to all of the other Twitterati that came to my aid with advice and suggestions as to what may have happened and how to sort it. There is a massive writhing beast of knowledge and skill out there in the collective mind.

We are connected.. with our fingers on the keyboards and our eyes fixed to screens.. It is almost as if the technology were grafted to our beings. We are the Twitter Borg.

[Check back in a little while and we may know more about how they got in to the site in the first place.]

Sky Pirates

Whilst waiting in line to check my baggage with RyanAir for my trip to the Czech Republic, I could not help but notice the guy in front getting charged £58 as his bags were four kilos over the allowed fifteen.

Half of me wanted to ask him if he would like me to carry his excess for twenty quid.. That should by a sandwich and a drink on board.. Just. Then I remembered the question you get at the desk.. “Are you carrying anything for anyone else?” .. and I thought it not worth the trouble.

There has been much publicity around the no-liquids-in-the-hand-luggage rule being a farce, but at the same time, through conspiratorial eyes, I can see how it all ties in with the baggage weight limits also dropping by five kilos. All this excess liquid in our hold luggage must be earning the airlines a tidy penny or two. There must be a stat somewhere stating how much more we are having to pay to put our liquids in the hold and at the same time increase the amount of overweight bags..

So when it came for my turn to weigh in and my hold luggage was a massive eleven kilos under the limit, I asked the girl if I could have a refund.

She gave me a blank stare.

I asked if this was not justified and if no money was available, could she please offer my weight credit to a nice old lady behind me who seemed to have packed her greenhouse and contents.

Another blank stare.

She printed my boarding card and told me that if credits were offered, mine would be over £130 and as my ticket only cost £30 this was not really fair was it..

I gave her a blank stare back.

So.. You can offset your carbon use in other ways.. why not offset your baggage weight against other passengers? Maybe it’s obvious.. The airline has to itself offset these great looking low prices by stinging us in as many other ways as possible. Perhaps with oil prices doing what they are doing they may just have to up their prices and hopefully their standard of service too.

If you are going to charge for a service, no matter how much or little, at least make it a pleasant experience. There is so much cost cutting now it is getting ridiculous..

They have even cut using coloured ink from their boarding cards which saw myself and a couple of other passengers ushered onto the wrong plane! Can you believe it..? As paranoid as airports are about security, I managed to find myself on the wrong plane and only realised when I heard a fellow passenger talk about not being able to wait to get on the beach. Last time I looked at a map, the Czech Republic has no beaches. As I left the attendant apologised saying all the boarding cards look the same now.

One hour later, on the right plane, as as I stared down at my plastic sachet of gin, that I had been sold by a slightly guilty looking flight attendant for £6, I realised I should have taken the advise of the lush in the coffee shop. “Flying Ryanair” she said wobbling as she dunked a biscuit in her coffee. “Yes, I said.”
“Make sure you eat and drink as much as you can before you fly.. They will rob you blind.”

Do I look like a terrorist?

On more than one occasion, while out and about taking photographs, (mainly in London) I’ve been stopped for having a camera round my neck and looking like I might be about to take a picture.

Yup, that’s all it seems to take now-a-days to raise the suspicions of some underpaid private security guard. Just be out and about minding your own photographic business, perhaps dangerously close to the threshold of some crappy shopping centre and as quick as it takes for a CCTV camera to rotate.. There they are, trying to enforce some imaginary law.

Normally I flash my press pass and tell them I know my rights. Sometimes I am feeling a little more confrontational and ask exactly what law it is they think they are enforcing? On one occasion a confused security guard told me it was one of the prevention of terrorism laws. The conversation then swung round to me asking.. “Do I look like a terrorist??

(Don’t answer that.)

I am not sure when all this started.. Perhaps it was just after 9/11 when everyones hightened level of paranoia needed to be justified by inventing some extra imaginary threats.

Most of the time, the least that happens is I’m looked at in a “I am watching you” kind of way. This is with a Mediterranean complexion, who knows what would happen if i wanted to go out with a camera and I was slightly darker skinned!

You may well have seen them yourselves, but once in a while I pass by a shop window and catch sight of those scarily Orwellian anti-terrorism posters asking YOU to be vigilant and to keep an eye out for people who use more than one mobile phone, or people who travel alot.. or who take photographs in a public place.

This kind of fear-mongering really pisses me off and in the past I have gone into the shop and asked if I could have the poster. Part of me could not believe the ridiculousness of it all and seemed to be wanting to gather these posters as evidence of crimes against common sense.  Are the general public really so small minded as to report one another for doing normal everyday things?

Probably.

Anyway it seems like I needn’t have bothered collecting these posters as most seem to be available 

online to download.

I was slightly comforted today to read this article in the Guardian Newspaper. Bruce Schneier states that the Police’s ‘War On Photography’ is daft as.. in his words.. “..real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything.”

With that reassurance in mind, read the article to learn that perhaps ‘movie plot‘ threats are being concocted to have some kind of psychological grip on our already fear laden minds. We really must make a point of fighting for our photographic rights..

If you are out and about with your camera, be it video or stills, stick a printout of your rights in your bag and make a stand, just in case.

UK Photographic Rights

US Photographers Rights

Aus Photographers Rights

This topic and others relating to our rights and what denotes a public space in todays day and age will be discussed at the social media picnic on the 25th of June.