Sunday Street Wars Photo Preview

Yesterday, i attended sunday street wars at the smeatharpe raceway near taunton in somerset. on the day myself and Mike the other photographer took well in the excess of 5,500 photos and we are resonably  sure we got at least one photo of every car in atendence.

We are going to be uploading all these photos as soon as we can, but due to the bulk, this may take a few days. So here is a photo preview.

All the photo will be avalible in full from the website, if you require higher resolution or professional prints please contact me, my details are on the flickr account and at the bottom of this page.

The preview photos are avalible at: this set on flickr.com

[UPDATE] the whole photo collection can now be viewed at this flickr.com photoset

Published: 11 June 2007 Permalink

SAEsational

As i mentioned a few weeks ago, i have recently been looking at the options to further my study and eduction and wow, have i found a great place.

SAE Institute is a collection of studio / universitys based around the UK which teach new media. I saw thier advert in the mac format magazine and i phoned a few weeks ago to ask about the requirements for studying a course with them.

A long conversation later with matt – the course coordinator – he was going to go speak to mog (the head lecturer) and ask what he thinks.

After a call with mog, and the swapping of some e-mails, we had decided that i would come and see them in London.

So, a few days ago, i traveled to london, met up with alun for some lunch and together we went to meet with the people at SAE.

We first met up with Matt, who showed us around the building. In short the facilities there are incredible. Studio after studio and room after room filled with Macs of all shapes and sizes. Really amazing.

After this we met up with Mog and we talked about the course, the support options and their work ethic. This meeting went fantastic and upon leaving i had decided that that was the university for me.

The next battle is to try and arrange the funding. Should be interesting. But thats another Post another Day.

So with Alun disappearing of to a pub standards meet, i got back onto the coach and traveled back to Taunton.

As a brief side note. On the journey back i read Mark Boulton’s fantastic series of articles about designing with grid on my phone. Mark, great job with the articles, and great job with making it all work on my phone. Impressive!

So with that all said and done, the future looks a little more interesting. Lets see what happens.

Published: 4 June 2007 | Categories: , Permalink

Power Mac G4

I love apple macs. and now (at long last) i own one. Introducing My Power Mac G4.

Macs have a reputation of being expensive, although this is not always the case. after i found myself laptopless i needed to find a computer to work on. This presented a problem, as i only had around £100 and i had to find a machine powerfull enough to run macromedia / adobe fireworks 8 for my design work. Also as i had no facility to play back DVDs i would require a machine which could plays DVD’s.

So with this in mind i started looking around both online and in local computer shops. Not suprisingly i did not find much. the cheapest desktop machine i coud purchase secound hand was around £75. but this machine was 4 years old and did not have a DVD drive. It was a 350mhz compaq.

After a little more thinking and investagating i found a company offering an OS less AMD based machine for £179.The specification wasn’t to bad, but it was clear due to the low buget componants that this machine would need serios upgrading in the short term. Also, i would have to pay for a copy of Windows, as fireworks does not nativly run under ubuntu. So i was left thinking and saving.

Then whilst talking with a freind (you know who you are) they mentioned that the local collage was selling off thier macs in the art and design center after an upgrade. So i rushed over to the collage and i spoke with the tech support staff and they told me to come back later that week to collect a mac.

So later that week, i traveled back to the collage with a freind giving me a lift and i paid £90 for my Power Mac G4.

With 512mb of RAM. OS X 10.3.2 (i updated to 10.3.9) a 40GB drive and a 400mhz G4 this machine was resonably quick and very caplbe of running fireworks and dreamweaver. In the next couple of days i installed a DVD drive, and i had my sub £100 DVD playing, design machine!

Published: 23 April 2007 | Categories: , Apple Permalink