What a fanstastic album!

I urge you all to go out and buy it right now! It's so fresh and enjoyable. I really like it, and all the tracks are gold (except the rap one, which just isn't my thing).

School food just isn't nice anymore.

Morbid entertainment or scientific exploration?

Channel 4 has done it again. Anatomy For Beginners has been airing every day this week at around 11.

It features a set of human dissections, one per episode, which focus on the workings of our body. First movement, then circulation, then digestion, and tonight reproduction.

It’s fascinating to watch, but I can’t help thinking that it’s just some kind of morbid curiosity keeping me viewing. I know how the body works (A* GCSE, ahem), but I don’t need to see it pulled apart at all. So why watch?

Well, I suppose I would have never seen such a thing if I didn’t watch it. It was well preformed, interesting and done in a proper manner. There were jokes, but they were harmless and arose from the lecture atmosphere of the programme.

It’s got a great theme tune, though.

Why not find out more about the show. You can see some pictures and the “flash” version of the titles on Channel 4’s website.

I took a nice new set of photos today. Check them out.

All of the stuff I ordered the other day has arrived!

The RAM for my laptop is brilliant and makes the thing work really, really fast. My prints also arrived and look fantastic. This is the first time I have ever ordered prints from my digital camera at all, and I really can't wait to get some frames to show them off!

Why not take a look at some of my best photos of Blagdon that I've published on this blog. Now in a higher resolution!

Lovely. Today I took an entire album's worth of pictures, which you can take a gander at, freely.

The other day in chemistry (the organic sort) we were luck enough to get to try this cool experiment. Just mix a polystyrene cup with some nail varnish remover, it will go all slushy (and melt) and let it dry. If you fiddle around with it, you'll get something that looks a bit like chewing gum.

It's a very save experiment, and does tend to take you mind off of the lesson...

This rarely happens.

As far as finance goes, I’m a rather tight person. But with the recent addition of EMA payments (and a lovely £100 bonus… just for going to college!), I’ve become a little more adventurous with payments. And since I live very far away from any decent shops (sorry, Cobbler’s Collectables), the Internet is the ideal medium to get a bit of retail therapy packed in over the weekend.

I started out by buying another Boom Bip CD and Book (the Life Gym or something like that) from Amazon. Which was a little taxing.

Then I realized I finally had the spending power to buy some more RAM for my laptop, so I went and got 256 MB of it from Crucial UK, who refused my payment and quickly received a phone call from me about it. The Russian lady was very helpful, if not a little incomprehensible. That was very taxing.

Finally I got something for free. Picasa 2, which is a truly lovely piece of free software (which still needs a bit of improving here and there) got a lot of my attention for the day.

However, it didn’t quite end that happily. I realized, through Picasa, that I had set a site a folder of “must print pics” which really are the cream of my crop. Varied, beautiful and personal (inspirational pictures of my gran), I really did have to print them. So I did, with an online printers found through Google who did a rather good deal if you were using them for the first time. 25 4x6 and 6 5x7 pictures later, and I was down a hefty £4 more. Now that’s surprising. I wonder if they’re any good?

Finally, I was playing around even more with Picasa and the now crippled Hello (what I use to post images to the site – it won’t publish anything large anymore… what’s the point in that, then?). I remembered Flickr, and wondered if that had any kind of impressive integration with Picasa. It doesn’t, really. But only a few minutes of using Flickr hooked me. It’s fantastic. It’s liberating. It’s the feeling I got when I discovered del.icio.us, but better, because it’s my content as well as others’.

Oh, the interest it sparked. It’s reaffirmed my love of photography, and is, in fact, so good that I went and bought a year-long Pro account almost immediately. For something like £25.

I really do have to say that something has to be very, very special to do that. Flickr is amazing, exciting and extremely well made.

Here’s to a good year of photography; high in detail, creativity, and quality.

It more of a staircase than a ladder...

Wow! Now there's an improvement!

Get yo' bum over to the Picasa site and get organized! You can even make cool collages like the one below!

Detailed pics: coming soon.

Whoops

Channel 4 has made a New Year's resolution to have a branding revelation.

What an achievement. Channel 4 rests on it's brand identity as an upmarket channel for the media-savvy generation. The older logo of the "4" within the square was really good, and I thought they could have easily kept it for another few years.

The big jump they've made is a real risk. They could easily alienate their audience with their new idents, but they're just so well produced that I don't see how. Everything's very nicely thought out, and looks marvelous.

Channel 5 tried to do something like this a while ago, but didn't quite achieve it. At all. They just look skank, because they didn't think it out at all. Serves them right, really. They're pants.

Well done, Channel 4.

I stayed on for yet another Open Day today, helping to show off the abilities of the Sixth Form's media studies faculty.

There really isn't much to show off. I was, however, really, really happy to find that the school has a dolly, which I just played about with. It's fun. We made a seedy-looking video of our teacher using some dodgy music, which ended up being quite funny. Of course, it had loads of great tracking shots framed by yours truly.

Today in General Studies we were talking about politics. We've got quite a good group because we tend to talk instead of completing the sheets we're meant to do, and it's usually about interesting things.

Voting and such and such were the main topic of today's conversation. We discussed the MEPs and how, to my surprise, they are actually elected by us during regional elections. I never noticed that! I think I'm gonna run next time...

A game. For the PC. With action. And guns.

Now I'm not going to get too worked up about this one, but it is a really nice game. High production values, and it even runs nicely on my PC. Which is always a bonus, I suppose.

People often say that this game is "the one you really have to play". Perhaps it is, but I wouldn't bother if you don't the genre. It's no revolution in gaming. Max Payne 2 has done the physics thing before, and it was a very decent shooter. All I get from HL2 is scale, imagination (limited but good) and story. The story is nice, easy to follow and works quite well.

PC Format gave it 96%. I'd tend to agree.

Good: Visuals, atmosphere, physics, good feeling when you kill a civil guard.
Bad: Slow loading times, gamma needs to be adjusted, took ages to activate.

It's back, and it's brilliant.

I won't say too much about it this time around, but they've got Sylvester Stallone's ex wife Bridgette Nielsen in there, and just dropped in his mother, to boot!

And she's 100% barking mad!

Last night on Channel 4 the first episode of Desperate Housewives aired.

It was really, very good far better than I expected it to be (trashy US comedy: peh). This is Nip/Tuck quality drama with a large dose of comedy and the sad parts, seemingly, removed.

Fantastically written and produced, their world of Whysteria lane (hmm...) is entirely immersive and, much like the desperate housewives themselves, perfect.

This new year I've decided to take a look at some of the pictures I've taken over the last half-year (since I got my hands on a lovely Nikon 4300).

I honestly can't wait until I get a car (around April, the time of my 17th birthday), because then I'm sure I'll be driving all over the place, and taking loads of pictures to boot.

Hello is a silly bit of software. I thought I was uploading all of these pictures at a higher resolution, but I didn't. If you want the original, high-res. version of any of these, just e-mail me.

It's bight, it colourful, it's partially scary and it's ever so slightly funky... but is it art?

No... no it is not.