More bank holiday weekend news. I ran into my old GT colleague Simon Brown in Camden while I was searching for a housewarming gift with Sarah. As you can see he is alive, well and running a record stall selling picture discs and rare singles.

His stall is in the section of Camden Lock market facing over the lock toward Starbucks. If you’re walking down from the tube turn left as soon as you’ve crossed the “you want some skunk” bridge and you can’t miss him.

Bank holiday weekend coverage begins with pictures from End of the New’s gig at Woody’s Club in Westbourne Park. GT folk will be fascinated to know that our old haunt The Golbourne House is under new management. I can also report that Trellick Tower is still standing.

On to blurry pictures from the gig, this time taken with my new 6630 and a mostly useless detachable flash gadget.

#27: Tim contemplates his next effects pedal purchase

#28: Isadora’s Cigarette

Of interest to Linux weenies only - K00l Luminocity OpenGL Videos.

OpenGL accelerated OSX Quartz-style visuals are on their way to Linux, along with a healthy side order of SVG.

Part of my ongoing quest to monitor Dr Nick’s exploits. He’s made some cute dynamic banners so you can track the age of your offspring in forum posts.

Which reminds me, I must book some flights to Klagenfurt.

I’ve upgraded my phone to a Nokia 6630, with a built in 1.3 Megapixel camera. Since I’ve taken nearly a thousand pictures with my old 6600, I figured a better camera was a good reason to upgrade.

The 6630 camera seems to take quite noisy pictures indoors or in low light, as these pictures of Jonny Jump show:

In good light it blows the old 6600 camera away. We drove up to Trent Park Animal centre yesterday and I waved my telephone in the face of the grumpy Eagle Owl that lives there. I’m really impressed with the quality of this picture.

On the downside, I’m going to have to start recompressing pictures before uploading them to the web. I haven’t bothered with these test shots, but 500Kb is too big for my slow ADSL connection to upload.

Thanks to everyone who came along to our joint birthday party last weekend. Here are a couple of pictures illustrating the brief rise and fall of our freakish cat shaped Piñata.

The spoon broke shortly after this picture was taken. We moved on to a small chair leg and then a two by four for the coup de grâce. With 20/20 hindsight, putting a Sherbet fountain inside the Piñata was a really bad idea. Here is the mangled face of the dismembered cat.

This is what Guy found downstairs when he woke up on Sunday.

I’ve had a quick go at photographing my ecosphere, with fairly useless results. My macro focus wasn’t really working and the flash kept going off, turning the few almost focused pictures into psychedelic shrimpscapes. I quite like them, but will try harder next time.

The red shrimp on the right might be Seymour, but the pictures are not good enough to be sure. Until I can pick out more distinguishing features or behaviours the other three shrimps are still nameless.

Here’s a zoomed out shot for a little context.

Ant is 26 today!

As a present from me he has a new blog. Go in there and leave comments - he thinks nobody knows about it yet.

The design is a cut and paste of his birthday piñata. I’m sure he’ll come up with something more tasteful in the next few days.

I’ve just received some news from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

The bird was released (after rehabilitation from being oiled) on January 27th at Oostende. It had a weight of 980 grm. Apparently it did not make it to reintegrate itself in the population. Too bad.

Poor Guillemot.

Pics from last night - a gang of us went down to Shepherd’s Bush to watch Anathema play an acoustic show with guest cellist Dave Wesling. The set was just under an hour long, starting with Fragile Dreams and Pressure and closing with a cover of Nirvana’s Something in the Way.

It was very surreal seeing them in a seated classical venue with pink lighting and dozens of glass chandeliers. The cello sounded beautiful.