Although I've lived in Edinburgh for over 6 years, I'd never yet made it to the National Portrait Gallery - the only one of the National Galleries that I hadn't graced with my presence! So I put that right this weekend, by spending a few hours there.
I'm not a massive portrait fan (hence the delay in visiting) but some of the more obscure sketches took my interest - and the more contemporary rooms upstairs held me for the longest.
The only painting that I really dwelled on was the one shown below - its ghostly and gruesome nature was strangely captivating:
Oh and the building itself is pretty impressive itself - I'd seen the red Gothic outside on many occasions, but the entrance hall was considerably more lavish than I expected:
So, if you live in or are visiting Edinburgh - why not pop in and have a look around...after all, it's all free! :)
On the way home yesterday, I suddenly remembered about a game I used to play years ago. It's called iSketch and it's effectively an online version of pictionary - with chat, MS Paint-style drawing tools and lots of stupidity thrown in.
Loads of people can play at once and there are a number of different 'rooms' you can join - varying in difficulty and humour - sometimes the really tricky ones are the most enjoyable but it's worth trying a few rooms out to begin with.
You can choose a category and a difficulty level for each game and each player takes it in turn to draw - points are gained if someone guesses your drawing correctly within the time limit, whilst the person to correctly guess bags some points too.
It can be a lot of fun - I'm looking forward to giving it another go in the near future.
I was mildy amused when watching the video below, to see that the British Isles seem to stay isolated from the continents all the way through to 250 million years in the future:
It's not quite clear if they've succumbed to the big continenty-mass at the end, but we hold fort for most of the way. You see, unlike most land areas, we're not really on a collision course with anyone. Mainland Europe protects us from the northerly surge of Africa, whilst North America has a long way to go to get near..
But, as I've said before, the land we know might have changed a bit along the way (well, there's no "might" really if we're looking this far ahead!).
But I'm pleased to see our island status is not in trouble for a long while, so we should keep enjoying it!
Ok, so website statistics aren't exciting. Everyone knows that. But, pretty much every client I've worked for requires them and the requests are getting more specific ("How many people downloaded this video?", "How many people opened this document AND saved it to the computer?").
So I give them what they want, but try to do it in a mildly stylish way - stats don't have to look boring as well. Website stats used to centre around "hits" but thankfully most people are now aware of the different type of statistics produced - hits, unique hits, page loads etc. I've always preferred my stats to show daily unique page loads - This shows how many different people went to your website each day and how many pages they looked at.
My stats are produced dynamically - I made a script to do that - but come out as a colour coded graph as well as a table of numbers [click to enlarge]:
This script can easily be manipulated to produce graphs for web display, giving users an idea of current website use - As you can see from my stats, this blog has gradually getting more popular - with over 2000 unique page loads being reached for the first time a month or so ago...may the rise continue!
This is a simple concept but brilliant as well - It just takes someone to think of it. I'm pretty sure the image is a mockup but I'm duely tempted to stick an old enter key to my doorbell and give it a go...
...Alright, I couldn't resist - I did the only decent thing and replaced my doorbell for the better. Great design, nice concept and pretty much free to implement :)
I recently purchased a cheap second-hand Sony Ericsson phone to act as my backup (W800 if you're interested) but I've found some software that makes the phone incredibly useful. Most phones these days come with a USB cable or similar and they normally allow limited access to the phone's files.
The official software doesn't do a great deal and seems to limit the possible opportunities as much as possible. That's where MyPhoneExplorer comes in - free software for all Sony Ericsson phones that allows pretty much every part of the phone to be controlled from the PC.
With this software you can not only sync all your contacts, appointments, messages etc but save them all to an archive aswell. Now you can effectively use your phone in the same way as email, saving all your messages and typing on a keyboard - it's just a shame most manufacturer software isn't as useful!
I'm a bit of a fan of the BBC Horizon programme. For the uninitiated, its a long running BBC Science series, highlighting current scientific research and making it accessible to the public. It systematically gets criticised from some quarters for being 'un-scientific' and it's true that over time it has perhaps lost its way a bit with this regard, but I think it's important to put it into context - These days it is much, much easier to look up more information on scientific topics and the programme still offers a great introduction to a lot of scientific topics.
Anyway, without going into that argument too much, I thought I'd take a look at some of the logos used over time and suggest one of my own. As you can imagine, the logos often use a curved horizon as a theme (not long until they use an event horizon!), although the most recent logo is pretty simple ("modern").
The last one there is from a strategy game called horizon but I put it in as I thought it wouldn't look out of place at the start of the programme! The penultimate one is my design - it was only a 10 minute job but it's ok - I don't think I'll be sending it off to the BBC though! The pattern in the background is actually a graphic representation of a mathematical equation and the original was titled 'Math Horizon'. If you want more detail on the pattern, here's the creator explaining it in more detail:
Well, there you go - a look at a few of the logo designs over time. If you want more info on BBC Horizon, then check out the links at the bottom of the page. There are loads of episodes available online, so have a look and check some out - I've posted one video below, which you'll need to register with veoh.com to watch in full - but should give you a good idea.
The men represented in this painting are professors in the Department of Surgery and Molecular Oncology at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee. All three men appear to have been disturbed in the middle of their duties: Professor Steele (left) has blood on his hands and Sir Alfred Cuschieri (centre) is holding a medical implement. The luminous quality of the paint makes the figures look almost ghostly, expressing the sense of horror and anxiety associated with cancer. 
