The Chicken Coop » travel

Only in Japan

Nic Wise — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:46:24 +0000

Only in Japan would you find extendable, disposable chopsticks.

Or in Amsterdam. Seriously.

Useful and work well, but surely all-wood ones would be as good?

Iceland’s rift valley

Nic Wise — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:05:45 +0000

Iceland’s rift valley, originally uploaded by Nic Wise.

More iceland pics (set on Flickr)

and Leonie’s write up of today.

Managed a couple of HDRs, but to be honest, the light was SO good all day, the non-HDR’s came out just as good!

wandering around london

Nic Wise — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:00:20 +0000

Leonie and I went for a bit of a wander around London, from Canary Wharf to Tower Bridge, via the Prospect of Whitby, which is a lovely old pub.

Nice way to spend a day, esp as it ended with Christmas Pud and left-overs sammies :)

Greenwich tunnel

Nic Wise — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:30:56 +0000

traveling office

Nic Wise — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:59:04 +0000

I’m in Copenhagen for a couple of days, spending some time with the people (aka friends) I’m working with. Having smaller devices has ment I can just literally pack up my “office” and move here, with about a 10 min setup time. Here’s what I’ve done:

Macbook – running VM and some general stuff, with an external 7200 rpm Firewire drive for the VM. Has a habit of charging my phone, too.
Mac Mini – also running a VM, but as my primary dev machine. Throw in another 7200 rpm USB drive for the VM, my small Mac keyboard and a Microsoft “blue” mouse – and a monitor on loan from ComArchive – and it’s up in no time flat.
An Airport Express, so I can use just one network jack for this whole thing, AND not have to reconfigure all my VM’s, scripts, DNS etc – I have my own mini-lan which looks like the one at home.

All in, it’s a one-rolling-carry-on-bag’s worth of gear to move my whole working environment between countries, which bodes very well for when/if we decide to take a longer trip back to NZ – eg for next summer :) The amount of space and power I can carry in a single bag – as carry on – is quite amazing, especially how far we have come since having to lug around 2 laptops (or more) 5 years ago.

London lite(s)

Nic Wise — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:53:26 +0000

London is a series of valleys

Nic Wise — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:53:58 +0000

fake-a-roids

Nic Wise — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:53:31 +0000

Using Shake It Photo iphone app.

The view from my.... office?

Headless Horseman in Canary Wharf

Autumn in paris

Nic Wise — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:17:17 +0000

Banksy vrs The Bristol Museum

Nic Wise — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:39:16 +0000

Leonie and I got up early this morning and headed to Bristol on the train (about 1.5 hours, assuming the emergency brake on the train doesn’t kick in all the damn time). We went down to see the Banksy exhibition, titled “Banksy vrs The Bristol Museum”. First stop was Paddington Station, named after the bear ofcourse.

Paddington Bear

Once down there, we had to wait about 40 mins to get in, but as it was free, the queue was moving quite quickly, and a nice day, it wasn’t too bad at all.

The main area of the museum, which is quite small, was taken over by Banksy, and scattered thru out the rest of the museum was other bits and pieces, eg in the ceramics area there was a bong and some weed, in the geological area with the stalagmites and stalactites was a dildo, amongst the fine art painting were obvious mashups. You had to look quite closely to see it all. I’d assume a lot of people thought they saw all of it, but only really saw half.

Venus (post surgery)

Stalacmite Dildo

I’m still not sure if the Giant Irish Elk were real or not. I guess they are as wikipedia knows about them.

The most disturbing thing there was Tweetie – old, without his trademark yellow feathers, and said to not like loud noises and children.

Tweetie at 80

To me, this just made me feel sad. He was subtly animated, his eyes moved a little, and occasionally a foot moved. The monkey, painting, which I didn’t get a shot of, was also kind of disturbing, but more because most of his movement was in his eyes and eyebrows, which made it creepy.

Some of it was amazing subtle, some of it was just outright obvious. But overall, it was very good, and well worth the trip down. Highly recommended, and on until the end of August.

The full set of my photos – all off my iphone – are here. Leonie’s, from her 400D w/50mm prime lens, are here. Big thanks to Banksy and The Bristol Museum for allowing (and encouraging) photography, but being explicit about not allowing tripods (we saw someone being thrown out for holding everyone up when using one)