frogcake.net

Over the weekend a new work by Banksy appeared on a wall outside the Post Office sorting building in Newman Street near my work.

There’s no tag, so it’s possible it’s not by him but it certainly looks like a Banksy and the fact that, according to the Mail, it required three stories of scaffolding to be erected makes it audacious enough to be his. After all, this is the guy who hung a smiley faced version of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

More pictures in the gallery.

I’ve finally finished uploading my photos to my new SmugMug gallery. It has just about every photo I’ve taken over the past eight years, so have a browse!

I have added pictures from our recent trip to LA, Las Vegas and San Francisco to the gallery.
I forgot to mention before that we wandered into the Musee Mechanique at Pier 45 in Fisherman’s Wharf while we were in San Francisco. This is a fascinating place that houses one of the world’s largest collections of antique arcade machines. They have a few classic video games like Pole Position which I dropped a few quarters into but mostly they are cabinets containing strange little diaramas with bizarre names such as “The Drunkard’s Dream”, “Bimbo Box” and that old classic “Opium Den“.

Also, I have converted the video of the Fountains of Bellagio into flash and embedded it into my previous post. Do check it out. It was taken on Kathryn’s phone and 320 x 240 pixels doesn’t really do it justice but it does give you more of an idea than still photos. Dancing fountains might sound corny but something about it was just memsmerising to watch.

I used the cool Pandora plugin for the GIMP to make this panorama of a 360 degree view from the top of Rannerdale Knotts in the Lake District.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work too well at a small size as the original is 16,654 pixels wide!

I finally figured out how to get a proper link to the gallery using the nifty Page Links To wordpress plugin.

So if you hadn’t figured out how to get to the gallery before, check it out.

I’ve managed to get gallery2 integrated into wordpress in at least a half-decent way. At the moment there is no dedicated link to the gallery but you can get there by clicking on the random picture displayed in the sidebar and then clicking your way around. I suppose you could also click on this link.

There are pictures from my recent trip to California for the MySQL Users Conference in there. Actually they are mostly from San Francisco as there isn’t much to take photos of in Silicon Valley.

If you are wondering what all the pictures of cars are, on my last day I stumbled upon the start of the California Mille. This is a famous classic car rally inspired by the old Mille Miglia (1000 miles) run in Italy from 1927 to 1957. To take part in the California Mille, your car must have either run or have been elligible to run in the original Mille. Not only that, it costs $4,000 and your car has to be chosen as among the best of the applicants.

I was planning on killing the few hours before my flight by sitting in the lovely park at the top of Nob Hill but as I arrived at the Fairmont Hotel I was greeted by the sights and sounds of rows of Alfas, Porsches, Fiats and Ferraris. There were some amazing cars there including quite a few gull-winged Mercedes 300SLs, a strange Fiat 8V from Australia, and an absolutely stunning Ferrari 250GT California. So I spent the next couple of hours taking pictures of cars until my batteries died.