March at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2007 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
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Hi, I'm Paul Carvill and I'm a web developer. I am Head of Interface Development at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for March, 2007
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Tuesday, March 27th, 2007Hard Currency
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007I found an interesting Photoshop feature when I was writing my previous entry on the new design for the twenty pound note.
To illustrate the entry I found a PDF document discussing the new designs published by the Bank of England. I planned to take a screengrab of the new design and crop it appropriately. However when I pasted the screengrab into Photoshop I was presented with this dialogue:
How did the application know what the contents of my clipboard were? I mean, obviously it knows the clipboard contains bitmapped pixel data, but how does it know those pixels represent a bank note? Is it using some image-recognition technology? Or does the clipboard contain some meta data about its contents or origin? I wonder if there are other instances or applications of this feature? For example it could be used to combat ticket fraud, child pornography or many other uses.
What’s The Score
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007The new £20 notes have been issued – I was surprised by one when I withdrew cash from an ATM on my return from Morroco. I always love seeing the new designs. Currencies implicitly reflect the values and standards of their central issuing bank, and by extension those of the nation they finance.
The new 20’s continue a fine tradition of evolutionary design – the size and shape remain the same, the current purple colour is also still in place, though now a little brighter. What makes the difference with these issues are the subtler changes – the increased white space, the thick border, the more elegant denomination display. These notes looks so much more European. Timeless, stately, perhaps slightly diminished in personality and a little more anonymous.
Speaking in tunngs
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007If Tunng had any more bells and whistles they’d be able to open a bell-and-whistle shop. A big one. As such, though, they’re one of the most percussively over-engineered yet deceptively and beautifully simple bands I’ve heard.
They bury plaintive, repetitive vocal hooks inside chiming pastoral guitars. On top of this they start a Tourette’s avalanche of electronic beeps, squeaks and hiccups. The whole thing is oddly heartwarming and touching. I saw them live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the Purcell Rooms – nice big comfy seats) and it it was even better to discover that they wren’t a bunch of rural hobbits, or dungeons and dragons-playing Womad’s. Not all of them anyway. One guitarist looked like he was partial to ale. And cheese. And mandolins. But the others looked quite….cool. And funny, too.
About half way through the gig something in the hypnotic melodies reminded me that I’d already seen them before, at the Green Man festival last year. Memories of hazy, damp Saturday afternoon’s came back to me. And then I started to wonder if I hadn’t seen them many, many times before that. The haunting, cyclical, almost Gregorian chant of the music makes them sound as if they been lingering in the mists of time for hundreds of years, harking back to Henry VIII’s Greensleeves, sitting round campfires in windswept landscapes, constantly considering another flaggon of Old Peculiar.
They’re doing a ton of gigs this year, check out their website to read more. They might even have grown some proper grey, straggly, perhaos even plaited beards by then…
Itchy Riga finger
Thursday, March 8th, 2007I went to see Turner’s “Blue Rigi” at Tate Britain yesterday. I don’t know if it’s worth 5 million quid, but it is astonishingly good, all translucency and shimmer and early, yawning, quiet atmosphere rendered in washy paint. I’m proud of the great British public for getting off their normally lazy fat arses to save something of some worth for the good of our artless, godless and hopeless children.
They’ve got a whole exhibition of Rigi paintings, sketches and other Turner stuff until 25th march. Recommended! 5 stars!! Etc etc.
While you’re there you can also see Mark Wallinger’s recreation of Brian Haw’s anti-war protest, before it was so callously and cynically dismanteld at 3am by the fuzz.
And once you’re done you can walk round the corner and see the empty plinth in Victoria Gardens where Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais” normally sits. It’s quite a plinth.