Birmingham Main Line & Soho Loop

Another day off another canal walk. Today i walked along the Birmingham Main Line from Brindley Place up to Rotton Park Junction (i have walked this before) but at the junction i then headed off down virgin territory in the shape of the Soho Loop. Some grim examples of Britain's rusting industrial past exist down this loop and i was also surprised to come across HMP Winson Green! Luckily there were no escaped convicts on the towpath. Here are the photos i took.

Spitfire painting completed

My latest kit is a Spitfire Ia and the painting is now completed, i just need to apply decals and varnish and we have another finished kit! This is my third Spitfire but as all 3 depict different eras in the type's life i must do a photo of them all lined up after this one is completed.

Update : and i have finished the plane this evening. Here you can see the completed Project 018. Next up is likely to be a Grumman Gosling, though i probably won't start it for a week or so.

Look Sir, Droids!

Years ago when i worked at Tw2 we had a great laugh about this amazing bit of stop-motion animation showing breakdancing stormtroopers. Glad to see the Suck Lord has put it on Youtube nowadays. Currently on a bit of a Star Wars high, reading my first novel on the Kindle and watching the films again. They never grow old. Except Jar Jar maybe.

Believing the HTML5 Hype

I bought Hype yesterday, and i believe it (bad joke). Hype is similiar to Flash in that you can create animations and interactive websites though it uses HTML5 and CSS instead of its own propriety file format which requires a plugin (and doesn't work on non-Flash supported devices anyway... like my iPad).

Having had Flash training a few months ago i found understanding Hype's timeline based interface quite simple (though its a lot less developed than Flash obviously which has been around for many years). It works pretty well though noticed some font differences between Mac and PC/iPad. Here is one of my test examples i created yesterday.

Grand Union in Leamington

I like Leamington Spa, went last year and today i went again! I wanted to explore more of the Grand Union canal which flows through the town so i headed off in the London direction for an hour or so until i was out in the countryside, the Warwickshire countryside of course which is the best! Next time i'll go the other direction and maybe walk to Warwick. Anyway you can see the photos here. Afterwards i went into the town centre itself, they have a nice shopping mall there which played Camera Obscura over the sound system, now that instantly makes the place a million times better than the Bull Ring!

July in 31 snaps

I am going to take a photograph every day during July and collect them in a set on Flickr. Why? Because. I think i'll restrict it to photos taken using my phone so it will help (hopefully) to build an impression of the sort of crazy sights (and vice versa) i might come across during the month.

The first image is this rather lovely Mini.