Today was a day for a bit of culture, Gaudi supplied it in droves. What an amazing building I'm never seen a church on this scale being built you normally see them 100 of years after they were finished. Lovely building.

photos are on flickr click on the picture and you can access the set.

Stanley makes himself at home in Barcelona

Currently in Madrid, Spain for a few days...turned on the television last night to see can you guess? Yes, Bull fighting and there was me thinking animal cruelty as entertainment was a thing of the past ho hum....

There is nothing like a photograph and nothing brings back memories than standing there seeing the place again,  While I was in Central Park, New York I popped down to the lake and tried to recreate one of my favorite photos. It was taken in 2002 when I was in New York with friends
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Its now 2007 and I've gone digital, over film and colour over black and white...i made it a mission to take the shot again.

Yesterday my blog was flodded by a bot called ID-Search bot with the useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IDBot/1.0; +http:// www.id-search.org/bot.html). Within a few minutes it requested around 1,386 pages and came from the IP 66.90.101.75 raping about 50MB of band width in the process...you've got to love those Russian spy bots

Is this a spam-bot or a serious project? Three things which make we wonder

1.) The bot does not (yet) support robots.txt. A quote from their FAQ

Does IDBot accept the directives from robots.txt file?
IDBot can recognize the directives from robots.txt files only partially, which is the result of the scantiness of our resources. Full support of robots.txt will be launched soon.

2.) They are not willing to release their IP addresses. Quote:

Can I learn the IP addresses, which IDBot comes from?
Unfortunately, You can’t since it is against the rules of our company.

3.) They flood servers. According to their FAQ you can write an email to tech support if the bot is causing problems. IMHO this is not a workable solution.

A New Yorker in Battery Park

It feels like I haven't been away, its been nearly a year since I was back in Manhattan, how much fun and a boy have in the City?

While distracting Rupert from asking more embarrassing questions about MPEG muxing and I showed him Microsoft Surface. While we were on the site he asked me to see if it was built in Silverlight,  so I right click and look what I saw...Oh so even Microsoft aren't using Silverlight for their main production websites yet. (click on image for large)

This an existential psychological play was named "The Man in the Cube" and was written and produced by Jim Hensen (prior to his Muppets productions). It was broadcast on NBC's "Experiments in Television" series in 1969. It stars actor Richard Schaal, father of actress Wendy Schaal and one-time husband of Valerie Harper.This kind of explains why Sesame Street is so dark in places.



It very much like the Twilight Zone epsiode were the people are in the create and trying to get out, only to find they are toys in a toy box. Also like the film The Cube