“Have you seen a truly awful piece of Photoshop work? Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter. And yes, deep down, we love Photoshop.”

Photoshop Disasters

How can you not love seeing some Escher furniture or wheelless aeroplane?

There must be a better indicator of whether someone is likely to purchase an item than “looked at it”.

You can see more photographs in the Flickr set.

Bonus: Clicking on an album cover will lead you to a legal stream of the album so you can check it out.

Ask yourself this: can you ever remember being willing to pay £16.99 for a CD?

Randy’s Postcards from Purgatory

An outstanding, entertaining, and engaging puppet-show. I strongly recommended it to everyone who would listen, however, I think the stigma of puppet-show was too much to overcome. (A alternative reason is my friends don’t trust my recommendations!) Randy was a children’s entertainer telling us about this life and relationships and how it was all messed up. The writing was excellent and the performance was brilliant. I’m sure from time-to-time I’ll fondly remember Randy shouting “WHERE’S WILLIAAAAAAAAAAAM?”

Orchestre des Champs-Elysees

I have been building an interest in Classical music since living in Bristol – Jim regularly listened to BBC Radio 3 when he drove us into work. Seeing a live orchestra was an great experience, there was much more energy than can be conveyed over the radio or on a CD.

Power Plant

I didn’t know anything about this until I saw a 5-star review on somebody else’s newspaper on the Glasgow Underground. Power Plant was an incredible light and sound exhibition at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens Glasshouses. There were some beautiful touches like the flame pipes producing rhythms and sitting on the couches looking over the disco ball palm trees. It’s difficult to explain this exhibition but I strongly recommend seeing it on tour. I didn’t take any photographs because it wouldn’t do this exhibition justice.

Fireworks Concert

I queued for tickets to watch the concert from Prices Street Gardens and I would do it again. Hopefully I will remember ear buds for next year because fireworks have never sounded so loud. A friend managed to take some great photographs of the display and this is the best quality recording of the concert I have been able to find:

The only restriction on taking photographs was that you couldn’t use a flash. Here are two pieces I particularly enjoyed. Overall, the exhibition was playful and I liked how you were forced to explore the entire museum to see everything.

The exhibition is on until 31st August and entry is free, however, you are advised that you may need to queue for at two-to-three hours. See twenty-one more photographs in the set.

We stayed in a hotel in Sardagna and had this beautiful view from the balcony. The Grappa was fantastic and I loved eating pizza with freshly cut Speck. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

I visited Toulouse in April to present a workshop paper at the European Conference on Information Retrieval:

Toulouse had a wonderful atmosphere and the confit du canard was delicious. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

Finally, in June, I visited Madrid for an EU project meeting:

A colleague recommended a particular cafe for churros, and we were not disappointed. I also managed to visit some friends and see parts of Madrid that were a little off the beaten track. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

For a company that seems to be taking steps to focus on the environmental impact of their products, as can be seen in the Environmental Status Report of the iPhone Tech Specs, the size of the pre-paid envelope is absurd.