So far, our advent calendar has been pretty awesome. Keyboards, naked ladies, postcards(?) and SHARK SOCKS!
Today, we ask you to make water from thin air.
The Topp household needs a new water bottle, and — to be honest — we really couldn’t be bothered to fill it. So we would like a bottle that fills itself from the air.
Get cracking, Internet.
In the midst of all my end of year best of the blog malarky, I seem to have left off one of most important year-end wrap ups: my photography.
So today — a few days late, and in no particular order — I bring you the eleven photos (of mine) that I like most from 2011:
As regular readers of the Big Bad Blog will know, roleplaying is a hobby of mine, and I play D&D on a semi-regular basis. I often take my camera along, to take photos of the minis in action.
Here’s an example of minis in action:
Two friends of mine got engaged (to each other) early in 2011, and so I took the opportunity to have an “engagement photo shoot”. A number of the photos resulting from this can be found at this post in April.
My favourite photo from the shoot is this one. The epic feel just feels right.
For most of 2010, Karen and I lived in Greenwich. There’s a tunnel there, that crosses the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. We didn’t use it at all.
When we moved back to Wapping, however, it started to get regular use — we would walk or jog to Greenwich, to spend time in the park or one of their many lovely pubs. The tunnel is quite picturesque, but usually the pedestrian traffic is too heavy to make for a good photo opportunity.
One day in March, however, I found myself in an uncrowded tunnel with my camera. I like the result.
Summer, a visit to a friend’s, bubbles in the garden. A beautiful day.
The Maggie-a-day project is an endeavour in which your blogger attempts to add a photo of his daughter to his Flickr stream every single day.
The project has met with partial success — I certainly do not take a photo every day, and I seem to miss posting a photo approximately one day in four (she’s about 450 days old, and there are about 350 photos in the stream). But with so much of my energy spent on photos of Maggie, it should be no surprise that they make up a significant portion of my top eleven.
All that practice taking photos of children comes in handy when I get to take photos of other people’s children. These stand out to me, as they are different from the Maggie photos I take daily.
My favourite of these is this photo of my nephew, taken while in Canada:
I don’t get out hiking or walking much — while London has a fair bit of green space, none of it is “wild”. And it’s tough to drag a child who isn’t up to walking along with you.
Exceptions are made, however, and one such exception led me to find this little green gem:
This summer featured our first family holiday — we went down to the French seaside. It was gorgeous, and filled with a dozen photos which would all be featured were this “the top 25 of 2011″, and I did not have an aversion to filling such a list with a group of photos taken in the same short timespan, in the same place.
Out of these photos, two made the cut to the top 11. The first is the final photo in the Maggie sequence above. The second is a black and white photo I took of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something special about photos of water in black and white.
All photos are CC licensed by Mr. Topp, and can be found in my Flickr stream. Alternatively, just click on the photo to go to it on Flickr.
For those who may be unaware, there’s a group that calls itself LulzSec that has been hacking up a storm lately (most famously targeting PBS) for, well, the LULZ.
Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have been scratching our heads trying to figure out what to make of them. After reading this article by Patrick Gray, we think that we will just co-opt his position:
So for the last ten years I’ve been working in media, trying to raise awareness of the idea that maybe, just maybe, using insecure computers to hold your secrets, conduct your commerce and run your infrastructure is a shitty idea.
No one who mattered listened.
…
So why do we like LulzSec?
“I told you so.”
That’s why.
We aren’t security professionals here at the Big Bad Blog, but that resonates. Because we are sufficiently technically literate to say — at least now that LulzSec has turned on the light — well, yeah, obviously.
Furthermore, this reflects the truth about how we treat our society’s insecurities beyond the computer: The security theatre that we witness at airports, for example. We all know that it does nothing to keep us safe, but governments just keep making more grand, visible gestures, rather than taking any steps to make flight more secure.
Photographers being harassed for taking photos in public places, as a “counter-terrorism measure”. The Patriot Act in the USA.
All these things smell the same. It’s a shame that LulzSec-style graffiti about Tupac in New Zealand doesn’t exist in these contexts, and there is no similar loud, visible way to demonstrate what is masquerading as security all around us every day.
Image by Frankie Eiknarf.
Webcomic is Invisible Bread, by Justin Boyd.
Just after graduating from University, I had a job in central Toronto. Across the street from our office was a little square, and during the summer there would be various events there. One day there was some sort of make-up event there, and for some reason they had also parked a Maserati Spyder in the middle of the square for people to fondle.
It was definitely the most beautiful car I have touched. Later I would learn that the “Spyder” bit just meant that it was a convertible.
So we now assume that Mazda’s spider infestation problem would be some sort of marketing ploy gone horribly awry.
Photo found at 500 px, by Anka Zhuravleva.
Webcomic is Doctor Cat, MD, by Sarah Sobole.
