May 30, 2006

It's been a while since we have updated our events, and believe me that Donald and I have a ton to catch up on. With an 85th birthday party in Northern England to time in Paris to the wonderful joys of just getting to live in the inspirational city of London.

The trees seem to have gone green almost over night and the warm sun has been an enjoyable difference from the cold winds of winter. The day light hours have changed drastically from the winter too. We went from daylight between 8:00 am to 3:30 pm in the winter to 5:00am to 9:30 pm in the spring. In early May we were enjoying days in the high 70's. I took the opportunity to spend my afternoons drawing in the park. I got a ton of great sketches of people. Hyde Park here is what the beach is to San Diego. Any sign of a nice day and it's packed with bare bodies enjoying the outdoors. It was amazing to watch business men pull off their ties and undo their shirts on their way home from work, builders sunning their muscles in the grass and mothers with toddlers playing in the shade of the big trees. Even nearby schools take advantage of the park and bring the children out for fun outdoor activities with giant balls, hoola hoops and parachutes.

I always look for a nice comfortable place next to Kensington Palace under a big shade tree along the broad walk. From there I get a great view of the people. On this occasion I had decided to abandon my normal people sketching for a branch which had been pulled off a tree and was lying next to my blanket. I have an absolute love for all things that grow and as most of my fellow art friends know trees rank on top. I spent a whole semester just painting trees. So in many ways it bothered me to see that this branch had been ripped from one of the trees. I began to draw out the branch and in no time had named it "Homicide", due to my pure fascination with detective stories and for the fact that it was a premature death, or rather murder, ripped it of it's now lost potential for growth and life. (I love Sherlock Holmes, Midsummer Murders, all the Agatha Christie's and of course the American shows like Matlock, and Colombo)

While drawing the dead branch two footballers (that's soccer players for Americans) began to play around me. Sporting England jerseys, and quite a talent for the sport. Every time they ran by me they grinned at me. They began kicking the ball as high as they could constantly trying to get my attention. When I would look up they would bat their eyes at me and smile. This went on for close to 2 hours while I tried to finish my drawing. At times they would run up as close as they could to me kicking the ball in any fancy way they could to show off. I was really trying hard not to get to distracted by their endless energy and skill, but I just wanted to draw my branch. I finished the drawing and packed up my things, but I must say that it is always flattering to be flirted with even when your admirers are of the ages of 4 and 5.

Homicide

Monday, 8 May

I keep having this internal debate about convergence v. divergence in electronic personal accessories. On the one hand, I love the idea of a device that I can carry about my person that will serve as a music player, video player, phone, organizer (PDA) and photo/video camera. My current phone the Samsung D600 does all these things with the possible exception of PDA, as the calender doesn't have full appointment functionality. The picture quality is surprisingly good for a phone (previous posts have pictures from it) at 2.0 megapixels. The phone functionality is great. And there it kind of ends for the glowing reviews. The music player is cumbersome and playlists are awkward. The headphones have a special plug, so you have to use the Samsung branded ones which make my ears hurt and have nothing on my noise reducing Shure E2Cs. The screen, while quite large for the footprint of the phone is still really too small for enjoying movies on and Transflash (the format of memory card the D600 uses) doesn't make anything larger than a 512mb card, so you aren't going to have a collection stored on your phone. So convergence on this phone means mediocre at most things and good at a few. And that is the case with all convergence items. The Archos has a great screen and plays movies well. But the thing is HUGE as a phone/pda/everything else. And on and on.

Then there's divergence. Apple's ipod didn't pretend to be anything but a great portable music player. That has changed now that they offer the Ipod Video, but still, it has a small footprint, making it easy to carry and the interface is almost telepathic. My gorgeous trophy wife artist bought me my first ipod a year and a half ago. I returned the favor a year ago, and we both love our ipods, they go almost everywhere with us. This month week, I won my second ipod at work, a 2gb ipod nano. And I think I like it even better than my 20gb ipod. I love the footprint! It fits in my pocket and you can't tell anything is there, it is still the same slick interface and I find that I don't listen to all 5000 songs I had on my 20gb so 500 is more than enough. If I could get a phone that was just a phone and had the same dimensions, I would be in absolute heaven. And the thing is, I don't mind carrying around three or four different things if it means that they are easily carried and work well for what they are designed to do. So, until someone can create a Nano that acts as a phone as well as pda, music player and perhaps comes with glasses that perform the screen function for movies, I don't think convergence is quite there yet. Now if only I could find a way to eliminate the cumbersome headphone cords and keep the small earbuds...