Tom blogs

I like to listen to Adam and Joe, but I listen to the podcast, not the live show. I have never joined in on their text the nation feature but many have, and they have a special jingle for it which is impressively composed and sung by the two of them:

Original jingle

In last weeks podcast they feature a specialy composed version sung by an amateur choir from Baldock in Hertfordshire which is a town I know fairly well (or at least has a pub I know very well as you can see here, here, here and here). Unfortunately for the Choir Adam and Joe were not very impressed, you can listen to the choirs efforts and the following critique here:

The Baldock Choir

Those poor 11-50 something year olds.

This morning I was lucky enough to sit opposite a poem by William Wordsworth, titled “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”. It was part of the Poems on the Underground series.

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

I wonder what he’d make of the view now.

After a few text heavy posts here’s something less brain demanding. Thanks to the London Advertising & Design Group blog I found this site for the new VW Golf GTi.  Take control of your own GTi and drive it round the track as fast as possible for your chance to win a golf for 3 months (Only three months? Then what?).  It’s been very well put together and plays well, and if (when) you take a corner to fast your car goes flying off and you have to wait for an scientist to pick you up and place you back on the track. Good attention to detail there.

Go and have a play and take a look around the ladge blog, one worth keeping an eye on.

Today the evening standard relaunches after its “Sorry” campaign. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of talk about it, but not as much as I thought there might be.

To set the scene, the guardian has an interview with Veronica Wadley.

Saying ‘Sorry’ for the past smacks of a Soviet courtroom ‘confession’. ‘Sorry’ has all the hallmarks of a KGB-style smear campaign.

The paper is now out on the streets and the immediate opinions on from twitter aren’t great.

The new London Evening Standard… oh dear oh dear oh dear – justin_williams

Typography? Leading? My eyes hurt!http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/ Will the Evening Standard be apologising for this? tayler

Oh Dear London Evening Standard. Oh deary me. Dboy

Kept my free copy of the “new” Evening Standard for about as long as it took me to walk across the street & back in my office. Still trash! webcowgirl

And more here: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Evening%20Standard

For a team away day we’re all given the following task:

bring a screen shot of 3 sites that inspire you for a warm up discussion: 1 information giving site, 1 income generation site, 1 other

Which is something I thought would be worth sharing here. So here are my three:

Information giving

For infomration giving I’ve picked google reader. I refer to it many times a day, have a reader on my phone  and use it as my main tool for keeping up to date with the web world and beyond. At last count I subscribe to over 200 feeds and I could never track all those sites without a robust feed reader

Income generation

I shop a lot online, as much as possible. One site I am happy to recommend for their online and offline service is photobox. Their service is quick. Very quick. Place an order in the morning and chances are they’ll be delivered the next day in a hard backed envelope. You can share photos with other people and let other people order copies of your photos, even changing the price so you can make a profit in what is sold. The site has a clean and clear design and is simple to use all that an online shop should be.

Other

For this I picked a section of the London 2012 website. I’ve covered this in an earlier post and my thoughts havn’t changed. It’s still a great example of location based media content. And the time slider gives a great historical view of information too. Winner.

Smashing Magazine have their usual monthly wallpaper showcase, and this month there’s 60 to choose from, with some really strong entries.

This month I’ve picked the “creative spark” design by Vinod Batus from India. “The entire concept of this art came out when i was playing around with various photoshop brushes. The effect came in so beautifully that i instantly named it Creative Spark.”. Many thanks Vinod andof course to Smashing Magazine! Maybe one day I’ll submit my own entry…

Today I found a new way to challenge my London knowledge, which was a map of Zone One of the London Underground without any of the station names. You have 10 minutes to type as many of the station names as you can remember and watch as your answers get added to the map. I managed 52 out of the 63 stations which I was fairly happy with, but still had to kick myself when I saw the ones I’d missed. It instantly highlights the parts of London you never visit, for me there was a huge empty space in south West London which I had no idea about. Have a go yourself at www.sporcle.com/games/londontubecentral.php and see if you do better than 52…  

It reminded me of a simliar game, with the same concept but on a much larger scale. At travelpod they have a flash game where you must place a flag on the map of the world to mark the location of cities and famous places with points are awarded for speed and accuracy. There are 12 levels of difficulty with cities becoming more and more obscure as you progress. Give it your best flag at www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq. Unfortunately I didn’t make the 30,000 threshold to get past level 6, I’m sure you can do better!

This is a great video, i know I take a lot of pictures but the work that went into this is astonishing.

London (harder, better, faster, stronger) from David Hubert on Vimeo.

Smashing magazine have got in early this month with their desktop wallpaper competition.

I’ve gone for this one (bit festive but I like it), which one will you choose?

www.smashingmagazine.com

The text competition on Richard Bacon’s radio show last night – the winner was “Lidle Miss Sumshine”