A few days ago I visited Chateau Samizdata.  While there, I picked the brain of its Chatelaine on the subject of my Google Nexus 4, because she now has one of these also.

She showed me various useful tricks. In particular she showed me – and helped me to download – an Android app called BUS LONDON, which identifies the bus stops nearest to wherever you are, and tells you what buses are about to arrive at each stop, when, and where they are headed.

BUS LONDON, in other words, provides you with information like this:

That is a photo I took last night at a bus stop near me.  I have always, in my pre BUS LONDON life, found such signs to be immensely useful because so very reassuring.  A bus to where I want to go will almost certainly be coming, quite soon, is the message I get, and it is most welcome when you consider the alternative.  But only some bus stops have these excellent signs.  Hence the value of an app like BUS LONDON.

Irritatingly, however, when I was at Chateau Samizdata, BUS LONDON refused to tell me about the bus stop that I was about to use.  This is because this bus stop is a bit further away from CS than it might have been, but is worth the short extra walk because of the greater choice of buses that it offers me.  This is a stop that buses converge on, so to speak.  But once I got near enough to it, BUS LONDON obliged with all the relevant information.

However, when I arrived at the bus stop, which also has an electric sign like the one in the photograph above, this is what I saw:

I stared and stared at this to see if anything further would happen, but nothing did.  This is something I have never seen before.  Usually these signs either work, almost always, or occasionally do not work and are blank.  Never before have I seen a sign behaving like an 80s personal computer, by publicising its problems like this and getting stuck.

Quite a coincidence, I think you will agree.  Within about an hour of acquiring BUS LONDON, I encounter a bus stop sign that fails to tell me what is due, but no matter, because I now have BUS LONDON to tell me!

I could not shake the feeling that my Google Nexus 4 had sucked all the information out of the sign, into itself, leaving the sign utterly confused.

If you think the reflections of all this info are not strictly necessary, and that the reflections might have been cropped out, well, true, but I do like reflections.

Here is the reflection of the first sign, the one near me, rotated and reversed to make it easily legible:

Off topic, but I like it.  If you think this reflection to be an irrelevance, then I suggest you redo this posting on your blog, with the first two images cropped, the final image omitted, and these last two paragraphs also omitted.  What?  You can’t be bothered?  Suit yourself.

As do I.  Suiting myself being what this blog is for.

So anyway, back to that wedding.  (Here are (1) and (2).) I’ve started so I’ll finish.  All the pictures for all these postings are chosen, arranged, uploaded, ready to go.  All that remains is for me to add a bit of waffle.

I should perhaps here explain that I was the first guest to arrive at the wedding, by more than an hour.  Hence the number of photos here – the previous posting in this series, this one, and the next one - of things without people.  It’s not that I suppose weddings to be better without people, or that I dislike people.  Not at all.  It is merely that near the start of my day, I suddenly had a lot of time to fill.  So, one of the things I did to amuse myself was take photos like these:

Spot the odd one out, the unsentimental, here-and-now, nostalgia-free technology.

Is that what future generations will mostly see of the way we now live?

LATER: That was quick.

The idea being to see if I had to log in again.  The idea was that I wouldn’t have to.  I didn’t have to.

LATER: Log on as in type in my password again.

Further Google Nexus 4 progress and rumination is reported and ruminated by me here.

This posting is a test, to see if I can post stuff to my blog entirely from my new phone/computer, and it looks as if I can.

No links, no complications.  Certainly no picture.  Just basic text.  It seems to be working.  Go.

Had a bit of trouble making the categories I had chosen stick.  And touching the screen instead of mousing really takes getting used to.  (Will those italics show up? LATER: YES) But, basically it works.

That mobile phones have cameras means that even regular people now always have a camera with them.  Already, mobile phone cameras are quite good.  Soon, they will be as good as all but the best cameras, to the point where ever more people will be satisfied with their mobile phone cameras, and accordingly won’t want to be bothering with dedicated cameras at all.  This transition is already under way, a fact which I regularly track whenever I roam about London snapping (among other delights) my fellow snappers and their snapping machines. 

This photographer, for instance, looks like he’s using a “phone”, the inverted commas there being because these things are so much more than phones, to the point where the phoning is almost an afterthought.  As Michael Jennings said last night, it really is something of an accident that we just happen to call these things “phones”.

Here is a photo I took with my Google Nexus 4, very soon after I got it, of Randy Barnett (already featured here in this earlier posting - bottom right of the first lot of pictures there), speaking at Freedom Forum 2013:

As you can see, the quality is okay, but only okay.  Compare with the zoomed photo (at the link above) of Barnett, and you can easily see the difference that a better camera makes.  If the Google Nexus 4 camera has a zoom feature, I have yet to discover it.

As the picture above shows, I (of course) had my regular camera with me at FF2013.  But last night I was out and about for a short while, without that camera, only the Google Nexus 4.  I was dining at Chateau Samizdata, and collecting Amazon stuff that I have delivered there rather than at my own front door, because at my own front door there have been robberies.  So anyway, a recent arrive at CS was a keyboard, for use with the GN4, but although pre-warned that this keyboard would require two AAA batteries to make it go, I had forgotten to bring these with me.  So, I nipped out to buy some.  Without my regular camera.

Sod’s Law decrees that whenever you are out and about without your camera, interesting things will immediately present themselves to you.  And one such interesting thing did, in the form of a sign making use of the double meaning of the word Pole.  But, Sod’s Law was held at bay by my GN4, which I did have with me, in my jacket pocket, because keeping the GN4 in my jacket pocket at all times except when I am using it is The Rule.  Snap snap, which fortunately I had more or less learned how to do:

The GN4 may not be much good for distance Big Things, and the like, but it is fine for a sign.

And since the sign was the point, even though I do like scaffolding, here is the bit of the picture with the sign:

No computerised trickery there, apart from the cropping.  More than somewhat blurry, but entirely legible, the whole point of letters being that they hack their way through exactly such communicational barriers.

As has already been reported here, I have been reading Pride and Prejudice on my Google Nexus 4 ultra-mobile computer-with-phone.  And, in Chapter X of this book, I read this:

My highlighted version of that last sentence being:

“As for your Elizabeth’s picture, you must not attempt to have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?”

So, in Jane Austen time, painters “took” pictures.

I thought that was only photographers.  There does seem, does there not?, to be something peculiarly apt about a photographer “taking” a picture.  After all, you could only “take” a picture with one click of a mechanical button, as I just did of my Google Nexus 4 with my Panasonic Lumix FZ150, if the picture was in some basic sense already there for the taking, in its entirety.  “Take” gets across the difference between photoing someone and painting a portrait of them, by which I mean “making” a portrait.

Perhaps this “take” usage, to describe portrait painting, declined when the painters stopped claiming to produce what we now call photographic likenesses, and, under the competitive influence of actual photography, began to “make” pictures of people, the whole point ofand the whole justification of which was that a mere camera could absolutely not “take” such pictures.  Such paintings are made, not taken.  To accuse a painter of “taking” a picture would be to accuse him of adding nothing.

When I have a longish spell of silence, such as the one that has just ended lasting ten days, my problem is that I keep thinking that another day won’t hurt, and that when I return, I must do so with a big bang, i.e. a brilliantly big or important posting.  Which causes the spell of silence to prolong itself even more.

So instead, what I eventually do is just shove up any old thing, such as this photo, this one photo (easily done), which I recently took near the Houses of Parliament:

What I like is that I am so very obviously in it, in the form of my shadow.

This sort of picture explains why it is so very useful for me not to be using a viewfinder, but instead a twiddly screen such as all cameras I ever buy always have.  They think I’m just looking at previous pictures, but I’m not.  I’m taking my next picture.  Of them.  And using only one hand, which adds to the impression of me not taking a photo.

You see people taking pictures with smart phones more and more these days.

This is a test file.  I am practising typing on my new Google Nexus 4, but would prefer a keyboard.  A keyboard is on order.

lt is strange not using a mouse.

Now I will attempt to transfer this file to Dawkins.

What is this new device going to be christened?

Well, what I did was copy and paste the text, rather than transfer the entire file.  Worked okay.  Then I did further rewriting, which is far easier on Dawkins.  But, I used the Dawkins mouse.  Won’t have a mouse when on the move.  Michael J says I’ll get used to not using a mouse, but that doesn’t now feel true.  A mouse is far more precise than a stubby finger, surely.

The main thing I’ve done with the new GN4 (there does have to be a better name than that, doesn’t there?) is re-reading Pride and Prejudice, in an e-book copy that has quite a lot of mis-scannings in it, occasionally quite confusingly.  You get what you pay for, I guess, and I didn’t pay anything for it.

I’m still on about last Tuesday, and about what a fine day it was to be taking photographs, and about what sort of photographs I took.

First there were those brightly coloured buildings, then the Tottenham Court Road grubbings, and now … the rest.

I confirmed that the weather was going to be just as fabulous as the weather forecasters had been saying for the best part of a week that it would be, from the moment I stepped out of my front door.  Because, what I then felt was that very particular early spring experience, namely: feeling warmer than I did indoors.  It comes from the bricks in my home being a heat store, or in the case of winter a cold store.  To be more exact, the sun outside is hot and it warms up the air outside a treat, but it will take way longer for it to warm up those bricks, still busy sucking the heat out of my indoors.

So, I was in a fine mood from the start, and duly ticked off my official objective (plus second semi-official objective close by), so that the other half of the fun might begin.  For me, the point is to get out there, preferably to places I have not visited lately, on a fine day, and to make sure I set forth with appropriate resolve and soon enough for it still to be light, I need an official objective.  Those coloured buildings served that purpose very well.  But then, there followed the unofficial pleasure, so to speak, of just meandering about and noticing things.

If you only click on one photo of those below, click on the first one, top left.  That scene was actually quite a long way away, but thanks to the brightness of the sunshine and the power of my zoom lens, it looks like I’m right next to it.

Otherwise, there are my usual preoccupations.  There is scaffolding, the other scaffolding being on Blackfriars Bridge, middle middle, where they are still finishing the new station on the bridge, with its oddly fluctuating roof.  There are cranes, the same cranes each time, I suspect, on the top of a new erection arising somewhere on the other side of the river, between Waterloo and Tate Modern.  And there is a particularly choice reflection effect, this time (I am almost certain) Tower 42 (the NatWest Tower that was) torched by the evening sun and reflected in the glass at the top of Tate Modern.  There are bridges, no less then three in the picture bottom left, and five different bridges if you also count the ghostly columns of the Blackfriars Bridge that never was, next to Actual Blackfriars Bridge.  And seven if you could the three views of the Millenium Footbridge as three different bridges.  There is the Wheel, twice.  And photographers of course, thrice.

I sought out the river because, as the light began to fade, by the river there would still be a huge (completely cloudless) sky full of the stuff to sustain me, in contrast to the streets north of the river where the light struggles to reach ground level.

As soon as I had finished looking at those brightly coloured buildings designed by Renzo Piano, I also took at look at the bottom of Centre Point, where they are doing Crossrail.

“Grubbings” is a word I inherited from my late father, along with his fondness for the thing that grubbings describes.  Grubbings are big building projects in their early, especially below ground level, stage, when they are … well: grubbing, rather than building upwards.  My father loved grubbings, and so do I.

It’s often hard to photo grubbings, because they often put a high fence around them and there’s no convenient high-up spot nearby to look over.  But at this site, you can climb up some steps (top left) to a Centre Point entrance on the first floor, and photo through the mesh that you see in most of the other pictures.

Even with the internet, it can be hard to know how these kind of things are going to end up.  Okay, here are these computer fakes of how they had in mind two years ago for it to be, but who knows if that’s still what they’re thinking.

There is also the fact that there are often so many images of how, at various stages in the design, they envisaged things looking, that it’s hard for a more casual onlooker to keep up.  Simpler to just wait and see.

It reminds me of how the Brits confused the Argies during that Brits versus Argies war.  Instead of not telling the Argies their plan, the Brits did tell the Argies their plan, and all the other plans the Brits might just as likely be following.  The British newspapers were full to the brim with every imaginable plan.  And the Argies were baffled, trapped in the headlights of too much information, all of it suspect of course.  That’s sometimes how I feel when trying (admittedly not very hard) to find out how some big grubbings in a big city like London are going to end up looking.

Recently I recycled, at Samizdata, some thoughts about Art from favourite blogger of mine Mick Hartley.

On the subject of “as found” art, the sort when it’s Art entirely because the Artist says so, without having done anything else himself besides stick the thing in an Art gallery, Hartley said this:

The logical conclusion to this line of thinking would be that if anything can be art if its maker wishes it to be art, then anything or everything can be art – and we don’t need artists any more. Curiously this is an argument that artists themselves seem reluctant to make.

I just know that there is a connection between what Hartley says there, and Hartley’s (and my) habit of taking photos (and showing the photos of others) of industrial clutter, outdoor gadgetry (such as the communications kit you see on roofs), decaying infrastructure, etc., that resembles abstract art.

The point of such pictures is that you do not only perceive the objects you are photo-ing as things doing a job of some kind, that is, the way their original creators mostly, presumably, perceived them.  You see them almost as disembodied effects, quite distinct from what the kit was originally built for, and often no longer even seeing what the objects once were or still are.  You see them the way you see abstract art.

(Related to all this is that I like cranes, but what I really like is how they look (like very superior sculpture), rather than: how they work, which is best, which sort does what, etc.  (Here is a Hartley crane snap I just found.))

I say you see all this stuff “almost” as disembodied effects.  But I think a lot of the fun is that you can also see what they are originally, even as you observe their aesthetic pleasingness or oddity, or resemblance to some particular work of art or type of art.  The pleasure you get is a bit like with those pictures which could be two different things, like an old ugly woman or a beautiful young woman, depending on whether you see that bit as an arm or a nose, or whatever.  Is it what it merely “is”?  Or is it Art?

Hartley is particularly fond of bright colour effects.  As are many more recent sculptors.

In connection with all this, here are four snaps taken by me on Tuesday Feb 19th, when I went on a trip to check out Blythe Hill Fields:

Top left was taken on the way, through a train window.  Bottom right was taken on the way home, at Whitechapel tube.  The other two were taken in the Blythe Hill Fields vicinity.

Those Artists surely do still have a role in all this, because we photographers of abstract-art-like stuff are responding to their challenges.  We are saying: We don’t need you.  We can see our own Art, thank you.  Mondrian rectangles?  I’ll give you rectangles.  Big crazy sculptures made of industrial waste?  Why not photo … industrial waste?  And so on.  We are both acknowledging the power of and (some of us – like me and Hartley) seeking to diminish the power of the Artists.

The artists have been telling the rest of us to see and enjoy the real world in new and interesting ways, and we are doing that.  They started this.

The question is not so much: Are the Artists necessary?  They have been, to the process I have described.  But: Can they stay ahead?  Can they keep on setting new challenges, or do I and Mick Hartley and all the other As Found Art photoers end up being our own artists?

I am groping my way into this subject.  The above may be a muddle.  But there is something interesting in among all this, I think.

A final Hartley photographic link that also seems relevant.

I recommend trawling back through his blog, as I just did.

LATER: And, as if he’s determined to illustrate all of the above further, there is now this.

Picture of them setting sail, so to speak, here.  Arriving this month, ish:

Bosses moving three of the world’s largest quay cranes cannot give an exact arrival date as they could be delayed en route from China.

The 138m tall, semi-automatic cranes are taller than the London Eye and weigh 1,848 tonnes.

Semi-automatic?  Does that make them assault cranes?

They are to go here.  I smell photo ops.

Further to what Alastair James said about the panoramic views of central London from Blythe Hill Fields, incoming from Rob Fisher:

Seen this? It’s a gazillion megapixel panorama taken from BT tower. You can zoom in a lot.

I think maybe yes, but it’s good to be reminded of such things.

Plus, I learned something, which is that I must check out these brightly coloured buildings just past Centre Point:

I wonder how such technicolor baubles as these will look in fifteen years time?  Drab?  Naff?  There’s a definite 1970s feel to quite a lot of architecture these days, especially for some reason in the vicinity of the Dome.  Look out for (although I promise nothing) further postings here about that rather distressing trend.

There’s lots more stuff happening around Centre Point, in connection with Crossrail, so lots of stuff to photo there.  Or at least to try to photo.  Sometimes building sites can’t be seen no matter what you try.

Regarding the London panorama, this is but one of many such urban views, there being a website devoted to such things, panoramicly showing you cities all around the world.  How long has that been going?

There’s even an app.  Above the button for that, it says:

Now with motion-sensitive panorama viewer!

Does this mean that you can hover two hundred feet above yourself?  Taking virtual snaps as you look out from your virtual dirigible?  If so, cool.  And probably cool whatever it is.

Immediately after my first relaunched Last Friday, the one at which Sam Bowman spoke, I suffered a dose of success depression.  This is when you achieve a goal, and then feel not happy but empty, because deprived of the goal.  The event had gone well.  But I expected a little too much from it by way of immediate good consequences.  A wise friend who attended the evening later told me that good results would indeed happen, but more gradually than I had been assuming, and that is now starting to happen.

One of the better consequences of these events is that because I send out emails to anyone I half know or know of who I think might be interested in attending, I have re-established contact with a number of friends and semi-friends who I was in danger of losing touch with.

One such, Alastair James, a libertarian friend from way back, recently sent me an email which included this:

I know you mostly like shots of one thing (often with some clutter in the foreground), but if you are also interested in panoramas I wonder if you’ve ever been to Blythe Hill Fields in Lewisham.  I think it has some of the best views in London of Canary Wharf and the City but I rarely see it mentioned.

For years I have been nagging people to tell me about good spots to photo London from, but mostly without success.  And now that turns up, pretty much unsolicited, merely through me being in touch with Alastair and discussing his son’s sporting triumphs, they being the reason that he often finds Fridays rather hard to do.

As it happens, I had never heard of Blythe Hill Fields, but it immediately sounded very promising, the clues being in the name.  A hill, with nothing in the foreground getting in the way, just fields.  Ideal for wandering around on, to find the best shots, and so, yesterday it proved.

I immediately found out where Blythe Hill Fields is (from Google maps), identified the nearest station, Honor Oak Park, and soon discovered (from this train website) that there is a train direct to Honor Oak Park from Victoria, which is very near to me.  I also learned (from a weather website) on Monday evening, that the short-range weather forecast for Tuesday was, in a word: superb.  Not a cloud in the sky, they said, and so it proved.  So, a superb forecast in the other sense also.

Yet again, we see here the working through of one of my favourite Laws, which says that new methods of communication (in this case the internet) do not replace older methods of doing things (in this case going there).  Rather do the new methods complement and as likely as not reinforce the older methods.  Writing gives people more to talk about.  Printing makes writing massively more productive, and gives rise to masses more talk.  Television adapts books and sells books and provides yet more conversation fodder.  Email makes meetings, at which we can all talk to each other some more, far easier to organise and publicise.  And now the internet makes wandering around London (also the world) massively easier.

This posting is already getting rather unwieldy, so I’ll hold the photos I took at and around Blythe Hill Fields yesterday for another posting.  Instead let me finish up this posting by quoting and commenting on another bit of the Alastair James email, which further emphasises the point about how the internet makes travelling easier, and in his case more fun:

BTW I recently finally got a Smartphone and I find it much easier to follow blogs since I got it – I’ve always felt guilty sitting in front of a PC reading a blog that I’m doing something unproductive.  Anyway I just wanted to say that I’ve been reading yours and how much I enjoy it!

You might be surprised to learn what a difference declarations of that sort can make to the morale of a blogger like me, who doesn’t now get many comments, still less comments like that.  Without my Fridays, I never get to hear that, which is a perfect example of a somewhat delayed effect that my friend in paragraph one above talked about.

But note also the smartphone thing.  Presumably Alastair now uses his to read blogs in circumstances where more serious work would be difficult, such as while travelling.

I am myself currently engaged in buying a smartphone, helped by my friend Michael Jennings (who is giving the next Friday talk this Friday – do come if you want to).  Whereas for Alastair James a key app is reading blogs on the move, for me the killer app is definitely being able to learn exactly where I am at any point in my various wanderings, and how to get to where I want to go to next.  It would have come in quite handy yesterday, but because of some serendipity that occurred without it (more about that later), I am actually quite glad that yesterday I did not have Google maps with me.  That’s another story, for which stay tuned.

I suspect that Alastair and I are not the only ones now, finally, kitting ourselves out with smartphones.  I sense a general society-wide stampede in this direction, as the iPhone works its magic.  The iPhone defines what a smartphone is, and all those for whom money is no object get one.  That tells the Taiwanese copyists what to copy at half the price, and now they have pretty much got there.

I will also be buying a “bluetooth” (Michael J says that will work) keyboard, much like the black keyboard in this posting (scroll down a bit), to go with my smartphone, the idea being that I will be able to type stuff in as well as read things.  (That keyboard is also a straight copy, in black, of an Apple keyboard, incidentally.  Again with the Apple influence.) A smartphone screen too small for typing, you say?  My very first computer, an Osborne, had a screen that was hardly any bigger, and I loved that.  Osborne equals a very stupid version of a smartphone, plus a keyboard, plus half a ton of electro-crap that is no longer needed.  Discuss.  I feel one of those ain’t-capitalism-grand postings for Samizdata coming on.

The trouble with my current laptop is that, like the Osborne if with less extremity, it is still quite heavy.  This means that I don’t always have it with me, in fact I pretty much now never have it with me, because when I do take it with me on my travels I often never actually use it, and in the meantime greatly resent its weight.  The idea is that I will always have my smartphone with me (obviously), and always (fingers crossed) with the keyboard.  So whenever a blogging opportunity beckons, when I am out and about, I will be able to respond.

The smartphone I am getting also has a rather good camera included.  It’ll be interesting to compare that camera with my present one.

At his talk chez moi on Friday Feb 22nd (see below) on How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised, Michael Jennings intends to show us some photos.  Indeed, he will be dropping by earlier in the week to make sure that the relevant technology can be guaranteed to work properly on the night.  This may also require some creativity with the seating.

Here, in the meantime, are a few photos that he has emailed to me, together with commentary.  Enjoy.

Georgia:

This is in Sukhomi, Abkhazia, a breakaway non-recognised state that is de jure part of Georgia (and is supported by Russia). Mango is a fashion label that grew out of a stall in the Ramblas market in Barcelona, and is now to globalised retail what the sub-prime market is to home ownership.

Cyprus:

An interesting phenomenon occurs when there is a market for a particular international business, and that international business does not operate in that particular market for whatever reason: because the market is too small, too distant, too poor, too corrupt, or there are political problems. Clones of the business will often spring up. These can be particularly entertaining in places where there is no trademark law, trademark law is weak, or where it can be legally difficult to pursue claims from the owner of the trademark. This burger place in northern Cyprus in no way resembles Burger King. Obviously.

One of the most extreme cases in which this phenomenon occurred was in South Africa under apartheid. Many international companies boycotted the country, which in some ways was a modern country with a sizeable middle class, economy and legal system. (In various other ways, it wasn’t and isn’t.) South Africa in 1990 was therefore full of quite good clones of international businesses, that until then were constrained as to where they could operate, but faces competition only from one another at home. Post 1990, the international businesses that they were clones of entered South Africa in a big way, and the South Africans themselves were subsequently able to compete in the wider world. The South African clones weren’t good enough or rich enough to compete in the home markets of the major internationals, and have subsequently expanded into countries that are poorly served by the internationals for a variety of reason - this means Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, parts of the Middle East. Politically dubious markets of questionable legitimacy a lot the time. One often finds South Africans and Russians side by side.

Tianjin:

One could write an entire book about fake Apple Stores. The ones in China (this one is in Tianjin) are the most awesome. The entire story of international brands in China is itself fascinating. Everyone is there, because of the perceived size and importance of the market. Yet the country is far more chaotic, far more unstable, far more corrupt, for more authoritarian, has weaker copyright and patent laws and a weaker rule of law in general than many of the markets these companies would generally consider operating in.

Mumbai:

India is more problematic in some ways: bureaucratic beyond words, and culturally difficult in ways that make foreign business models work less well, or at least require a lot more adaptation. (Imagine you are McDonald’s, and you are told that you are not permitted to use either beef nor pork in the food you sell). There have historically been limits on foreign investment. Supermarkets are only now in the process of being legalised. Very large companies can find entry to the Indian market - car makers or mobile phone companies. Medium sized companies - which is where most of the interesting stuff happens - find it much harder.

It’s going to be an interesting evening.