Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

NSConference, Day One

Just finished a long and excellent day at NSConference. I would be tempted to say that all the speakers today were brilliant, but that would be immodest since I was one of them. All the other speakers were brilliant.
Matt Legend Gemmell kicked off the conference with a very measured, calm and reassuring walk [...]

The Joy of Travel Planning

Instead of looking forward at the start of the year, I’m taking a little time to think about now. Every year, around this time, I always develop a hankering to travel somewhere. I love planning to travel. It fits my predisposition to overengineering. Plan, and re-plan. Measure five times and then, maybe, cut.
We now have [...]

London

I’m heading down to London next week for Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk. I thought it would be fun to repost a set from London from last year.
Flickr now supports embedding their slideshows in external sites, so here goes:

Matt Biddulph is hosting a little soirée afterwards. See you there?

C4[2] Brain-dump

Writing this at a table in Heathrow Terminal 5, halfway home to Scotland after spending the weekend at C4[2]. I’ll try and pull out my highlights.
The crowd is a feature at C4. I don’t want to insult those not in Chicago by saying that “everyone who is anyone was there”, but everyone who was [...]

T-minus-twelve

I just noticed that it’s been nearly two months since I wrote here. It’s been a busy time and that time has mostly been spent pushing really hard on my efforts with the iPhone SDK. Neither are yet done, but yesterday I wrapped up phase one (the I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-doing phase) to get ready to leave [...]

Dopplr and the “so what” of social networking

I signed up for Dopplr. The idea behind Dopplr is great - have people come together around their travel plans. However, unless you’re an insanely frequent traveller, or have huge numbers of friends, Dopplr really suffers from the lack of a Step 2.
See, on Dopplr, I can share my travel plans with people, see some [...]

Edinburgh Castle

I visited Edinburgh Castle with my friend Neil yesterday. It was really great - I hadn’t appreciated how much there was to see in there.
There are at least three army museums, the crown jewels of Scotland and the Stone of Destiny. The Royal Apartments are the part of the castle in which James I was [...]

April Does London

My trip to London with April went really well. It wasn’t exactly a photographic expedition, since I didn’t have Carolyn as a second pair of eyes to check that April wasn’t playing in traffic (not that London traffic moves very fast).

April Playing in St. James Park
Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 22
1/30 @ f/4.5, [...]

In The Interests Of….

I’m just back from London which, for the first time, felt like a city slightly paranoid, unhappy and joyless. Everything, it seems, has been prohibited, regulated or become subject to fines for violation. In particular, the Health and Safety legislation seems to be the shibboleth of the killjoys who once universally worked as park [...]

Lazyweb: London

I’m planning to take April to London for a day or two on October, and I’d like some help: I need a child-friendly hotel somewhere in central London.
There are precisely ten bajillion hotels in London, and I’m struggling to find something that fits the bill. It doesn’t need to provide anything in particular, just [...]