Amazing Maldives!

Just read that the Maldivian president is aiming to make the islands completely carbon neutral, which is such a positive step. They are hoping to do this with wind and solar power, which will hopefully lead to innovation allowing other places to follow suit.


-- Post From My iPhone

More music Sunday

It's a beautiful day outside, but we've once again chosen to sit in the bedroom and record Chimovski tracks - it all for you, folks! Dedication or what?







Here is buzz doing a rough take of Come and Get It... The ironing board kinda ruins the cool factor, but this is a home, not a studio, so what to do?! I should get my surf board in there, or maybe my new Bustin long board once I've figures out how to get it over from NY...

Getting in on london2012

Been at an Olympic 2012 business network meeting this afternoon in the museum of London in the docklands, trying to work out how to get in on the fun. They are working hard to make it 'sustainable' but as usual there are some crazy things going on. For example they've tied the heating up to a 40 year contract which is supposed to provide combined heat and power from waste at the site using bio-matter. However, this means that the houses they build on the site can't have solar hot water heating as this would eat into the projected returns of the power company... Crazy! Anyway, it was raining when I went in, but a lovely night when I came out, with all the lights of the docklands and a big moon rising between the buildings. The iPhone camera can't do it justice of course, but you get the idea.

Simple sounds

Been recording more chimovski this week, trying to get a few more tracks nailed before our next gig, which is Friday the 3rd April at Dead or Alive in Bar Rhumba on Shaftesbury Av. Should be a good one as it's Rich's birthday that weekend. Jim is having a party on the saturday too so it might be a mad weekend.








Went to comedy at the Arts Club on Frith St on Saturday- was very funny and a cool venue, though I wasn't reduced completely to tears as I often am. Must go to more comedy, laughter is great.

Freedom Path longboard

I've just been checking Core77 and it looks as though my Freedom Path long board has been cut and is on it's way! COOOOOOL. Ch ch ch check it here.

Ten at Fifteen

Went to Jamie Oliver's Fifteen retaurant last night with a bunch of friends. Was pretty nice food and not bad value overall, though I think there's probably a fair amount of hype about it. We were given a set menu, the starter being a large plate of various tasty treats including aubergine, yummy pate and, king sqaush and some mozarella. For my main I chose haddock on a bed of chick peas, but for me it a was a little salty and the chick peas a little to crunchy- I know they're supposed to be 'al dente' but personally I prefer the Spanish style soft ones...

Anyway, here are some photos of the fun:

First mobile blog

Just checking, while I await my sandwhich, whether blogging from my iphone is working...


-- Post From My iPhone

Boiler Man

Poor engineer dude is here from British Gas....his afternoon started badly with a difficult to maintain and repair boiler that had broken down in some poor old dears' house, leaving her with no hot water and no heating. He toiled all afternoon, when I called to find out where he was, he said he was looking at bits of a boiler all laid out over the floor....so I waited patiently, just hoping he would come today so that I wouldn't need to wait until tomorrow. And come he did, at about six thirty, and he's still beavering away in the kitchen trying to get my boiler to work properly...

I made him a cuppa tho' so he'll be right as rain soon.

Just been reading through the Howies blog, those guys still rock. I'm sending them some jackets back on which the zips have broken....I'm hoping their design team will find it useful to see where their jackets fall down and make them even better.

Snow fun, comp winer and more.

Well, Manu Chao was awesome, I was right to be excited! Following that Leah and I headed to Sri Lanka for a lovely holiday over Christmas, with Bobby, Netta, Laurie, Beth and Family...I should post some photos thinking about it.

2009 has started well. Chimovski played an awesome gig at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town. We managed to get 99 people down to see us so the place was heaving - they had to open the doors at the back so that the people who couldn't get in could see! I'll try and sort out video and photos soon. We're playing again at the Bullet Bar in Camden on the 26th Feb.

This Monday serious snow hit London, which meant my office was closed for the day, which was a nice surprise. Went for a nice walk with Jesse and Katharine through Regents' park and up to Primrose Hill. The snow was perfect for snow-balls and snow-men. This lead to everyone rolling MASSIVE snow balls, until they couldn't roll them anymore, and they lay dotted about the park like some kind of strange art exhibition. It was a shame to see the number of discarded bin-liner bags all over Primrose Hill. People are SO lazy.

From cold snaps

I had a result today as I found out that I'm one of the winners for this months Core77 1 Hour Design Competition. You can see my 'Freedom' entry here. Always nice to win something.

Seriously excited: Manu Chao next week

I'm sitting here winding myself up watching Manu Chao videos on You Tube. I've managed to get some tickets for next Wednesday to see them play at the Forum and I'm seriously excited.



It's grandma's funeral that day too, which is less exciting obviously, tho' I'm hoping it wont be a dour affair, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want it to be.

£120 road sign

This almost invisible congestion charge sign ended up costing me £120 last week since I missed it when I drove to work to return the hire car that I'd rented for the weekend in order to go to Wales. Unfortunatley, due to a crash on the M4 we didn't make it to Wales and instead spent fives hours on a Friday night driving nowhere in order to end up back home.

The really painful thing is that the hire company, Capital Hire, have charged £50 + VAT to photocopy the congestion charge letter and send it to me. OUCH.

The sign should be bigger, it's stealth! If the van on right was on the other side of the road you wouldn't see it at all.

Chimovski return to the Stage

A big thanks to all those who made the French Revolution in London party last night and gave support to us. Was great to be back on stage playing music, we've got some great new songs and it felt really good to be up there. Hopefully I'll get hold of some photos soon.

We're working on the website, so that should be live soon, and we're still recording so we should have some more stuff for your iPods soon.

Glastonbury 2008

Here are our photos from this years' Glastonbury festival.

Once the rain stopped it was a great festival, I think my favourite band to see were Vampire Weekend - see them if you can 'cause they're great live. We also saw Manu Chao again, who rocked, a bit of Leonard Cohen though we split early as Tasha didn't really like him, some great circus and comedy, and lots of other stuff too.

Keeny Greeny

I've been spending the last few months trying to get under the skin of sustainable and 'good' design, but it's proving very difficult to reach a consensus in many areas as to what we should all be doing. True, there are some examples of great forward thinking design, like the Herman Miller Aero office seat, but the main difficulty I have is convincing everyday clients and my fellow designers as to what the best steps forward are and how we can make them economically viable. One of the main problems it seems to me is that consumerism is so fundamentally woven into our society as the model for happiness and good living. I finally got round to watching the http://www.storyofstuff.com/ video and it says everything I've been thinking and reading for ages... only thing is trying to change the momentum behind our current way of life and alter the rather self destructive direction we are currently pursuing.

There are lots of great ideas coming from people like wearewhatwedo.org and http://www.dothegreenthing.com/ but I wonder how global all that really is - who's actually reading them and taking part other than what probably amounts to a pretty small concerned minority at the moment. So how do we get these thoughts out to your every day Joe Blogs? Well the Internet is certainly doing it's part on many fronts, as I suppose is some of the media. But many of the arguments are still unresolved, and some ideas that seem really good on the face of things have terrible implications - such as trying to run our cars on Bio Ethanol- Bye Bye Forrest and food!

Anyway, just some ramblings as I sit here musing on how to draw all this stuff together into something that makes sense.

The Story of Stuff

Please watch this:
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Thanks!

Back in Colombo

So Leah, Tasha and I have returned to Colombo after five months in London for a two week break to celebrate Aushi and Ero's wedding, which is next Saturday. It's great to be back, especially as this time we have no agenda and nothing to organise, which means we can chill and hang out and go visiting places.

Last night was Aushi's 2nd Hen Night, once again themed after Sex and the City. They asked me to take some photos, which came out ok but I don't have permission to post them here yet...ok, well maybe use one.

So tomorrow we're going to head South towards Galle with Zarook and Neela so spend some time chilling with them. The weather is very hot and pretty muggy, but the sun has been out so hopefully I can get some colour over my computer tan. Plus I'm determined to get a bit of a tan since Helena has a bet out against me that I will come back the same colour as I left...

Lauren's b-Day Bash

Si B Stag Photos

apparently it was a car chase...

that got the bikes (see my previous post)! Now that would have been fun to watch!

Went on Si B's Stag Do this weekend to Dan's parents farm down in Surrey. We did lot's of boy stuff, like shooting, quad biking and swapping manly stories about the good old days of being young, free and single!

The clay pigeon shooting took place on the farm itself under a lovely clear blue sky and was lead by a couple of real old geezers who regaled us with their stories, usually begining with 'well, when I was a lad' and 'caws, kids these days dhant know their bauwn'. We split into two groups; the have shots and the have not shots - I was needless to say in the beginners team and spent quite a while missing, but on my very last go I got 6 clays for six bullets so I was dead chuffed.

After a Bar-b-q that was most skillfully cooked up by Dan's folks we headed off to quad biking, which took place on a seriously hill-billy farm but was pretty enjoyable considering my preference is to have pedals if the word 'bike' is involved! There was plenty of mud and a fair amount of testosterone to boot.

Quad biking was followed by setting up camp back at the farm, and with a fair degree of optimism I strung my Hammock between some very thorny trees next to the camp site. I'd forgotten how cool the hammock that we bought way down in Florianapolis is, and it's fairly ironic that I carried it all the way up through Brasil only to send it home and not use it till now. I put up a tent anyway just in case the many predictions of rain were to come true...

Once camp was all set we headed off to the Hare and Hounds for a fantastic meal and some post shooting/quad biking analysis, general advice to Si on being married, er, again, and plenty of Spitfire ale and red wine.

Back at camp a number of hours later and with some marsh mallows and Stella Artois to hand we lit the carefully pre-prepared bonfire (Dan's handywork) and settled down to some suitable round-the-camp-fire banter. I'm sure at this point I began to bestow virtues on Red Ken beyond his merrit in response to the terror I felt that some of the party were considering voting for Boris... Oh well, seems to be the way with a lot of people I know, and it occurred to me today that we may well end up using the term 'Borisisms' way more that we can currently imagine if it goes his way.

After I failed miserably to get my guitar to play properly and we'd thoroughly exhausted a good number of Stella cans I fumbled my way into the Hammock and settled down to get some shut eye. Sure enough at some very early time of the morning I was awoken by rain pitter pattering through the tree leaves and onto my head, so in fear of a total down pour I upped camp and retreated to my tent. However, no sooner had I got there than the rain stopped and all was well again at camp Mohacek.

Sunday was a day of recuperation and rest and generally feeling pretty mash-up, which would mean that the stag do can count as a complete success.

Bike rack destruction

Check this, someone overcooked this junction and destroyed this rack of bikes. Nuts. Hope no-one was putting their bike in at the time...