A month at The Werks

I’ve mentioned I’ve been working out of the Werks. Well… it’s been a month now [over a month, but this blog post has been sitting around whilst I was away] and in that time I’ve visited the Werks ten times or so. I’m not sure exactly how often, but long enough and frequently enough for the coffee shop to know what my order is.

Unexpectedly I’ve ended up having about three times the number of meetings I’d normally have—the good kind of meeting, mind you. That’s down to being able to say “just drop by” rather than having to actually arrange anything. An example: Danny popping round the other day and we had the space to spread out his Post-Its® and discuss a bunch of ideas.

I get the sense that there’s a good chance of chance happenings happening—especially once more of the space is used. I’d expect more people to be showing up once we’re out of the dismal months.

A few times I find it better to work from the home office, for instance if I need the printer, make tricky phone calls, or just absolutely need guaranteed quiet. But mostly I’ve noticed that I may be getting more done when I do go to the Werks. As odd as it might seem, having to plan the day around what you need (that file? that external drive?) and then having to head out, seems to set the tone for the day. Prevents thrashing. Create focus. Something like that.

Sierra Nevada Laguina Lift

For a while I’ve been meaning to record an entire lift run at a ski resort.
On a trip to Sierra Nevada last March, Jane decided to make the recording — presumably because she was bored of me mentioning it and forgetting to
do it.

Unfortunately she picked the longest lift run at the resort. The original video
sequence was a finger chilling 10min 11sec, but you’ll be glad to know it’s been sped up here to just 2:10. There’s no sound on this clip, in case you were wondering if your sound was turned all the way down.

The only feature of interest here is that there’s a radio telescope
at the top of a hill
. When riding with that in the background, you half
expect James Bond bad guys with automatic weapons to start chasing you on skidoos. Well, I do.

New gadgets

Over the past few months I’ve gained some nice new gadgets, which I’ve reviewed over at one or other of my other blogs. But, this was originally the home of gadget reviews, so here’s an overview with links to my other musings.

Nokia 6110 Navigator – I got this phone on Vodafone in August time and its the first phone that I’ve made use of as a general device rather than just a phone. I use the mobile internet on it quite a lot to keep up with google reader and twitter (mainly). I make use of the GPS tracking via the Nokia Research project SportsTracker and have uploaded some tracks to their new beta community site as well as listing them all in our maps section. This has taken over from the combined SportsDo on an old Sony P900 connection to an external bluetooth GPS. The major advantage of the 6110 Navigator is that the routes can be saved directly from the memory card, with SportsDo they had to be uploaded over mobile internet to the SportsDo site before then allowing them to be downloaded in google maps format.
The 6110 Navigator also comes with Route 66 software with which I’ve had a few battles but am now getting on fine with.

iPod Touch – I got this as a Christmas present and I love it. I got a rubberised case for it as part of my Christmas gift but also bought a screen protector for it (after I’d managed to give it a small scratch). Since getting this I’ve started watching a lot more video podcasts, especially to do with photography. I purchased the $20 January upgrade and am finding the mail application really great to use.

Braun PixelBank – As I wind up taking more and more photographs with my beautiful Nikon D80 the ability to recycle my SD cards quickly enough is getting to be more of a challenge, especially when I am without my laptop. So, I decided it was time to buy a portable storage unit that could read from SD and xD (for my little Olympus fe130). It has 60GB of storage all held on a 2.5 inch replaceable hard disk and can be charged via USB and uses USB 2 for transfers.

3 different gadgets, all so far being enjoyed…