migrant|roo

I helped launch The Sound of Orange Rockcorps with POKE.

It's a midi-based Flash sequencer, where you and your Facebook friends can create a bank of notes to make your song. Like this:

Wasn't an easy road by a long way, but we're all dead proud of the final result :)

There are a few very excellent film photographers at POKE and I've felt a growing desire to try out film photography over the past few months. It's not that I think that I can start to suddenly take photos as good as those folks, but just that there's a lo-fi charm about the whole thing I really like. No chips, or beeping, or card readers or Photoshop.

So, I bought some film cameras. I was tempted by the very famous and popular Lomo LCA, but kept exploring other options. After doing a lot of research and Flickr-ing, the camera I arrived at was the magnificent Olympus XA:

(I also bought a couple of it's newer brothers, the Olympus XA2)

All in all, it's absolutely great fun. I'm getting my films processed at ASDA after some truly awful results from Spectrum Imaging (and some snotty customer service too) and I'm so impressed - giant supermarket doing awesome scans for £1.50 a roll, within the hour - who would've guessed?

Here are some photos off the first couple of rolls I got back from the XA and XA2:

Big thanks to Marc, Greg, Will and the rest of the filmnerds at Poke who opened my eyes to another side of photography :)

I'm also fully aware that I have done any food-blogging in bloody ages. I have loads of photos to blog, and now that I've got over blank-blog syndrome it should be easier to get them posted.

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

Welcome balloon racers! I work for POKE and I was lucky enough to be part of a very talented team that created the Balloon Race Across the Internet. It's been a long and in part difficult road, but I for one am so proud of what we've managed to achieve.

I love the idea of people dropping onto here, so please say hello! If you leave the name of your balloon I'll even give you a boost :)

I'm now the proud owner of a Specialized Sirrus bike!

My bike got stolen from the station a few weeks ago, which coincided nicely with Poke joining Evans' very noble Ride2Work scheme, meaning I got a cool 35% off the price :)

Here she is:

I am so, so impressed! The ride is extremely fast, and the bike itself is so much lighter than I thought it would be. Riding on London's shitty potholed roads is a bit, ahem, jarring.. but I'm going to be using this mostly out around the countryside near Milton Keynes, so i'm not really bothered.

If you're looking for a fast, racey bike but that isn't actually a racer, look no further. At £400 you get a lot of quality for your money, and a bike that should cope really well with any kind of road riding.

It's something I've been talking about for a while, and today i've actually done it - I've permanently removed myself from Facebook.

I'd never really taken to it, preferring to use lots of the tried and tested methods to keep in touch with people I like, and found it was mostly useful for having inane twice-yearly "conversations" with people I intentionally stopped speaking to.