Tete-a-Tete at the Tate

Today we left the hotel, walked across the Millennium Bridge and then on to the Tate Modern. Wonderful gallery. I love going there, they usually have some very good free exhibits. Not sure what they all mean, but I always find them interesting.

View from the bridge

View from the Tate

Pop Art

Heading Back

Then it was onto the train for home. Great stuff.

London Birthday Bash

Today we all headed for London and the birthday bash for number on daughter. Lots of treats to come. Including a trip to the Apple store (which was for me).

Racing to London. We beat the car to the next junction.

We arrived in London bang on time, got to the Apple store before it opened and I got myself a docking station or two (the shiny new iPhone doesn't have a docking station supplied like the old one did).

Then we went for lunch at the Rainforest Cafe (excellent food and a thunder storm every twenty minutes) and on to Spamalot. Very well done, and very funny. For it to work it had to have proper music and dancing. And it did. Along with funny jokes and some tunes to sing along to. Heartily recommended.

Then the final treat of the day, a trip on the London Eye. With the big camera and fat lens.

Base of the eye

Looking towards the Telecom Tower

Our seat of "government"

Back on terra firma

Then we wandered out in search of food and taxis.

This is my favourite picture of the whole trip.

Although this runs it close. There are more on Flickr.

Then back to the hotel for a rest. Excellent day. More tomorrow. Can't wait.

Wall-e

Lots of Wall-e is wrong. The premise (the human race renders the earth uninhabitable by rampant consumerism) is rather strange coming from a movie which will be accompanied by the inevitable welter of disposable artifacts that you get with a big budget Hollywood release (actually, I really wanted one of the Wall-e wrist watches they were giving away but didn't get one). The lead character hardly has a line of dialogue, and nobody speaks for the first quarter of the film. Some aspects of the plot are a bit loopy and the people who designed the spaceship had obviously watched '2001 a Space Odyssey' rather a lot.

But the film is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. We have reached the point where the fact that the whole thing was computer generated is completely incidental (although getting images of this quality and wonder would be impossible any other way). It is all about character and story and that is there in spades, along with a love story thrown in. But don't listen to me any more. Just go and see it.

Schmap Maps on iPhone

If you have an iPhone (or other device with web access) you might like to take a look at Schmap guides. There are guides for lots of cities around the world and they provide useful information behind a nicely designed interface.

And I'm not just saying this because they've used one of my pictures. Oh no.

Dr. Horrible

Number one son commands that you watch this. I do to, it is rather good.