I just had too many websites and not enough time, especially as my photography is taking up the bulk of the limited free time I get.

That said, the site will remain up with the blog archived, and also as a place to find all the articles I've written over the years. That section will still be updated as and when there's something new to put up there.

But it's not all bad news, there are still two main places to keep up with my doings:

Tech blog on the Moore Consulting site

Photoblog at Clearing the Vision

Cheers,

David

PS: Or there's always the Flickr fun:

www.flickr.com More of wycombiensian's photos

This, together with the natural desire to take lots of pictures of my young daughter, rekindled my interest in real photography - after I’d been distracted for years by the ease of digital point-and-shoots. And I got some shots I was really happy with.

I was right - getting hold of cheap (or in my case, free) film SLR is a good way to start taking more pictures, and now is a great time to get hold of one. But I was also completely wrong, in ways I’ll now describe.

Cheap Camera, expensive running costs

The problem is that if you’re interested in photography, you want to take a lot of pictures, and film doesn’t really make that very easy.

Sure, you can send your films to Shutterfly or the like, and only pay to print the ones you like, but that takes a while, and there’s a hidden catch I wasn’t aware of immediately. I thought that if Shutterfly developed the film and put the digital versions online for you to see (which they do), then you could download the hi-res versions for no cost - since you’d paid for the developing.

In fact they show you a lo-res version that you can use to decide if you want prints or not, but the hi-res versions will cost you the price of an archive CD - in my case nearly $20 for 150 images or so.

Grass is always greener

The other thing working against film is that the lenses on most SLRs are ‘cross-platform’ - working on that brand’s digital SLR bodies too. So the nice Canon 28-105mm USM I inherited would fit on the Canon digital bodies I soon started ogling. That meant it wasn’t going to cost as much as I thought if I wanted to go digital.

After a lot of research, and much pained inspection of my bank balance, I was the proud owner of a Canon 350D (or Digital Rebel XT, as they insist on calling it here in the US), bought without incident from Beach Camera.

So now I can shoot like a crazy person, and sort out the keepers later, without fussing with film and delays and all that. And I’ve greatly enjoyed the who experience - supporting it with a useful 4-class course at the local community college to fill in the gaps in my basic knowledge.

Birthday Photowalk

As the camera was technically a birthday present, I took some time on Tuesday to walk around town a bit (and take some shots of my subject, Finn). The results are here.
I’ll write more later about the learning curve, and about the search for software to help on the computer side of things.

I’m going to ride the Santa Fe Century this year. The last couple of years I’ve sort of been meaning to do it, and then sort of meant to just do the 50, and then sort of didn’t do it all.

Which is no good. So I’m making it public in the hope that now it’s out there I have to do it.

I went to my first spinning class in a couple of weeks this morning, and feel like I got flattened by most of the Irish rugby union back row. Which is a pretty good reason for going more often.

Then, when the streets are finally clear of slushy icy cinder-brown piles of snow, I can get back out on the bike, which is currently buried behind house extension-related boxes in the garage.

I’ve done a couple of centuries (both in Ireland), and some other long day rides (starting with a 75 and then 50 around the Sonoma Valley in 2000), so hopefully the legs haven’t completely forgotten about those (or the 2000 miles in 2 months I notched up in 2001 and 2003 for the long trips, but that’s sort of a different thing).

Firstly, I need to flick through Marci’s cycling training books and build myself a plan.

Then I have to stick to it - basically, I’ll be trying to get all the necessary training by riding only two (or towards the end, three) times a week. Time is tight with work and my Fionnuala-minding duties, so the biggest problem will be just getting the necessary miles done.

But the benefits in terms of fitness, energy and general good humour should be good to see. I’ll keep you posted.

Marci had a better idea - she strapped on her cross-country skis and slid down the (uncleared) driveway and along our road to check out the situation.

The snow has stopped now, and we can finally see across town (although the mountains are still shrouded in cloud).

We’re going to brunch tomorrow if we have to use tennis rackets as snowshoes. Another day in this white prison, and we’ll end up like ‘The Shining’.

Amid the smart-talking and wisecracks, there are some heavyweight references. In recent weeks the show’s namechecked Pericles and Strindberg, and this week there was a sensitively-handled storyline involving the Hollywood blacklistings of the 1950s.

The return of pedeconferencing

An ensemble cast of clever characters walking down corridors having sharp conversations ("pedeconferencing") was Sorkin’s stock in trade in ‘The West Wing’, but now his TV show is about a TV show (it’s set in a thinly-disguised “SNL"), he can explore the perils and opportunities facing his own medium now.

It’s a return to familiar ground for him - his first TV show was the lauded but overlooked ‘Sports Night’, set in the studio of an almost-ESPN.

Just as The West Wing’s Martin Sheen was the president many of us wished we could vote for, so Amanda Peet plays the head of a network we wish we could watch. She refuses to buy a reality TV show that subjects the competitors to media intrusion until they crack, and supports ‘Studio 60’ as it runs a sketch guaranteed to upset the Christian rIght.

In reality of course, no-one ever went bankrupt underestimating the public’s appetite for down-market TV, and the challenge facing both the show itself and the show-within-the-show is to prove that a smarter approach can also be a success.

Clever but flawed

One way to do this is to wear your learning lightly, and ‘Studio 60’ is careful not to take itself very seriously while making serious points.

The characters are clever, but they’re also endearingly flawed. Matthew Perry plays a version of Chandler (or is that Sorkin?), this time reborn as a neurotically talented head writer.  Bradley Whitford again gets to be a wry and loyal lieutenant. We’re in safe and crucially likeable hands here - and there’s good support from Nate Corddry and D L Hughley (who must be delighted finally to get a script worthy of his stand-up talents),

So, the characters feel real, and the plotting is tight and interwoven. But it’s the script itself that sparkles, without a word out of place. You know you’re watching something out of the ordinary, when the show finishes and you still hear the rhythms of the dialogue in your head.

A real imagined world

With The West Wing, Sorkin’s was an alternative reality that he could never make real. ‘With Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’, he’s imagining an alternate world of good TV, and creating a little bit of it for real at the same time.

It seems my adult life has been punctuated by the England football team losing on penalties in important competitions. We think it suits us, that we’re dogged and sturdy, but I think it just lets us off the hook.

It’s as if, if we really tried and went all out for a win, and believed we could do it, and then failed, that would be much worse. Because we’d put everything into winning, and come up short.

This time it was Rooney’s disgraceful sending off that let us be plucky losers - disgraceful because no professional footballer playing for his country in the World Cup has any excuse for losing the head and stamping on someone’s crown jewels.

But where was the real spirit when we had 11 men? And the lack of will and guts when it came to the penalty shoot-out was horrible to watch.

Hargreaves (the only one in a white jersey who looked like he cared) ran his legs off during the game and scored his penalty. But Lampard and Gerrard (anonymous during the game) bottled it from the spot.

I’m not sure what it is in English culture, or at least the culture of English football that creates a team of such potential that always fails to deliver.

At least in Spain and Brazil (where the same conversation is no doubt going on today), they can take comfort from the fact that they played some great football during the tournament and were beaten by a team playing very well.

The rodeo sits in its own grounds out on what used to be the edge of town, but it’s now been overtaken by low brown sprawl. But once you’re sitting in the old-fashioned grandstand with some lemonade (with real lemons in it) and a quesadilla, you forget you’re in the 21st century.

There are more boots being worn by the audience than I’ve ever seen before - kids are wearing wranglers, stetsons, boots and spurs; and so are the dads. There’s a sub-group of aging hippie audience members (this is Santa Fe, after all), and a weird Footballers’ Wives meets All Creatures Great and Small thing going on in one of the boxes. Scantily clad young girls with Jackie O shades are in danger of getting a mouthful of dirt during the team roping event - who knows how they came to be here.

The pageantry was great - an arena full of horses being nonchalantly ridden one-handed is always worth seeing - and the Rodeo Queen did her cool gallop and salute thing, but what I’d forgotten about all this was that it’s a professional sporting event.

The guys trying to ride broncos or bring down the calf in four seconds flat are competing against each other for money, and the chance to go to bigger events in the rodeo world. This might be minor league stuff, but there’s a (hard) living to be made if you’ve got the talent and bravery to do it.

We’d just watched Brokeback Mountain, which put a slightly different spin on things, and you could just see Jack Twist scraping by at rodeos like this. But that aside, it gave me an insight into a different slice of Santa Fe life, away from the galleries and spiritualism and over-educated blow-ins like myself. The sponsors were a Dodge truck dealership, a ranchwear manufacturer, and a propane company - all things you need if you’re living out on a ranch, but not things that get a lot of attention in town.

Like many new parents, we don’t get out much (but the fortnightly babysitter-enabled date nights are definitely promising), but when we saw that ridiculously talented floppy-haired young English jazz man Jamie Cullum was coming to Santa Fe, we snaffled up a couple of tickets.

Jamie’s huge in England, but fortunately not so well known here, so he was playing in the small and funky open-air theatre, the Paolo Soleri. The evening came round, and with Memorial Day weekend and all, no one could be found to watch Finn. So she came too - Santa Fe is supremely kid friendly, and no-one batted an eye as we walked in with her in the Baby Bjorn.

It was a great show - Jamie has a great voice, some hot piano chops and a likeable way about him, and soon we were all very happy (and Finn was asleep). Depending on how you look at it, he’s either an MOR crooner and sell-out who pretends to be a jazz musician but is actually after the suburban audience, or he’s the very model of a modern relevant jazz dude, throwing in Doves and Radiohead covers with the standards.

I tend more towards the latter view, and he certainly gave us a good night - it was his last show before heading off on holiday, and the band had an end-of-term feel about them.

The sun set over the Indian School, Jamie said his goodbyes, and I was left wondering what the hell a guy from London made of the whole thing. He was complimentary about the weather and the location, and he certainly liked it more than Phoenix the night before (which wouldn’t be hard), but as he headed off for Hawaii, it just brought home to me how far from home I am here in my new home.

Another couple of audience members have posted their reviews of the show on Jamie’s site (complete with the set list - nice idea, by the way, for any musician’s site)

But I’m back with something to show for my absence - a few pics from my travels. I picked up the old SLR again after a long break (film - how last century), and had a great deal of fun with it.

Here’s young Fionnuala, a shot from the garden of the Institute of American Indian Arts (across the road from the office), and the sign from Joseph’s in Santa Rosa (on old Route 66 haunt we stopped at on the way back from Clovis).

The DVR has helped in this, making sure when we slump down on the couch for an hour, there’s always something we want to watch available. My trusty RSS reader gives me the internet-based lowdown from many a site, but there’s a new kid in town that’s also more than pulling its weight - ’The Week‘.

Rather like The Editor section in the UK Guardian (don’t know if they still have it since they went all Berliner), it pulls together the best of the US and international media in one slim and scan-ready publication.

You get analysis, book and movie reviews, some weird stories and one full-length feature, and you can feel like you’re keeping on top of things, including some interesting stories from foreign news sources you wouldn’t be reading unless you were being paid by the Pentagon or MI6.

Of course there’s the danger that this is a type of continuous partial attention, where you mistake being mildly informed for actually knowing what’s going on (as Neal Stephenson remarked, quoting Donald Knuth, he’s not about keeping on top of things, he’s about getting to the bottom of things), but to my mind, a little breadth is a good thing, so long as it’s accompanied by some real rigour.

And if you’re looking for well-chosen breadth and you’re on a time budget, The Week fits the bill nicely.