Phil Balchin

HTML 5

Interesting insight into the future of web markup. A List Apart have produced a useful preview of the newest version of HTML. The current version of HTML, version 4, has been with us since the mid 90s, and quite honestly its looking really dated. In the mid 90s, flash had only just been launched (and was only capable of really simple animation), embeding sound onto a web page was almost impossible (remember using a dialup modem?) and knowbody had even thought of streaming video? Well, we take all these things for granted now, but i order to get them all to work, we have to hack HTML to do things that it was never designed to do. HTML did get a minor bump with the introduction of XHTML, but that only reinforced what we already knew, it didn’t bring any new features with it.

So why HTML5? well, with this new version, HTML will be the centre of a complete web publishing API, with built-in support for flash, sound, video and next-greneration javascript. The core language of HTML also gets loads of new semantic markup tags, bringing improved support for mobile devices and users with disabilities.

When can we expect this HTML5 thing then? well, its not been approved yet by the W3C, and support in Internet Explorer is almost non-existent, but other browsers like Safari, Firefox and Opera are all slowly adding support. It may not be here now, but it is going to be the future of Internet

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Phil Balchin

Beat Happening

Genre: American Twee Pop; Label: Krecs

Formed in early 80s, Beat Happening were early leaders in the american new lo-fi musical sound, and have been releasing their ‘twee/indie pop’ . Deliberately using simple and primitive recording techniques, Beat Happening produce a very rough and deep sound, mixed with strong deep american vocals mixed with simple backbeats.

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Phil Balchin

Swings and roundabouts. The Big Mystery Kyan day out ...

Thursday started like any other day, except that particular we were told to bring to work some ‘out-door clothing’, which we all thought to meant we were going paint-balling or go-carting, but, we were totally wrong. As we came discover, the big Kyan mystery day out, was a short trip to Frensham woods and the afternoon on the goape high ropes course, which involves a lot of swinging around in trees, negotiating high wire rope obstacles, and ultimately, jumping out of the trees whilst attached to a zip-line.

Thankfully we were warned in advance to bring outdoor clothing, and we all arrived to work in morning wearing our finest baggy jeans and tough boots.

The High Wire Course

Resembling the Ewok village from Starwars, the course is a series of platforms built around the tall thin trees, with rope ladders to ascend. Once your on the course, you have various wire and rope bridges to cross to get to the next tree. At the end of each section of the course, you hook your safety lines to the zip-line and slide gracefully backwards/upsidedown to the forest floor.

All in all, it took about 3 hours to complete the course spread over five sections.

More photos of the Mystery day out do exist on Flickr

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