Ejecutive

My Year in Photographs

My most memorable photograph was this cityscape taken in Tokyo. The smog and buildings, especially the tall chimneys, reminds me of the opening shots of Blade Runner.

Following on with the Japan theme, this is a photograph of a temple in the historic town of Nikko, which we visited on a day trip from Tokyo. See more Japan photographs.

My favourite photograph from my visit to the Lake District this year, there is something I really like about the calm created by this. See more photographs from my travels around the UK this year.

2007 was also the year that I started shooting film again, and I’ve now amassed quite a collection of film cameras. Here’s one of my favourite film photographs taken this year, with a £1 Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.

My Year in Cities

This is a list of cities I visited and stayed at least one night in for 2007:

• Nottingham, UK *
• London, UK *
• Tokyo, Japan *
• Kyoto, Japan
• Nikko, Japan
• Dublin, Ireland

Cities marked with * were visited more than once on non-consecutive days. For once, I didn’t go to Aberdeen, Scotland at all this year.

My Year in Travel

The most enjoyable trip this year has to be the one to Japan with my old school buddy Stephen. We visited the sights in Tokyo and Kyoto, getting lost while wondering the streets on more than one occasion. Japan is truly a wonderful place. And it’s a strange place.

My other trip abroad was to Dublin with my ex-fiancee Kirsten. I loved it, Dublin has great food, great people and great music. The best part is that its big enough to accommodate a long weekend of snooping, but small enough that you don’t feel like you’ve missed out by just spending two full days there.

I also visited a lot of places in England this year, mainly around the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. Nothing beats driving in the Yorkshire Dales; hardly any traffic, winding roads, spectacular views, and a sense of wilderness really gets the blood running.

My Year in Technology

This has to be the year of the iPhone, the device that has revolutionised smartphones. It’s also the year in which I’ve moved to using a Mac full time, and a MacBook none-the-less¹ from my old Dell computer with Vista installed.

The Nikon D3, which arrived quite late in the year, also deserves a mention as it has single handily brought Nikon back into the DSLR race with Canon. An honourable mention should also go to Fuji for bringing out the S5 Pro, a fantastic camera with a huge dynamic range and great high ISO performance, and also to Pentax and Olympus for bringing more competition to the usual Nikon and Canon dominated market.

And finally Asus, for bringing out the computer that no-one else wants to make, the Eee PC. No-one else wanted to gamble on a barebones laptop sold for just a couple hundred dollars, but Asus did and managed to turn out a fantastic product at the same time.

But for a whole year, I can only pick out three outstanding new consumer products (ignoring the fact that the D3 is, in fact, a professional camera). It has been a year of disappointments: Sony PlayStation 3, Blu-ray, and HD-DVD have all failed to kick off. Let’s hope next year starts off with another bang at MacWorld 2008.

The best of the stuff I bought this year must be the Dell 24″ 2407WFP-HC widescreen monitor–with it’s fantastic image quality and huge 1920×1200 resolution, the Epson Perfection 4990 scanner, and the concisely named Tamron SP AF17-50mm F/2.8 XR Di II LD Aspherical [IF], the optical bargain of the year.

My Year in Sports

In January I started a new fitness regime, and managed to loose 10KGs by June. I’ve also gone from someone who couldn’t run at all to now attempting to run 10KM in under 45 minutes (just need to shave another minute off my current pace) and starting to prepare for a half-marathon next year. So it’s looking very good.

I also started playing squash regularly in November, and along with running it’s become my major source of exercise ever since I left the gym.

Stephen Fry now has a technology column with The Guardian, following on from the style of his blog which I linked to.

He talks about the value of style and substance in a digital device:

What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started…

This is the exact problem I find with Windows Mobile phones. Functionally, third party applications means you can get GPS navigation, instant messaging, interactive underground maps, and thousands more. But there is one fundamental problem with Windows Mobile, after six versions and seven years of development¹ its still not possible to use it without a stylus.

Those of you that haven’t used a smartphone whose interface requires a stylus won’t quite understand, but its infuriating. Its almost impossible to use one accurately when walking, so you have to be either standing still or sitting down. Even then some of the buttons and scroll bars especially are still small enough to make errors fairly common.

This leads me back to the aforelinked Why Enterprise Software Sucks. I’ve yet to come across any enterprise software that manages to blend the right amounts of style and substance. In fact 99% of enterprise software is incredibly poorly designed, and I sometimes wonder how much people get paid to write this appalling rubbish.

Some people will never get it, the kind of people who wonder why the iPhone is such a success when it doesn’t even support MMS. But they’re a dwindling minority, it’s easy to forget that such software only started to become mainstream 10 to 15 years ago, and many people are still not very well educated about it. I’m hoping that as people learn more about software, they will eventually realise that usability and design can be just as important as the functionality.