Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Wedding Weekend

Posted by Roo - 31/08/08 at 09:08:55 pm

I went to Oxford this weekend to celebrate Megan and Ben’s wedding.

The wedding (complete with double violin concerto) was held in the chapel of Worcester college. The reception (complete with bouncy castle) was held in Mansfield college. I stayed in Keble college (shown above). All three colleges are stunning.

If you’ve never been to Oxford it’s eminently worthy of a visit. Utterly soaked in history, it lives up to the foreign tourist’s idea of what England should look like beautifully. Eating breakfast in the dining hall at Keble this morning, Ray and I were reminded of Harry Potter. Philip Pullman is from Oxford, and it clearly influences his work too.

Congratulations and best wishes to Megan and Ben. A lovely time was had by all.

• My photos of the wedding
• Flickr Group (if you were there, add your pics)

Hursley in the sunshine

Posted by Roo - 14/05/08 at 12:05:29 pm

Photo by Andy Piper. Used here with permission.

The recent few days of hot weather seems to be coming to an end. To celebrate it while it still lasts, here’s a photo Andy took yesterday of some friends enjoying the sun on the steps of Hursley House. Left to right: Hanan, James, Rob, Helen, Alice and me.

IBM Hursley really is a beautiful location. Here it is from a slightly different angle, taken last week by Darren. (He describes the process of making a 360 degree panorama on his blog).

Photo by Darren Shaw. Shared under a Creative Commons license.

If Darren wasn’t out in Arizona (taking even more amazing photos) with Ian, they both would have been on the steps with us above. I’m not sure if they would have been eating ice creams or would have stuck with the traditional cup of tea though.

2007 Travel

Posted by Roo - 29/12/07 at 03:12:53 am

Andy’s 2007 travel roundup reminded me I did something similar last year, and I want to make a habit of it.

My international travel this year included the following

• San Francisco (where I had some meetings and took some photos).
• New York (and CT for team meetings. I took some photos).
• Paris (for a big IBM internal conference. Of course I took some photos).
• Iceland (for pleasure, not work. Iceland Airwaves 2007 and general sightseeing. I took photos and even made a hungover podcast with my brother).
• Derry (for the Awakening Serious Games conference, at which I presented. I really liked Derry, and took some photos of Bogside).
• Zurich (for the IBM Innovation Forum. I gave the IBM CIO 2010 Outlook presentation for the first time, as well as a virtual worlds presentation of which I’ve given modified versions at various conferences. Of course, I couldn’t visit Zurich without also taking some photos).

Which looks a bit like this. Thanks to the Great Circle Mapper for the map.

This doesn’t include all the domestic travel I did by the way. There’s a fairly comprehensive list of conferences and speaking engagements for 2007 on my bio page if you’re interested, or this list of my slideshows gives a flavour of the work highlights.

Even without train and road journeys, that’s an estimated 22,062 miles of flights alone. I’m glad to see it’s slightly fewer than last year’s total of 24,375 miles, but it’s still too high. My personal target for next year is to get below 20,000, preferably more like 16,000.

Since photography is a recurring theme of my travels, I’ve decided to invest in a better camera. Something I can carry and transport relatively easily, but bigger and better than my existing Canon PowerShot S2 IS. I want to finally make the jump from compact to DSLR. I imagine it’ll be a Canon EOS 400D, or whatever similar thing exists in a couple of months. Someone kindly tipped me off about the big industry event in January, and the rumours of a 450D are encouraging me to hold off purchasing anything just yet.

Updates, many of which make me feel like a travel lightweight:

• Euan Semple has done one too (47,416 miles)
• Euan inspired Dave Snowden to do the same (285,054 miles. Horrific.)
• Bobbie Johnson has done one too (53,000+ miles)
• John Tolva updated his travel roundup (75,080 miles)
• Ewan McIntosh shares his (51,281 miles)
• Andrian Spender (22,541 miles)
• Russell Davies (67,231 miles)

Flickr Stats

Posted by Roo - 16/12/07 at 04:12:42 pm

Flickr is great, isn’t it? Last week, they introduced in–browser photo editing (via Picnik), and this Thursday they added stats.  If you’re a Pro user, go and activate stats for your account. I think you’ll like it.

By digging around my stats, I now know that this generated ‘fractal flame’ picture (generated using Apophysis) appears on the first page of the results for a Yahoo image search for ‘flame’.

And it seems to be getting (relatively) more popular as a result.

Some other interesting (to me) facts:

• Only 3% of my Flickr traffic comes from my blog (I was expecting that to be higher)
• 19% comes from Google, 10% from Yahoo (a total of 30% from search engines) while 41% of traffic comes from within Flickr itself.

What fun.

Channel 4

Posted by Roo - 12/12/07 at 05:12:34 pm

I love walking through London with my camera.

Channel 4’s offices on Horseferry Road (SW1) are quite striking. The big 4 logo outside is stunning, and walking past it is just like being in one of their adverts.

Iceland Airwaves - hangovercast #1

Posted by Roo - 18/10/07 at 04:10:00 pm

Sam and I woke up this morning with mild hangovers after the first night of Airwaves. We made a hangovercast over breakfast in which we mumble about the bands we saw last night. Enjoy.

Here are the bands we saw…

12 Tonar:

• Rokkurro (beautiful)
• Gavin Portland (loud)

Organ:

• The Diversion Sessions (funny)

NASA:

• Smoosh (US) (popular)
• Soundspell (muse)
• Lights on the Highway (obvious)
• Shadow Parade (enjoyable)

Iceland - day 2

Posted by Roo - 16/10/07 at 02:10:56 pm

An 8am start in order to sort out rental car and have breakfast. (The sausage, egg, beans and weird-cold-potato-cubes were tolerable, but Sam made an exciting discovery: muesli, yogurt and watermelon makes a refreshing breakfast.)

Theory: “golden hour” lasts all day here. At this time of year, even in the afternoon the sun is low in the sky, giving you that lovely near-dusk look.

Packed cameras, tripods, mp3 recorder, spare batteries, sweets, bottles of water, maps, plenty of extra layers. 12 hours and 500km later, we had seen…

• The lake and nature park of Þingvellir (the whole country looks like a nature park to me)
• The geyser at Geysir (the one which lends its name to all the worlds geysers)
• The (huge) waterfall at Gullfoss (with amazing ice formations thanks to the spray)
• Ate another amazing hotdog
• Keriđ crater (water-filled dead volcano)
• Seljalansfoss (tall skinny one)
• Skogafoss (shorter, fatter one)
• Vik (town on South coast with a beach of black volcanic sand)
• Passes the greenhouse village all nicely lit up
• Stopped at a geothermal power station to take long exposure pictures (and got asked “what are you doing here?” by a security guard)
• Drove around for a while following the pillar of light which is the John Lennon memorial. Eventually found it (and got some mediocre photos of a spectacular sight)

Back to the hotel room and paid 500ISK (a little under £5) for 1 hour of wifi to upload photos and check email. Strange, when it’s free in every bar. The Airwaves music festival starts tomorrow. Very exciting.

Iceland day 1

Posted by Roo - 15/10/07 at 01:10:45 pm

My brother Sam and I are in Iceland for a week. We flew in this afternoon from London Heathrow to Iceland Keflavik, which 40 minutes outside Rekjavik.  Importantly, it’s also only 15 minutes from the Blue Lagoon - an amazing geothermally outdoor pool full of blue-green algae and strange squishy mud. The departure of the transfer bus was kept waiting by group of kids delayed in the airport, but we soon forgave them when they turned out to be a choir. A choir which sang beautifully on the bus (and even, briefly, in the lagoon).

I don’t think I’ve yet found a better way to relax and de-stress after a flight then soaking for a couple of hours in hot, eggy, milky blue water. There’s a waterfall, grotto-like steam room, and a sauna (which we ignored). Dotted around the edge of the lagoon itself are containers from which you can scoop mayonnaise-like mud. Rubbing white mud onto your face is nice, but the biting wind means you really want to keep your face dry.

Post lagoon, San introduced me to the best hot dog in the world ever, complete with the local treat of crunchy onion bits. Here’s a tip: go to the blue lagoon and on the way out, have a hot dog.

The hotel is basic, and a 20 minute walk into town, but comfortable. Comparing tour prices with car rental was amusing: 7000 ISK (£70?) per person for one 8 hour trip around three or four of the major tourist attraction (Gullfoss, Geysir, etc). Renting a car, however, is only 4995 ISK for 24 hours. That’s tomorrow sorted then.

Walk into 101. The wind is cold, and initially my nose and ears are stinging, so I remember the technique of wrapping a scarf around your head. With that, a hat and a hood, I’m pretty cosy, with the exception of my thighs. And so, we walk into the hippest town centre between London and New York - Reykjavik 101. Hot chocolate at a cafe, then find the 10pm showing of Sigur Ros ‘Heima’ film at a nearby cinema. Wow. Back at around 1am, tired and happy.

More photos are being added to this set as I can upload them.

Contact details

Posted by Roo - 01/10/07 at 11:10:27 am

I mainly took this photo to use in presentations. A few people have suggested that a nice macro shot of a business card would be a good way to share those details in an attractive way.

Double bonus: the narrow depth of field means my phone number is too blurry to read.

If you need to contact me and commenting here, email, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr, SlideShare, del.icio.us (etc) are not an option, feel free to leave a voicemail at at +44 1512 664264. This will let me listen to the message but also (thanks to SpinVox) transcribe the message to text for me and send me an email and text message.

What do you do again? My Serious Virtual Worlds presentation

Posted by Roo - 16/09/07 at 09:09:33 am

A number of people have asked me recently “what is it you do again?”. When I tell my friends and family that I’m giving a presentation at some conference or another, they very rarely have any idea of what I mean. So, if you’ve always wondered what sort of nonsense I’ll stand up on stage and spout at a captive audience, here’s your chance to find out.

This week I was at Serious Virtual Worlds in Coventry presenting ‘virtual worlds for corporate collaboration’ where I mostly talked about social networking and why it’s important.

If you have 29 minutes to spare, and if SlideShare is feeling friendly, you can hit the play button to start the audio and, thanks to the magic of technology, the slides will progress at pretty much the right time.

Continue reading What do you do again? My Serious Virtual Worlds presentation…