chris nixon : nixonbyname.com

If you are interviewing Apple, NEVER go off message. They’ll have the tazers out next!

The wind and rain in Scotland at the moment has meant that I’m not getting out the house to take photographs. I know I can take them round the house, but I find it difficult to be inspired by stuff that I see every day.

I’ve taken solice in my laptop, and a cool little program called Gawker, which helps you make time-lapse videos. It’s great fun. See my latest effort below.

Brain Scan from Chris Nixon on Vimeo.

I’ve been playing with Gawker for OSX. It’s a great tool that helps you make time-lapse video. I’d like to do something a bit more inventive, but in the mean time, this is my first attempt.

Cooking Up a Storm from Chris Nixon on Vimeo.

I’ve never written a post about football, but this is the thing foremost in my mind this week.

On Saturday, Scotland take on World Cup holders Italy in our last (and their penultimate) game in qualifying for Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland. Italy are ranked third in the world in FIFA’s world rankings, after Argentina and Brazil. Back in March 2005 when Scotland were ranked 88th, I had no trust in FIFA’s ranking system, but now we’ve climbed up to 13th, I’m happier to accept their calculation.

Now a couple of years back…hell, even this time last year, I would have said their was NO chance of beating Italy. It was completely unthinkable. There are, however, a number of factors pointing to the fact that Scotland could pull off a shocker and put the world champions out of Europe’s biggest football competition.

Scotland have beaten the World Cup runners up, and FIFA’s fourth ranked team, France TWICE in this qualifying group. I was at the first of them at Hampden (Scotland’s home stadium) in October last year. It was the greatest football match I have ever been to, and there was only one goal scored. I can barely remember any of the match action. My memories are of the goal, and then we sang and sang and sang until the full-time whistle. I could barely speak for the week following the match. We all thought it was a but of a lucky result, but in September this year we went on to beat them again in Paris. Surely no fluke.

Italy have NEVER beaten Scotland at Hampden. You can’t argue with a statistic like that. It is a very intimidating stadium for visiting teams. While visiting fans are made welcome, no matter what the result, 60,000 baying Scots, kilted and fairly drunk, can put even the biggest teams off their stride. On the three (don’t quote me) visits they have made to Hampden in the past, they have never managed to overcome this force of will. Hopefully on Saturday, we will be able to take advantage of this.

Scotland are on a huge high at the moment. Since Bertie Vogts left as Scotland manager, the huge surge in playing abilities, support and hope means that there is somewhat of a steamroller effect. Italy will have a hard job in stopping us. They will not be relishing their visit to Glasgow, and the possibility that they won’t make it to the finals.

If we beat Italy we will most likely go into Euro 2008 as a top 8 ranked team despite not qualifying for a major championship in a decade. I won’t predict a score for Saturday, but I think it can be done. I’m not counting any chickens, and I’ll definitely be looking for any possible good luck charm for the day, but I am hoping for glory.

opinion, sport, football, scotland, italy, euro 2008, hampden, tartan army, soccer

I’ve spent the last week getting used to using my new Mac. It’s true what they say…it just works, but when you are so used to using Windows every day, there are some things you have to learn, and unlearn….and for the first time today, I tried to do something the Mac way in XP.

I’ve now transferred my music over. This was an extremely long process, even though it was iTunes to iTunes. Apple really should make it easy to keep all my settings, ratings, play counts and playlists. As it turned out it took me four hours to transfer the music with a bit of hacking of my old library file to “make it mac” and even then all I kept was my ratings. I tried Senuti, but it kept failing on the transfer of the files.

I’ve settled on Photoshop CS3 and Bridge for processing my photos. I managed to get through a few this weekend, and I’m pleased with how it worked. I tried Aperture, but with only 1 gig of memory on board, it wouldn’t even install. I’ll give Lightroom a go once they iron out their Leopard issues. I was very disappointed with iPhoto. It works well, but I really wish it would properly rename and tag files. It’s something that users have been calling for for some time, but Apple seems to know better.

Adium is just brilliant. There is nothing that even comes close on XP. I’ve been able to ditch a whole raft of programs, because the single one does it better. The only other chat client I’m still using is Skype.

Tonight I’m beginning to get back to blogging. Ecto seems to be the tool of choice, and all seems to be working well with it so far. It doesn’t seem to be as good as Windows Live Writer, but I’ve only been using it twenty minutes, so I’m not in any position to judge yet.

I’ve had one or two issues with folder sharing and with Airport, but the former was a windows problem, and the latter is a known issue with Leopard.

So far so good. Despite what I thought, my MacBook has now become my main computer. The desktop has only been switched on in the last few days to take files off it. I’m still learning, and more importantly enjoying learning to use Leopard

Photo by Andriy