At the start of may a group of us went to Wales for my friend Tom’s 25th Birthday, I’ve been meaning to edit the footage together for ages and finally got round to it this weekend. I’ve never edited or colour corrected anything in final cut pro before. I found once I got the basics, it wasn’t too difficult to achieve what I wanted.

I can’t wait to make the next one, i’ll shoot a lot more footage for it. I’ve certainly got my eye on a 7D.

I went to my local polling station at 7am this morning to vote in the general election, when I arrived my name wasn’t on the list. I was told to call the council electoral services where they would be able to help me. After a brief conversation with the lady (who was very pleasant) she said that I hadn’t registered in Birmingham so I wasn’t able to vote. I was expecting them to have a computer at the polling station where they could lookup my details and obtain my voting number.

I’ve been living in Cornwall for the last six years and recently moved back to Birmingham, after seeing an advert for aboutmyvote.gov.uk at the start of April I went and registered by filling in the form, printing out the PDF and sending it by snail mail. Because it was a little late (but within the deadline), I wasn’t expecting to get a polling card through. Its clear that the paperwork wasn’t done in time therefore I lost my vote.

This got me thinking why we can’t vote online. If we can manage our money on a daily basis online, why can’t we vote once every four years online? In an ideal world, this morning I could have woken up, logged on, input my governmentID and national insurance number and voted online. If computers counted the votes there would be less margin for error and it would be done a lot more quickly.

Whilst there are also arguments against this, in modern times where the Internet is used by billions of people on a daily basis, I don’t see why our government can’t create a secure system for us to handle this.

Feel free to add any opinions in the comments below.

I’ve been following the take away shows for a couple of years now, although I love them i’ve never actually written anything about them. This performance at dusk in an apartment by Bon Iver is really great. I saw it quite a while ago but just re-watched it and though i’d post it.

Bon Iver – Wolves (act I & II) – Une Soiree de Poche from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Late this year or early next year i’m going to be travelling on the trans-siberian from Moscow to Beijing and then i’ll be travelling around asia. I just found this beautifully edited video that excites and inspires me. Whilst I can’t guarantee that mine will look as good as this, i’m definitely going to be documenting the journey all the way.

Right, its a new year so i’m going to write lots of useful things on here. I promise this time.

So to get the ball rolling here are my links from round the web over the last 7 days.

Christopher Niemanns weather predictions for 2010 courtesy of the New York Times – Niemann doesn’t post all that often but his posts are always of a high quality. I recommend subscribing to the feed.

Some things that you never think of could be designed with a little more thought to make everyone’s life easier. One of them is boarding passes. I’d like to see something like this used, but judging by this article, there’s probably not much chance of it happening.

This site from the icanhaz network is pure gold. Say no more.

Oh, and by the way. Happy New Year!!

I recently finished building a website for a band called NinosKika. They are good friends of mine and recently kicked off their tour at the poly in Falmouth. It was a beautiful, intimate homecoming gig with a great audience. I took a few videos of some of the songs. If you ever get the chance to see this band, you should definitely take it.

check out these remixes i just stumbled on…

I just downloaded Eliss for iPhone and on first touch it’s very addictive and fun to play. I don’t mean it addictive in a tower defense kind of way, addictive in a way that I actually want to play it over and over.

Anyway… if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, download it now!

 Just had a little catch up on Layer Tennis as I have unfortunately missed both weeks 1 & 2 due to my slightly busy life right now. This post however, isn’t really about that.

As always, I had a little look at the website of either competitor to gather a little bit of information to make the match more enjoyable. It was really nice to see that Jeffrey Kalmikoff had written on his blog his reasoning behind each layer even though he apparently lost. I’ve never seen anyone go through each post in as much detail as this.

Also, I’m not really sure how he lost, in my opinion his layers were far wittier than Brendans.

Maybe it was for slating flash?

I’m a little behind as usual.. but last friday layer tennis returned to our screens traveling over 16,000 miles with a special edition.

Ten PSD files flew from San Francisco to Singapore in a blaze of pixels.

Check out the match here.

Anyone fancy a game of MS Paint Tennis?