As I Xi It v2.3

This is just brilliant!! For those who don’t know, it won the 2010 oscar for best animated short film and rightly so!

I was about to brush my teeth this morning when I looked out the window and saw some sort of ginger four-legged animal run across the garden and scaled the fence. I rushed back to my room, put my glasses on and saw that it was a fox! At first, I thought it might be that big ginger cat who sometimes likes to terrorise Cici. So, I dashed back to my room, put on the telephoto and shot it. Not the best pic, but you can clearly tell that it’s a fox. It’s not as manky as some of the foxes I’ve seen at night.

Fox!

What would be really nice to see is a hedgehog. Haven’t seen one in years. When I was a kid, they’d always be visiting and staying over in the garage.

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

Swedes can be so funny.

Plopp

Naturally, it had to be to one of Abba’s hits.

Arctic Adventure 2010 from Xi on Vimeo.

Here’s something I cut together to the original Ski Sunday* theme tune.

Skiing in the Arctic from Xi on Vimeo.

*It’s a UK thing.

Pics from my trip up into Swedish lapland. Trip report to come.

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I’ve installed the WPTouch plugin for this blog and it works pretty well. It greatly simplifies the interface of the site when viewed on an iPhone or any other mobile device.

Simple, elegant, fast. What more could I ask for?

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Watson is a bit OCD, wherever I put the chunks of the treats stick he’s taken apart, he’ll always pick it up and put it back into his “computer” which he uses as a pantry for all this nibbles. He’s ever so tidy.

It looks like Cici isn’t all that interested with toys.