Mighty Toast ^beta

I play drums in a covers band called High Speed Hangover, who cover the best cheesy party tunes from the last three decades.  I've build a website for it using the popular WordPress blog site tool.

Check out the site at http://highspeedhangover.com

Me and my sister (an artist and documentary film maker, see www.lenkaclayton.co.uk) spent an fun saturday building a ridiculous hat for a 'mad hatter's hat contest' in a nearby community festival.  We decided to build a super-tall recreation of the spire of Berlin's Fernsehturm TV tower, complete with flashing lights to ward off oncoming aircraft (cycle rear lights sellotaped to the spire).  Despite virtually everyone everyone else who entered being more than 20 years younger than us we still managed to walk away with a prize for 'most bizarre hat'.  Hurrah! 

Freecycle is a really useful online community which aims to try and reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfill. Essentially it's a yahoo group, where people post messages offering, for free, items that they don't want anymore. Other people then reply to these posts, and arrange times to come and pick them up. There are dozens of online groups around the country, but we've used the bristol group.

My boss came up to me a few weeks ago and say, "Hey you're a skiing man, aren't you? Do you fancy being flown off to a ski resort to build a game to present to a bunch of female lifestyle and fashion journalists?". My answer of course, was "YES PLEASE!!"

Fishtank! is a fun little side technology demo I worked on as part of my job at HP Labs Bristol working on the mscape project.

The way it worked was that each delegate at the recent mscape fest 2007 conference carried a 2d barcode on their identity badge. You could then use one of the ipaq 6815 devices to scan the 2d barcode and choose a fish type, and a fish with that person's name appeared in a digital fishtank on a large-screen plasma display in the refreshment 'n' networking area of the conference. You could also feed the fish - which caused them to grow in size, or, by scanning a barcode again poison or 'lurve' the fish.