Lance Armstrong V Stuart Shorter

Sep 21, 2007 by John    2 Comments    Posted under: books, television

I recently ended up reading two books side by side, It’s Not About the Bike by
Lance Armstrong and Stuart: a Life Backwards by Alexander Masters. Now I don’t like watching sport, I don’t like talking about sport and I don’t like reading about sport but a friend in work gave me ‘It’s Not About the Bike” and told me it’s not about the bike. Most of it is about Armstrong’s remarkable battle against cancer, and he is a remarkable person but where I started out rooting for him, I ended up disliking his smugness. As the battle against cancer, which is an intriguing read, became history, and he began to win the races I just got a bit bored, and found his cocky competitiveness to be a big turn off.

In the meantime I was getting to know Stuart Shorter, a paranoid homeless alchoholic violent suicidal self-harming junkie. Stuart’s life is told backwards, (as Armstrong’s simulaneously goes forward, onwards and upwards) , so you get to find out what made Stuart the man he is, and the more I read, the more I found myself rooting for him. I wanted him to win and Armstrong to lose. But the tragic are tragic to the end, and winners are winners.

Stuart and his biographer, Alexander Masters became friends of sorts, through a field of differences. It’s a fascinating read, and their story has recently been televised and it’s on this Sunday:

Stuart: A Life Backwards

BBC2. Sun 23 Sep, 9:00 pm – 10:30 pm 90mins

Few new sites gone live:

Sep 20, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: css, design, web design

A few of the dealer sites I did, have eventually gone live. I did these about six
months ago. Offices eh?

Moore’s Garage

http://mooresgarage.ie

Billy Barron Motorcycles

http://www.barronbikes.com

Semi fluid layout, the navigation buttons resize as the browser window is resized.

Dogs box motorcycles

http://www.dogsbox.ie

Another fluid layout, but this time the image on the homepage resizes depending no the size of the browser window.

Lee Motorcycles

www.leemotorcycles.ie

Another fullscreen resizable layout.

Buckley Motorcycles

www.buckleymotorcycles.ie

Hogan Motorcycles

www.hoganmotorcycles.ie

Scotts bikes

http://www.scottsbikes.ie

A sketch from my summer holiday

Sep 17, 2007 by John    2 Comments    Posted under: art, drawing

The Persistence of Memory

Sep 4, 2007 by John    4 Comments    Posted under: art, books, brain training, master your memory, memory, painters, painting, tony buzan, waffle

A few years ago I got sick of having a terrible memory. I’ve since nailed it down to a slightly bizarre portion of bad memory in that I can’t for the life of me remember proper nouns; pubs, shops, roads, restaurants, people etc. However, like most people I’m better with faces, much better though, I could see a bloke walk by in the street and remember that he was two people ahead of me, in a queue in a chipper, in Dun Laoighre, eight years ago.

So apart from my otherwise terrible memory, I have a pretty good visual memory and when I came across a book called Master Your Memory by Tony Buzan, I scanned the back cover and saw that it had a system to improve your memory through your visual memory. So you can remember long numbers as images in a story for example. But it didn’t really make any sense without it’s  precursor Use your memory. So I bought that and spent every morning on the bus to work practicing the techniques in both. And they are fairly amazing techniques. Definitely a step above your average self help book.

The first thing I memorised, just for practise, was Pi to 500 decimal places.
The second half of Master Your Memory contains lists of trivia to memorize so
I went to work on them.

• All the countries of the world – including their capitals and currency
• The periodic table – including atomic number, atomic weights etc
• 100 most frequently used words in Spanish
• 100 Painters – including a famous work, its location, the artist’s lifespan, nationality and school of art

For the list of painters, I tracked down all the paintings on the web to make it a bit easier, and then discovered that the a lot of the data isn’t that well researched on any of the lists. When I reviewed the book on Amazon, I slated the content (while praising the system) for not researching any of the material properly even in it’s later editions. And Tony Buzan is definitely not short on pennies.

So, after quite a bit of waffle, the main point of this post is that list of paintings – if you’re looking for all the paintings in this list like I did, or just want to have a look through 100 famous paintings, here’s my list of 100 Artists, thoroughly researched, and backed up by a few books I’ve read over the years. And more importantly, there’s an image to go with each painting. There were a few cases where I couldn’t find the famous work that Tony Buzan chose, the fact that they were so hard to find was testamant in itself that they weren’t the most relevant works. In a couple of other cases I chose a different painting anyway just because it seemed much more relevant – but in most cases, I stuck to the original list as much as possible – apart from correcting all the mistakes, which were mostly dates and locations of paintings.

By the way, after years of this ‘Brain Training’ I still have a terrible memory! It didn’t do a thing to improve my day to day memory. Arsebags! Still an amusing way to pass the time at the bus stop though as you have to keep going through these lists in your head. Specially if you have a head like a sieve, like I do.

100 Artists – 100 paintings

SEMI Finals

Sep 1, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: flash, funnee