Fairly frequently we go on a Boys Big Day Out, that's me and our two boys (2 and 4). They're always good: the Transport Museum is a favourite; W5 is another; Various parks, forests or beaches suit the purpose perfectly when the sun's shining (actually this is Northern Ireland so the best we can hope for is that it's not raining).

Last Saturday we went to the Ulster Folk Museum and had a brilliant time. Unfortunately my camera was being seriously flaky but managed to snap quite a bit of stuff nevertheless.

It's an excellent museum, beautiful even. There's a reconstructed town complete with period bank, post office, sweet shop (2oz of mint humbugs please sir), hardware store, drapers, pub and appropriately for NI, loads of churches. There are various workers cottages, a great school house where Seth (aged 2) had to stand in the corner and not come out until he was sorry for what he'd done, a police station and bicycle repair shop; even a picture house that shows Chaplin films, the boys loved that. There's a fully working print shop, how exciting is that? I have secret plans to infiltrate and exploit (but shhh! Don't tell no one?).

Then you can go off down country lanes and find mills, orchards and a scattering of psuedo-poor people wandering about (usually on their mobile phones). All it needs is some period brigands for that authentic bygone-days mugging experience.

Lunched on sausage rolls eaten in this standing room only stone watch tower. Don't ask me why.

Back into the town we sat for a while in a thatched weavers cottage, warmed ourselves by the fire and chatted to the old guy, who was just brewing up, about weaving etc.

Hope to go back next week for the Hallowe'en events; bobbing for apple, burning virgins in wicker men, that kind of thing. There are more pics here.

If you'd like to contribute to FTF, please do. Send stuff here.

In preparation for OS 10.5 Leopard’s release tomorrow, I’ve been poking around the Apple forums and came across a user that claims CS3 is still working after his Leopard Upgrade. I’ve heard tons people begging for an answer to this question, so I thought you all would like to know. Here is the thread, Just installed Leopard by user ray sharpe. He also states that these other apps are working perfectly in Leopard: “Biz, Skype, Handbrake, Toast, Limewire, EyeTV, SiteSucker, Google Earth, Earth Browser, Suitcase Fusion, Parallels, ECI Client V5 (tax), Uncoverit and SnapZ pro.”

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The Voices That Matter conference just wrapped up here in San Francisco. My talk was the last one of the day apart from a lightning round of two-minute takeaway points from a phalanx of speakers, moderated by myself.

My presentation was entitled Microformats: what are they and why do I care? You can download a PDF of the slides. The presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license so do with it as you please.

The talk went okay—I have the horrible feeling that there were quite a few “um”s and “ah”s peppered throughout. I made sure to leave plenty of time for questions and, as usual, the questions turned out to be the best part. Tantek took notes of the Q&A and I’ve published them on the wiki page for the event (if you were at the presentation be sure to add yourself to the list of attendees).

When he wasn’t taking notes, Tantek was diligently folding cheat sheets for the attendees. They were popular. If you weren’t lucky enough to get a pre-folded one, you can always print out and fold your own pocket cheat sheet courtesy of Erin.

And now, with my speaking duties fulfilled, I’ve got a day to spend in San Francisco before I head home. I intend to make the most of it. If you’d like to join me in soaking up the last of the California sunshine, come along to the picnic tables in South Park at noon tomorrow (Friday) for a geek picnic. Be there or be even more square.

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Whatever Halloween costume you choose to wear this year, for safety’s sake don’t make it black, or wear a mask, or carry something awkward like a broom. It’s just too dangerous. After this safety video was made in 1977, road accidents involving black witches must have dropped dramatically.

A client asked us for some advice on how to get the most out of working with Adaptive Path (or any design firm, for that matter). We polled the staff, and put our responses into an essay.

Enjoy!

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Check out how Shopping.com handles search drop downs. When searching for headphones they make it easy to select many popular subcategories.

In the age of the mp3, label musicians and the labels themselves are fighting for survival. As the cost of music is driven down to near zero, they’re doing everything they can to reverse that trend — and yet, the trend continues. I’ve been thinking about music costing effectively nothing and the future of the business and my musician friends for the past few weeks, and some half-assed ideas popped into my head.

Classical Music. Classical music is our future so take some time to consider it.

1. People rarely spend money on classical music itself. I bought a Bach or Mozart CD once when I was 19 when I needed background sound while studying. For the last few years, whenever I want to hear some classical, I just put on the one radio station that plays it or I pick any random classical listing in iTunes’ streaming music area and let it play. It’s basically free and plentiful.

2. Old classical music has no copyright, anyone can cover anything by Beethoven and not owe anyone a cut. You can remix sheetmusic from the 1700s all you want and call it your own. If you’ve got access to an orchestra and a recording device you can go nuts making music and never need a lawyer for any of it. Everything before 1923 is in the public domain: it’s like a Creative Commons wet dream.

3. Classical music fans are tech savvy and embrace the internet. The majority of them rip music, and a sizable chunk own iPods and pay for downloads.

Despite these doomsday notions, classical music remains an industry and there are tens of thousands of professional classical musicians worldwide that make a living from it. It’s not all glitz and glamor, but there are classical music labels that are doing alright and plenty of live events generate a decent amount of revenue even in modest-sized cities. There may not be crazy millionaire Kanye West platinum sellers (aside from maybe Yo Yo Ma?) in the classical set, but they’re not all starving artists.

The popular music industry of the future isn’t going to be anything like it is today, but if you’re an indie rocker in 2007 worried about what the future might bring, don’t listen to what the labels are saying, think more about the 2nd chair clarinet in the Berlin orchestra.

update: Andy was kind enough to send more evidence along: NYTimes, NPR, and The New Yorker all on how despite being plentiful and free like I mentioned, classical was the fastest growing segment of music sales last year, thanks in part to the tech savvy listeners paying for downloaded music.

Drew Europeo just release brand new Grafikas with top quality illustrations.

I’m not expecting anyone to know the answer to this question, but I’ll ask it anyways.

How big would a meteorite needs to be for me to feel it? This assumes it were to hit the earth exactly halfway around the world from my position.

To provide some background, a few weeks ago I was reading about the worlds largest metorite craters. I learned that the largest was a 10-kilometer-wide meteor (6 miles) which slammed into Earth. This was in South Africa, and it left a 300 km (186 miles) wide crater.