A photo from the weekend, through iPhone and Autostitch…

Panoramic photo of the beach at Felixstowe Ferry

Taken at Felixstowe Ferry (the old end of Felixstowe) on a fantastic day over the weekend.

It’s not often that I see a piece of technology that makes me go simply “Wow”.  However, Word Lens brings forth exactly that response.

It’s basically a translation application for the iPhone, but what makes it different is that it works through the camera lens – hold the phone up to a sign in Spanish, and it’ll translate it – immediately – into English.

The demo app is free – which either removes words, or reverses them – and English-Spanish or Spanish-English cost £2.99 each. I assume that there’ll be other languages before long, and I certainly hope so. This kind of application is exceptional, and something that could/should change the way some translation is done.

Three four (Oops) years ago today, I/we moved to Norfolk.

How time flies.

Today, I is 39.

Today, I is travelling down to Bristol to be at Pixeldiva‘s wedding. A camera will be in attendance too.

Today is a good day.

One of the more surprising things about yesterday’s trip to London was the cost of the train ticket to do the journey.

Now I wrote about it last year when National Express East Anglia decided to almost-double the cost of the trainfare overnight from £40 to £74, and ended up with a letter from NEEA telling me that oh yes, it’d been an error, and the prices would drop back down at the next revision.

Looks like that was a lie, too. Indeed, the price has now gone up, so a return ticket with travelcard cost me £80.80 That really takes the piss. I could’ve driven down, parked all day, and driven back for less than half that amount – the only reason I didn’t was that I wasn’t in the mood for navigating London and the M25.

On the (very minor) plus side, the trains are now a lot less busy than they were when I was using them on a daily basis a couple of years back. Of course, that just means that (in theory at least) NEEA will then try and gouge their remaining customers even more in order to maintain the same levels of income.

Today’s been a pretty long day, and I’m fairly thankful that it’s over.

Work had asked me to go up to the AdTech exhibition / conference / thing in London, and today was the day. It meant getting up at 5.30, leaving the house at 6.30, getting the train to London – for £80 return (eighty fucking quid!) – and then to Olympia, hanging round loads of marketing twerds for the day, and then doing the return run. Joys.

What was worse was that (for me) it felt like a pretty wasted day. I didn’t really learn anything new – after all, I already knew that marketing droids are a dull bunch – and didn’t get any new ideas or new contacts that’d be useful.

One thing that did surprise me was how execrably bad a lot of these marketing companies were at marketing themselves – in a marketing conference, no less. So many of the exhibitors had exceedingly minimal stands, no information, nothing. Really very very strange.

Anyway, at least it’s over.