UK Barista Championships @ Hotelympia 2010

For all you coffee aficionados, the UKBC is being held at Hotelympia 2010 this year with the final on the 1st of March.

It promises to be a intense competition with the winner going on to compete in the World Barista Championships.

If you would like to attend, a free ticket can be had by registering on the Hotelympia site.

Firebug - For web designers

With my Windows 7 RC running out in the near future I decided to switch to a retail copy and start the process of reinstalling everything. One of the first things to get setup was of course firefox and with it firebug.

firebug

For those of you who don’t know firebug, it is a web development tool that allows you to inspect HTML and modify style and layout in real-time. This superb tool allows you to see the effect of any changes you make to a website on the fly without making actual modifications to the code. You can also debug and profile javascript and pause execution at any time. As with most of the best bit of software it works really smoothly, is incredibly powerful and saves us hours of development time.

For you web designers out there who don’t use firebug, get it now!

There is also chromebug to integrate with Google’s browser should that be your choice. For you IE users there is some sort of version that can be used by adding code to your site, not tried it but it looks like it’s a PITA. Just use firefox, it’s simply better.

Pyrenees Weekend

Headed to the Pyrenees this weekend and thought I would drop a few photos in here.

Starting with of course the mountains themselves, once the cloud cleared there really was some spectacular views on offer.
The shear scale of what is in front of you is quite hard to comprehend and to be honest very hard to do justice to in a photograph.

pyrenees

After staring at the Pyrenees mountains for a while we moved down to the snowboard park to see some xtreme sports in action, photos after the jump.

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Messing with speedlight gels

Just having a bit of a play with a couple of Nikon speedlights and a CTO gel. A toy dino that sits on my desk was the victim model, apparently it’s a Deinonychus if your interested.

Deinonychus

Sales Reps

You try to help out a sales rep taking photos  for their competition and this is the thanks you get…

thanks

The show was the Brasilia Barista Challenge which was a great success and a lot of fun.

For you coffee geeks you can have a go at the barista quiz with questions from UKBC judge Paul Meikle-Janney and put together by yours truly.