I know this going to sound a bit bourgeois, as it’s about fine food, but I was so impressed on a recent visit to France that I felt it needed writing down.

 

I don’t profess to be an expert gourmet or a connoisseur of fine wine, but I know when something is really good, and this was it.

 

The last couple of years in England have seen the opening of a proliferation of gastro pubs and celebrity chef restaurants, particularly in the area I live in. The quality and service of these establishments are generally pretty good, but the impact on the wallet can be quite damaging. And the more serious the places take themselves the more the bill goes up.

 

So how refreshing to find an antidote. We discovered this restaurant through the recommendation of a friend who lives in France and this was the second time we’d been there.  I thought from the first visit that we might have just got lucky but the second visit confirmed how excellent it was. The environment is charming; the service perfect - low key, but not pretentious; the food fabulous; the wine list (well, French) and the cost unbelievable.

 

Although I can’t share the taste experience, I can the visual one. And the cost?

 

18.50€ for the 3 course lunch (that’s about £12.50)

 

If you’ve read this and want to know where it is leave a comment!

Muse 'Absolution' by Storm Thorgerson

 

I’m a great fan of Storm’s work and have been keen to get more examples onto the walls of Hypergallery.

 

In case you aren’t familiar with him or his prodigious output of music related art, you can read the Wikipedia entry here.

 

Three years ago Storm suffered a stroke and his recovery from that life threatening illness has been remarkable. Considering that a stroke affects the brain, it certainly doesn’t seem to have affected his creativity or his artistic temperament!

 

So it was with interest that I read that Muse have been voted best British band at the annual NME Awards last night. These awards are one of the few to be exclusively voted for by the public and the band beat favourites Oasis and Arctic Monkeys to the winning post.

 

Storm created the covers for Muse’s 2003 ‘Absolution’ album, 2004 ‘Butterflies And Hurricanes’ single and 2006 ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ album. They are all great pieces of work and typical of his art. In Storm’s words:  “we give performances... not unlike the musicians for whom we work, be they on the stage or in the studio, up to and including various computer drop ins and repairs. But ours are visual - they are done for the camera, otherwise no one would ever see them.”

 

Apart from the twelve Pink Floyd album covers we did with Storm and his involvement in the Led Zeppelin covers, I have now published nine other pieces on the Hypergallery site, including ‘Absolution’.

 

I’m sure that ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ will find its way onto fine art paper at some point in the future, we must just be patient.

 

The first computers I ever encountered were big mainframe monoliths way back in the early 70s. At the time I worked for Honeywell Information Systems, who were known then as the ‘other computer company’ – what an amazing evolution has taken place from then to now!

 

By the time I was running my own business in the 80s, computing had become ‘personal’ and we were early adopters of the IBM PC with 256K of memory.

 

Since then I have stuck religiously with the PC, and subsequently Windows format. For our business it has made absolute sense, as our customers exclusively employ this platform and the tools we use all perform perfectly on it.

 

All through the 25 years I’ve been in business though I have constantly had the "PCs are crap, Macs are wonderful" argument thrown at me. And I have robustly defended the PC.

 

Then late last year I decided that I wanted to digitise my library of home videos and realised that my home PC, though perfectly adequate as a home-business machine, would need serious updating or replacing to deal with the kind of processing demands that this would entail. After some research and good advice I finally succumbed and decided to purchase an iMac.

 

This was on the basis that:

• It came with some very good tools for the video amateur (me).
• It was going to sit in my front room, not my home-office, so look/design was important.

I haven’t been disappointed and after a little initial alienation I’ve got used to the Mac OS. Also it’s doing the job I bought it for very well and it is definitely a design statement in my house.

 

However, what’s been very interesting is that now I am a user on both sides of the camp and can argue my case even more effectively than before. All the rubbish about how user friendly the Mac is, how much faster, how it never crashes, how it works out of the box etc etc is all just propaganda (very good propaganda of course – the ads are very amusing).

 

I’ve had some inexplicable issues with everything freezing, lots of annoying wizzy things happening as a result of a mouse click that I could really do without, huge frustration with its file management, and as far as how fast it is, it’s no different from the high-spec PCs we use in the studio.

 

All in all, they are both just personal computers, the result of 30 odd years of development by extremely clever people, but both are at pretty much the same stage of sophistication.

 

Signals will certainly be sticking to the PC platform for the foreseeable future.

 

The Mac does look good though!