Status-Q

I was fortunate enough to get to play with one if these today - a Qualcomm Toq - one of the first to be publicly shown.

It's very nicely put together, slightly bigger than my Pebble, with a colour e-ink touch screen, and wireless charging. But Qualcomm have created this more, they say, to seed the market and demonstrate their technology than because they intend to sell it directly; though the idea of making some available (at around $300) is being discussed.

I hope they do. That's quite a lot for a watch, but it has a quality feel to it. The key question will be whether they can get good SDKs to developers early on, and whether they can make it play nicely with non-jailbroken iPhones... It's not very easy to get past the restrictions that Apple (for some good reasons) imposes on developers, but at that price, they would probably be targeting the Apple-buying market.

In-store signage is often not very well thought out. Long-time readers may remember the seasonal toilet rolls at one of my local stores, and an aisle entirely free of long-life milk at another.

Yesterday we spotted this in HomeSense in Cambridge:

The bizarre messages continue elsewhere in the store. Above one checkout was a sign with an arrow saying "Pay up to 60% less here." Less than what? Less than the ticketed price? Less than at any other checkout in the store? Do these people have any grasp of how meaningless these signs are? Or -- more worryingly -- do signs as meaningless as this actually work on the general populace?

Now, they may be cleverer than they look. My nephew Matt points out that they might be trying to encourage people to buy today because the savings will be lower tomorrow. This does make some sense, because it's the kind of store that, though it looks mildly interesting from the outside, I think few people would voluntarily enter twice.

Beacon Park, Lichfield

Well, one quick transatlantic flight, and I've lost even more degrees of centigrade than I have hours of sleep!

For my more geeky readers, I can report that I return with a Scottevest Transformer jacket, and a Google Chromecast.

But the highlight of the trip was definitely the hikes we did in Yellowstone and in Glacier National Park. I leave you with my favourite picture from the Yellowstone Grand Canyon.

(Click for a larger version.)

My brother-in-law's dog Joshua got up on the sofa to help me check in for our flights, but it turned out he wasn't really too interested in Delta Airlines. He was more keen to chat to these girls.

Two days ago I enjoyed elk quesadillas
Yesterday I had a bison burger
Today we fished the Yellowstone River under the watchful eye of a bald eagle.
Feeling very Western.

Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above...

We're in Montana, and it's beautiful.

No, I mean really beautiful.

We made some friends amongst the natives.

The humans are friendly too. All in all, a lovely spot.

More pictures are sure to follow soon...

A couple more pictures from the industrial periphery of Motown.

Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere...

By the time you read this, in contrast, we'll have taken the dawn train going to Montana, from where I'll probably post some rather different photos!

I was quite pleased with this shot, taken by the Marathon Petroleum plant in Dearborn, Michigan last night.

(You can click it for a larger version, which looks much better)

This was handheld - I wish I'd had a tripod, but at this point the security guards pulled up and asked us to move on...

Part of what makes it 'pretty' is the use of two different types of lighting - given the industrial location, I imagine the golden light is sodium and the silver is halogen - and the camera's auto white-balance did a good job of reproducing what I saw.

But when I got home and loaded it into Lightroom, I thought it would be fun to try calibrating the white balance based on a chimney lit by the sodium light. (I could have achieved a similar effect by selecting tungsten white balance in the camera.) The result was also pretty. Can't quite decide which I prefer...

Tilly and I had a lovely early walk at Wimpole Hall today. But we weren't alone...

As the poet said,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young, with four legs and a waggy tail, was very heaven.