Here’s a photo that a friend helpfully sent along of me chatting with Chris Francis, of Receiver Coffee renown, at the Nine Yards Studio party on Friday night:

Chris is the dramatically more fashionable of the two of us, and seeing such a stark contrast prompts me to ruminate on:

1. Why didn’t I take my coat off at the party? It was hot up there. I should have taken my coat off.
2. Those jeans. I have to throw them away. Trousers should fit. Those don’t.
3. Those Rieker sneakers. They’re less than a month old, and yet they’re deteriorating and look like my lawn-mowing shoes. Also, they do not make me look like Steve Jobs as I imagined they did. It’s time to head in a new shoe direction.
4. I still like that Marimekko bag all these years later.
5. I don’t look like as much of a dork holding a cocktail as I thought I might.

By far and away the most exciting part of the Province House resuscitation is the impending construction of an “exoskeleton” that will enshroud the entire building, Iron Man-style. Preparations continue: this week they’ve dug out a trench around the eastern side.

After several weeks of coveting, I overcame my fears (“we’re going to have to see some artist ID…”) and invested in a Winsor & Newton “Sketchers’ Pocket Box” at The Bookmark.

I haven’t painted with watercolours since kindergarten; they are lovely.

My friend Silva’s new enterprise, Nine Yards Studio, had its launch party tonight, in the space otherwise known as “that place where the bike shop used to be beside where Sam the Record Man used to be.” It was the perfect place to launch a creativity factory.

In an unusual move for me, after decamping for home to carry out parenting duties, I returned for a second go. I’ve never returned for a second go.

Between the time I left, and the time I returned, the mean age dropped 25 years. And as the hour wore on, and even those who Susan Brown called my “age appropriate” familiars left, I was left to silently observe the pulsing  of the city’s young creative class. Who knew.

It was an oddly comforting millieu to be immersed in, as I realized that there was no point feeling ill at ease, as the youngsters could not actually see me.

After a feed of oysters and a few more songs from the band, I bundled back into my rain slicker and headed back into the hurricane-like weather for the walk home.

I look forward to seeing what Nine Yards cooks up next.

I’m certain this is just a robotic ad-served-mediated coincidence, but this big ad for Orange is the New Black running on the front page of the very-orange Guardian is perhaps the only time the orange revolution at the paper has made any sense.

I asked The Bookmark to consider ordering some Paper-Oh sketchbooks. And they did, arriving today. So I bought most of the crop.

There are still a couple of A4-size Circulo in stock if you’re in the market.

Andy Trivett bikes to work every day, 19 km round trip.

Good on him: by doing this, and by being vocal about it, Andy prompts us to consider doing the same thing ourselves.

(That said, my commute to work is 25x shorter than Andy’s is).

All of the photos I take with my phone get automatically backed up to Google Photos, and occasionally Google will, of its own volition, decide to experiment with them and offer the result up to me under the “Assistant” tab. Here’s one such experiment from a few weeks ago, an automatically-generated panorama of Founders Hall:

The photos that Google’s AI robots used to create this pano are these two:

I remember back in the early days of panoramic photography, when Apple released the QuickTake camera and the Quicktime VR set of tools: making panoramic photos was a dark art that seldom produced satisfying results. Now the machines do it on their own.