Sometimes you see a music video that, although not for everyone, really hits home for yourself.

This one, has beautiful cinema photography ... and as someone on YouTube commented, a voice that is "haunting beautiful"

For me, since I can't understand the words I get caught up in my imagination ... and with the images and the sounds make up my own story.

The coastline in this video reminds me of the places in New Zealand, where we would play as kids and you yearn for when you are away.

Enjoy

Sanvean (I am your shadow) - Lisa Gerrard

One of the incredible blessings of working in the Queensberry Group is the wonderful people we get to spend our time with, and few are more inspiring than Peter Haythornthwaite.
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I was sitting at the kitchen table about to take a photo of this wood pigeon when I got an email from Peter commenting on my blog. Amongst other things he said "I guess a natural 'other' would be small videos of family discoveries at the beach - your area, your 'forest' area, your Titirangi - why do you live there etc." The timing made me smile as this beautiful bird perfectly symbolizes why we live here. I guess home is always where your family is, but only a few meters from our kitchen table we have the wonder of nature (Peter you must admit Mother Nature was a pretty good designer), while through the internet and travel the rest of the world is available to us as we want it. Our house sits on a ridge, with the sun rising on one side...
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... and of course setting on the other. It's as if we live in an incredible painting, but one that changes by the hour and where the wind blows. Today the sea is looking very moody and cold.
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Danny and I are in Germany at present, Cologne (Köln) to be specific, visiting the Photokina trade fair. It's been a whirlwind tour through Europe getting here. In 5 days we travelled through Las Angeles, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne. What an incredible week of contrasts. The cities, especially Paris and Amsterdam, were incredible, so romantic with their old world charm and architecture, but with unfortunate modern contrasts. If Mc Donalds down the road from Notre Dame wasn't enough, how about the accommodation we have in Cologne? This is a table in the restaurant. The place is a haze of stale cigarette smoke and cooking oil, shelves adorned with stuffed toys and English country music. I'd never stay here again if it wasn't for the wonderful people and good food. No one here speaks a lick of English but somehow we manage because they're so nice. I guess that's why the restaurant was full of 'suits', people you would only see at the Stamford Plaza at home. I laughed when I went to the restaurant bathroom however, as it was so modern I thought I must have entered a neighboring building. Being someone that loves books, however, the greatest contrast was between the books I found at Notre Dame and the Louvre and the horrible, cheap, mass produced books being flogged by the truckload at Photokina. Amongst precious items like the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo the books were equally precious artefacts contain our history, our stories, our culture. You won't find cover designs like these on a Queensberry album, but you'll certainly see the same pride, sense of purpose and craftsmanship. At the end of the day it is the sharing and honouring of stories that is the goal. I won't include a photo of the "Photokina" books. Suffice to say most (not all) are tacky, cheap and don't respect any level of craftsmanship or longevity. In fact so little craftsmanship is involved, we sat today stunned as a demonstrator haphazardly assembled a book with one hand as he held his mobile phone in the other. I feel some excitement about these new books, as people are finally able to move their digital files off their hard drives onto paper so they can be appreciated. But important stories need to be honoured, treated with respect and enhanced through beautiful and timeless presentation, not jammed into the cheapest book available. An amazing week none the less, fascinating and inspiring. I love life's contrasts, it's a wonderful reminder that we are all different.

Ok ... Truth is, I'm not really sure what this is about. But I love the artistry in this sort of work ... powerful images and music, strangely moving in an odd sort of way. Hat tip to EpicGirl

I saw my blog traffic jump by a huge amount yesterday, with most traffic coming from Stumbleupon, and I wondered how I could check who had reviewed me, and what they had said. I found a webpage on Stumbleupon that links to this information. It doesn't seem to be directly accessible from your user account but I found part of the answer in this post. You need to build a URL using a base URL of:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=

plus the page URL, eg

http://stephenbaugh.com/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/

This means the full URL would be

http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://stephenbaugh.com/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/

This brings you to the referrer page on StumbleUpon, with the information you're looking for. Just click on the "reviewed by" link, shown as "2 reviews" in this picture. (click image to see full size). In an effort to make it even easier in the future I set up a script in my book marks. The javascript is:

javascript:void(location.href='http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url='+location.href)

Loaded in Safari like this (click image to see full size): This shows up in my browser as below, meaning I can check the StumbleUpon status of any page right from my browser window. UPDATE: Of course you could do what I did and change to Firefox, the Stumbledupon tools are amazing. I like the new Firefox, but miss Safari though