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I spent Tuesday rushing to France and back on the Eurostar, attending a Dell press conference at Versailles. About three hours in I spotted this plaque: it turns out the hotel ballroom was used to draft the famous Treaty - now it's a site for business meetings.

At the end of the afternoon a few of us had an hour spare, so we went around the corner to the palace. It's predictably spectacular:

.. and the gardens are something else:

.. but sadly we had no time to do any more than take a quick glance around. At 7pm it was back in a taxi, back to the Gare du Nord, back on the Eurostar and back to London. Eighteen hours, about 1,000km, three press conferences, one interview, two news stories, three glasses of wine underneath the channel and twelve photos here. Not bad for one day.

One of my favourite parts of my job is testing DSLR cameras. Many of the new models this year are adding HD video recording, which is interesting - and which requires me to shoot loads of test video clips to accompany all the sample photos. Here's my trip to work, shot in high-def as a test on the new Nikon D5000 - click the HD button to enable maximum pixelocity.

Just down the road from Hither Green lies Kidbrooke, and what's left of the Ferrier Estate. Built in the 1960s-70s, it's now in the process of being "developed" - development, in this case, meaning knocking much of it down and starting again. Many of the buildings are now sitting empty, windows smashed out, Sky dishes aiming pointlessly up, wet curtains billowing in the wind. Plants are even beginning to grow into and over some blocks.

It's an interesting place. On one hand, its current state of delapidation is almost epic, and past residents have written of its numerous problems: crime, gangs, rats, water supply problems and ants (see comments here).  The buildings, created from huge slabs of concrete, have not aged well, and have a depressingly monolithic look to rival the kind of Soviet housing you see in much of Eastern Europe.

But despite all that, take even a quick glance at what's left of the Ferrier Estate and you see what the GLC was aiming for when it constructed it. The huge low-rise blocks were to provide large quantities of much-needed social housing, set in landscaped grounds rather than rows of terraced blocks like those near Waterloo, and with communal spaces even above ground level courtesy of the walkways - a bit of classic modernism.

A huge boiler was to provide heat and hot water for all, and there were schools on-site. These pictures from the time show the estate as it was when newly constructed - it's unclear whether these were posed, but even if so you get the idea of what the GLC was aiming for.

And, of course, it all fell apart. The boiler system failed, the covered car park shown in the second photo above had to be removed for security reasons, and the open walkways were divided off. Now, 40 years on, the whole thing's about to be taken down.

With 20/20 hindsight it's easy to judge this kind of project harshly. It'll be interesting, though, to see what people are saying about the new, replacement housing that's due to be built after it's been up for 40 years - and if it even lasts that long.

The colour photos here were taken yesterday - more can be found in my Flickr set. The black-and-white photos were taken around the time the estate was built by the GLC Architects' Department, and are reproduced here from Iqbal Alam's excellent Flickr set, which also contains some excellent information about the Ferrier Estate and the GLC. These photos are presumably copyrighted, but it's unclear as to who owns those rights now.

Cats, flowers, cats, flowers. Need to photograph something new.

Somewhere in deepest darkest Greenwich, out near the Millenium Dome, lies an Odeon multiplex cinema. Formerly a Filmworks, it's the shape of a huge bucket and holds 18 screens including, since December, an IMAX theatre.

How, I wondered, can you cram an IMAX screen into an existing cinema without ripping a good half-dozen other screens out? The answer is that, as it turns out, you don't. You stick a smaller screen in, slap a big IMAX badge on the outside and a few extra quid on each ticket.

Look on the web for information on the Greenwich IMAX and you'll find that IMAX has been outfitting cinemas with a system completely different to its traditional "build a screen the size of Jupiter and project 70mm film on it" setup for some time. Some people are very angry with the fact that the new, identically named, IMAX system is obviously inferior to the original as it uses a far smaller screen and relatively low-spec projectors (two 2K, rather than 4K, models). You'll also find an Odeon website blathering about "floor to ceiling screens" and "theatre geometry", while a local newspaper report shows four kids with an oversized ticket and the rather grainy picture of the screen I've reproduced above.

Nothing on the web, though, could tell me what I needed to know: should we pick an IMAX showing of the film (conforming entirely to stereotype, we wanted to see Star Trek) at Greenwich or the slightly cheaper 35mm screening next door? So, dear Google indexing robots and those who may be searching for the same information, here's my two cents.

The IMAX screen (9) is, appropriately, one of the biggest - almost 240 seats in three banks. Most of the central bank are "premier" seats that cost extra. We were on the aisle on a side bank about two thirds of the way up, and the view was fine - the rake's quite steep, so you can see clearly over those in front.  The screen itself is nowhere near IMAX size, but large enough for the auditorium and, yes, almost floor to ceiling, while the sound system is impressive if terrifyingly loud. The image in our showing was brilliant for roughly two hours of the film, but marred by annoying blue stripes for about two minutes near the start - whatever caused these, they were fortunately banished.

So, is this new, smaller IMAX a con? Possibly - it's certainly confusing. Is it worth a fiver per ticket if you know it's not proper IMAX, though? I'd say so: short glitch aside, the picture is better than most that I've seen in UK multiplexes lately, so you're paying a bit more for a high quality digital screening. And, as an added bonus, there's very little pre-film advertising to suffer through - just a few IMAX idents and two of the dumbest trailers I've ever seen (Transformers 2 and, honestly, GI Joe The Movie). Go, gawk, enjoy - just don't cough up any more for the Premier seats.

Oh, and Star Trek is really rather good. Thanks for asking.

Lewisham has a number of pawn shops, ranging from the heavily fortified "gold chains by the dozen" variety to others that are more like Aladdin's Caves full of junk. And, when passing one of the more junky ones the other day, I spotted this:

It's a Carl Zeiss 135mm f/3.5 lens - a little old, and with a huge thumbprint on the front element (now removed), but nonetheless obviously worth more than the £9 it was selling for. I snapped it up just to see if I could get it to work, and happily it did:

In fact, as it turns out it's amazingly sharp - certainly as good as my Nikkor 24-85mm zoom, and possibly better. Using it isn't easy - it needs an M42 to Nikon adapter, which is stiff and hard to fit, it won't focus beyond ten feet or so because of the Nikon mount distance, and there's no metering, autofocus or automatic aperture control - but still, on the D80 it's the equivalent of a 200mm telephoto for £15 all in. Bargain.

I've been scrawling that over and over again, lately.

A few years ago, and about five years after finishing my degree, I decided that I wanted to learn something again. I figured a language would be more useful than anything else and working in technology there were only really two useful choices: some sort of Chinese, most likely Mandarin, and Japanese. Knowing nothing much about China or Chinese culture, and being an avid consumer of Japanese books (a lot of Haruki Murakami, at the time) and video games (yes, I am a walking stereotype) I picked the latter. I signed up for a one year "Beginner's Japanese" course at SOAS with two hours of tuition per week.

I followed the course  for a year, and it taught me a decent amount of (largely business-like) Japanese, along with how to read and write hiragana and katakana - the two alphabet-like kana scripts, rather than the pictographic kanji. I also learned a few other things, though, such as that I couldn't really stretch to £300-plus-per-term courses on my salary at the time and that after working an eight hour day in the office my brain is pretty much incapable of writing English, let alone any other language. So, I passed the first year and then dropped out. Yay me.

I figured I'd continue to study on my own, but this never really happened. For two reasons, I suppose: a lack of willpower and a problem with textbooks. SOAS uses a course called Minna no Nihongo, which is largely concerned with business situations and very focused on instruction in Japanese only - great with a teacher, but on your own it's hard to work out which audio clips or exercises are which, let alone what you're meant to be listening for or writing. So, that was pretty much the end of my experiment with Japanese. Until last week.

Last week Helen and I decided that, having not had a long holiday for three years, it was time to take more than two days away from work. I was briefed to look for relaxing beach holidays. I found myself looking at flights to Tokyo. Helen liked the idea. We're going later this summer. Which leaves me a month or two to pick up the language again. No pressure.

And, pleasantly, it's been going surprisingly well. I was amazed to find that most hiragana characters had stuck somewhere in the back of my brain, and after a few days of practicing on the train I can now read and write both it and katakana again. I've also picked up a different textbook - Genki, which is apparently more modern, easier for English-speakers and less business-focused - to replace Minna no Nihongo, and I've found some PC-based flashcards that are quite good. And unlike the final months of my last course, where I felt like the daft kid at the back of the class who hadn't done his homework (usually on press week), I'm enjoying the whole process of learning  again.

Of course, despite all this I'll probably get to Tokyo and find that I can't read, comprehend or say anything of use. But who knows - it's worth a try.

I spend far too much time on Flickr and a lot of that time gawking at photos shot on old-fashioned film. Flickr may have millions of users toting digital-compacts, and probably just as many who are unhealthily obsessed with their DSLRs, but it also has a really strong community of those who won't - and it's mainly won't, rather than can't - move from film to digital. And many of them take some really beautiful photos.

And you can see why. For one, some films seem to impart a unique look to photos that's at best time-consuming and at worst impossible to replicate on a digital image. I loved the look I could get from Provia in my F80, even if it did cost a fortune to process and posed serious questions about how much film it is acceptable to keep in a small home fridge:

Film also imposes some discipline that's helpful if, like me, you have a tendency toward crap photos. Each roll holds only a few shots, so you must compose each carefully. And then there's the cult-of-film aspect: unlike the millions of plebs who take digital snaps, film photography is, now, a more niche pursuit. Those with a liberal arts degree might want to to knock up one of those dichotomy lists so beloved of theorists and/or poseurs (digital/film, many/few, snapshot/art, blah), not that it would prove anything. But anyhow. I owned several film cameras, then sold my best to buy a DSLR because digital photography is, in every way, more practical.

And then on Sunday, while diving through cardboard boxes in pursuit of batteries, I found one of my film cameras: a "vintage" (old) 1973 Zenit E SLR. This camera was made in the USSR, designed with the aesthetic care and attention usually lavished on anti-aircraft emplacements and made from what I think is a solid chunk of aluminium. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be radioactive - it's got that "made before safetly considerations" look to it. And then, lurking in the bottom of the box, a spare roll of film. What better way to waste a sunny afternoon than to give it a whirl.

The Zenit has five shutter speeds (plus one for bulb exposures) selected via a dial that regularly falls off the camera and its light meter gave up the ghost some time ago. Probably before I was born, actually. Remarkably the results came out pretty well exposed, and a few of them look OK. I quite like the soft background and colours on this:

while Hunter survived his visit to the 1970s, too:

And there's no denying that using the Zenit is strangely fun: the viewfinder makes everything look like a 1980s Thames TV broadcast viewed on a slightly frazzled Trinitron, all colour-cast and barrel distortion, and there's an amazing mechanical KER-CHUNK noise when you press the shutter accompanied by the whiz of the speed selector spinning around and doing its best to remove the skin from your hand.

There's also something undeniably neat about taking photos with a camera that requires not a single battery: the Zenit could probably survive a nuclear blast and still work (in fact, it'd serve as a handy hammer should you need to take part in civilisation-rebuilding). Truth be told, everything about taking photos on film again was enjoyable. So will I start lugging the Zenit, or perhaps a more practical film camera, around along with the D80? No chance. And here's why:

Dust. Gets. Fucking. Everywhere.

That's the shot of Hunter in Lightroom, and each circle is a dust spot correction that I had to add to remove the assortment of crap, crud, grime, hair and fluff that my film scanner picked up. And that's on a negative strip straight from the lab (there's one, conveniently, across from my office). Argh. And many of the other frames were far, far worse, to the point where I couldn't be bothered to clean them up. If it weren't for Lightroom's tools I probably would have just given up and chucked the film out.

So that's quite enough messing around with stips of chemically-treated plastic for now. I've packed the film scanner away again, and put the D80 back in the bag with a 4GB card (400 JPEGs - luxury. In my day, etc). But I won't be throwing the Zenit away - I'll come back to give it another try. Next summer, maybe.

An incomplete assortment of things I like:

1. Ascending really tall buildings in cities to gawk from the top
2. Taking photographs from said tall buildings
3. Playing with expensive cameras and lenses
4. All of the above in one morning

Today I was lucky enough to achieve #4 on that list, as Nikon announced its new D5000 DSLR* in the Paramount private members' club on the top of Centre Point. It was a bit gloomy outside with lots of cloud, but the views were still great. A handful more are on Flickr; I'll dig through the rest at the weekend.

* In a nutshell: 720p video, D60-like body, swivelling LCD, no AF motor, 11-point AF,  £720 or £800 for the kit. I'll reserve judgment until I give it a proper try.