Trash the Dress

>> Trash the Dress
Last week’s slot devoted to online photo makeovers prompted this email from Mike Bryant:

Miles, You mentioned websites which make your photos look better and Janey asked for something that worked in real life. This doesn’t work for long but hopefully you think some of the real-life photos on Trash the Dress are better than your average wedding day photo.

Trash The Dress is a photoblog devoted to stunning photos of brides and grooms romping around in sea, sand, jungle and industrial estates! The site suggests that after the big day, rather than keeping a wedding dress languishing pristine in a cupboard, brides should consider trashing their dress:

“Get it dirty. Get it wet. Roll around in the mud. Drench it in the ocean. Show your husband how committed you are by trashing the dress, and get some great fun pictures while you do it!”

In practice, not many brides will get the opportunity to take their wedding dress for a dip in the rainforest or the pacific, but the photos on show here are as life-affirming as they are aspirational. Well worth a look. (Also mentioned today: my favourite life-affirming photography site: Balloon Hat.com)

PS – Shameless plug alert: You won’t find this linked on the Radio 2 site, but if you need a fine wedding photographer, take a look at my friend Neil’s site. If you like the kind of vibrant wedding pics showcased on Trash The Dress, you’d be hard pushed to find a better exponent in the UK:

>> Neil Walker Photography

Friday Quick Links

>> Ultimate Dallas
The official site for the definitive glossy soap. Includes preview clips from Justin Lee Collins’ Bring Back Dallas show.

>> Visual Complexity

“A visual exploration on mapping complex networks” – This comes across like a cross between an arts installation and a post-grad dissertation. I can’t pretend to understand it, but it looks pretty, and helps me feel marginally more intelligent just for looking at it!

>> DIY Fixit
Because it’s compulsory for all British citizens to either barbecue or put up shelves on a bank holiday weekend

>> Pirates of the Carribbean: Official
>> The Pirate’s Realm: Online Pirate games
Ahoy me hearties!

Wikihow

>> WikiHow
First things first … a wiki is defined here as "a web site that anyone can write and anyone can edit". You’ll doubtless already be aware of Wikipedia – which now has over 7 million articles and ranks among the top twenty most-visited websites worldwide.
If Wikipedia is a living, breathing encyclopedia with as much detail on popular culture as it has on science, history and philosophy, then WikiHow is like an instruction book for everyday life.
WikiHow’s 18 thousand (and counting) ‘How To’ guides aim to explain and demystify the kind of bizarre but routine challenges or chores we face every day – from tiling a shower to wiggling your ears via playing guitar like Eddie Van Halen. Keep an eye on this one – it’s well on the way to becoming indispensible.

BRITs / Valentines Podcasts

>> BRITs on Radio 2
>> Win a guitar signed by the winners and nominees
>> BRITs: Official Site
Tonight from 2100-2230 Dermot O’Leary is live from the backstage enclosure at Earls Court talking to the winners and nominees at this year’s BRITs. I’ll be hiding in the backstage enclosure taking pictures for Radio 2’s BRITs minisite so keep an eye on our BRITs pages later to see Dermot hob-nobbing with the stars. You can also win a guitar Signed by all of Dermot’s star guests.
Also mentioned today:
>> Queen of Hearts & King of Clubs Valentines podcasts
Top-notch reference source The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been offering selected audio biogs of notable figures in podcast form since the start of 2007. Why not send your beloved a Barbara Cartland (Queen of Hearts) or Bobby Moore (King of Clubs) Valentine-friendly podcast!

Send a free Valentines Message

>> Love Is Blind
Last year we mentioned the RLSB’s Love Is Blind site and the response was fantastic. The site lets you post (anonymous) romantic messages on an animated montage of love hearts. Your valentine will receive an email which links them straight to your message. The service is free, but helps to raise awareness for The Royal London Society for the Blind’s work. Also mentioned today:
>> Life on Mars
Download an animated DCI Gene Hunt for your desktop, or a use a range of sound bites from the programme as your mobile ringtone or text alert.

Spend A Million

>> Spend A Million
We’ve all wondered how we’d spend our first million if we won the lottery. This site gives you a virtual million and offers suggestions for your millionaire’s shopping list. You might start with clearing the mortgage and the credit card bills, but things get more interesting when you start looking at the site’s portfolio of speedboats, Caribbean Villas, investment opportunities and state-of-the-art gadgetry.
You can choose from 233 high-end purchases in 15 categories, to create an exclusive wish-list, then publish the list on a blog or personal site or just email it to friends. Day-dreaming has never been such fun!

Social Networking for Anglers

>> Perch Engine
Even if there was nothing more to this site than the name it would deserve an honourable mention, but there’s enough here to support their claim that this is “the future of fishing”.
This is truly a MySpace for anglers, offering comprehensive piscine search results, angling news, personal profile pages, fishing blogs, chat and instant messaging, the chance to befriend fellow online fish fans and areas to upload photos and videos of your proudest catches

Social Networking for Anglers

>> Perch Engine
Even if there was nothing more to this site than the name it would deserve an honourable mention, but there’s enough here to support their claim that this is “the future of fishing”.
This is truly a MySpace for anglers, offering comprehensive piscine search results, angling news, personal profile pages, fishing blogs, chat and instant messaging, the chance to befriend fellow online fish fans and areas to upload photos and videos of your proudest catches

Music Downloads on MySpace

>> MySpace
>> BBC News: MySpace set to sell music online
The social networking site MySpace has announced that they’re going to start selling music downloads – This has the potential to really shake up the market for legal music downloads, as the site is so popular already that it’s in with a shot of challenging Apple’s dominance. Read more on BBC News

Valentine’s links

>> A Mobile Valentine
This site invites camera-phone owners to send Valentine-themed photos straight from their phones to the site. You can comment on every photo and the best submissions before the end of this week could win a new camera-phone or champagne

>> BBC Valentine WAP site
Here’s a Valentine mini-site you can view entirely on your mobile. Features include a flirting guide, Valentine’s quotes and how to cope with a flower allergy. Text the word BBC to 81010 to have the link sent to your phone, or view the whole thing using BBC Mobile’s web-based WAP Demo

>> Stupid Cupid

An online game in which you manoeuvre Cupid’s backside to bounce a ball against targets of Chocolates, Hearts and Roses