I can’t get enough of Sandwich Video, which is the company run by Adam Lisagor. One of the things that I hate with a passion is a BAD advert, which is probably why I love a good ad so much. Adam has got one of those styles that you can easily distinguish recognise straight away. I suggest you have a look at the original Birdhouse video, followed by the Jawbox and finally the Square video as my top three favourites at the moment.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses - Probably the funniest shit I’ve seen on the net in a good long while. Honestly can’t stop laughing at this. (via kottke )
Todd McLellan - Love this series so much. Will definitely try and get a print of the blown up Pentax (if/when it appears on 20x200) or the Old Typewriter.
So Yasmine got us a bonsai tree last week. So I did the geeky thing and downloaded this bonsai app for my iPhone and did some research on the internet about how to take care of the bonsai tree and then I went forth and overwatered the plant so that it’s basically shedding most of it’s leaves.
Now the good news is that I think it’s stopped shedding leaves at a crazy rate but I basically killed a ton of the leaves in these last two days by watering it every day, thinking that the soil had to be kept moist all the time…nope big mistake, at least for the bonsai tree that I currently have.
Unfortunately the damage got done the second day that I watered the plant. One day it was able to handle it, but two days in a row basically suffocated it and didn’t let it get enough oxygen to the roots, which basically made it shut down. Now it seems that this isn’t the end of the world (as long as I don’t overwater it again) but that you can’t stress the tree like this many times because it will permanently shut down. The thing is I absolutely LOVE this plant. I’ve always wanted a bonsai tree and now that I got one, I nearly bloody killed it within 2 days of over doing it.
God help me not make this sort of mistake when/if (hopefully) have kids. I mean seriously I feel terrible that I’ve done that to my bonsai tree, but the problem is these things should honestly come with a manual and the name and type of tree and links to a website where the proper way to care for these delicate plants. I feel terrible about my bonsai tree, hopefully it’ll start to flourish and produce those deep green leaves again sometime soon.
Harry Houdini - Love these retrospective birthdays on Google. Like when they put Will Eisner’s birthday on there a few weeks ago.
Save as WWF - This is a great idea,…up to a point. At work, I need to print things out, although I am probably in the minority. At home I’ve not owned a printer for many, many, many years.
Paul Haggis Vs. the Church of Scientology - Huge article on the topic of those nutbags (via Kottke).
The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Neil Gaiman, at the Sydney Opera House, reading a short story, with a quartet behind him and artwork by Eddie Campbell….yeah pretty cool.
Bald, Unemployed and still living with my parents - Laughed soo hard when I saw this. Now I want a son just to make sure I get him this. (via Coudal)
Rian Hughes’s of London Logo Proposal - This is by one of my favourite designers of all time, Rian Hughes. Shame it’s never going to be used, as it’s amazing.
World’s largest burger - Speaking of burgers, this is a MONSTER!
Soccer Aid World Cup 2010 Poster - By Trebleseven Design, this is an excellent poster for the World Cup. Which I’d seen this before, because I would have definitely got this for the house.
New Bus for London - Hopefully should be out when I next visit London.
Didi - While still on the whole World Cup kick, excellent typographic tees with the major players for each team. Most excellent. I really want the Argentina one.
Supermarket - Great design. Straight from designers. This place is absolutely amazing. So much sweet looking stuff. Spending 10 minutes here I could probably spent like $1000 easy.
Redesigned Wikipedia - Honestly I hadn’t noticed until today. I instantly look at the content, as for years I’ve ignored everything around it. This, the latest ‘Vector’ theme is actually extremely elegant and a great transition for the site.
Sawyer’s Nicknames - While I’m on the Lost bandwagon, this is excellent.
Loved And Lost - Amazing interactive picture of all the characters with a brief recap of who they are and what happened to them. Looking through this, you just start remembering all the questions they just didn’t bother answering.
National mascots - Don’t know what to make of the new London 2012 Olympic Mascots. What I do know however is that I love the comparison to the Prime Minister and Deputy.
Probably not an ongoing thing, but I’ve recently found a few YouTube videos that should help you waste some time on this lazy sunday afternoon:
Barack Obama the freshman - So stark, so vibrant, so youthful.
Reindy Allendra - Industrial Design portfolio of this Indonesian native. The KLM blimp being a highlight.
Origami Yoda - Too cute.
Facebook Facelift - Have you noticed how Facebook always seems to be changing it’s look every 6 months? This would have been one of those welcome changes. Having said that, being away from my friends during this sabbatical, I’m actually very thankful for Facebook.
Creative Review incredible dissolving bag - This is from 6 months ago but it still remains as one of those great ideas, that I hope others adapt in the near future.
It Will Come From Japan! - Love me some Paul Pope.
Guillin Fishermen - One of the best adverts I’ve seen for HSBC (it’s old, but I’m going through all my draft posts trying to get them below 50).
The Best Part - Love this print of an alphabet made of brand logos.
Egypt / Lebanon Montage - Excellent montage filmed by another Khaled. Excellent choice of music as well.
S is for… - Awesome Superman mosaic of the ‘S’ from an action figure collection.
Colosseo Letterpress Poster - Love the attention to detail of course. It’s objects like this that make design something special.
Alphaposter - While I’m talking about love the detail in these posters as well (obviously not as elaborate as the Colosseo poster, but lovely nonetheless).
Brazilian strip by Nike - Love the concept of reusing waste in a positive way like this. Wonder when the day will come when we’re not as wasteful with everything as we are now…
Hate Mail from Third Graders - If this had happened when I was in the 6th grade and planets and the solar system was my passion, I’d be doing a lot worse than this. (via Coudal)
Be still my bleeding heart. Yesterday I saw an interview on the BBC with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whom I rate extremely highly as one of my favourite directors. Well amidst a pretty poor interview (that guy from’Hard Talk' really needed a kick in the head) Jean-Pierre let it slip that after ‘A very long engagement’ he spent 2 years working on the ‘Life of Pi’…basically one of my favourite books. Man that would have been AMAZING. Chalk that one along with ‘Dune’ by Alejandro Jodorowsky as the great movies we’ll never get to see.
Obviously it’s not all doom and gloom for the ‘Life of Pi’, we get Ang Lee to release his version in 2011. Can’t wait.
Mark Coleran Visual Designer - Remember all those awesome futuristic designs in movies? Ever wonder who designs them? Mark Coleran, that’s who.
@Astro_Soichi - If there’s one new person you should be following on Twitter is Soichi who has been posting breathtaking photos from space and sharing them with the world.
Movie Mr Men - This made me smile a lot. Love how he’s just constantly building this flickr set. Here are some of my favourites:
Overcoming Creative Block - Some excellent ideas in there. One of my favourites (which I’ve not tried yet, but was actually thinking about that today) was the idea of going to a local university art library and just snapping or photocopying things from old journals to get inspiration and creating a physical drawer or scrapbook with ideas in there. I know I’ll be requiring a lot of inspiration in the coming months.
Driving in Lebanon (a user manual) - Thought I was making it up eh? Hell a whole book has been published to catalogue some of the crazy shit these Lebanese do with their driving over here. The best part of the book is in the introduction explaining that it’s not ‘bad driving’ but rather ‘superior driving skills but irresponsible conduct’.
Michael Johansson - Click on that link, you’ll not be disappointed (via iso50).
As a teenager, I was never ashamed to pledge my allegiance to this show (the original version, not the shit that has turned up this year). Up until the second year of University, this show was golden - I’m still not.
Happy 9.02.10!
Galileo Telescope - REALLY want one of these.
Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Moral Virtues - Found this great set of principles to live by.
Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling Conversation.This was my favourite of the thirteen.
Panic Blog - Just wanted to say that the Panic Blog (like most things related to Panic) is pure genius. Simple, but extremely clever with loads of thought put into it. I’m surprised this hasn’t been featured on design websites…probably because most of them are attracted to shiney things rather than subtle.
Welcome To Macintosh Documentary - I’ve come relatively late to the house of Apple, so this was good watching.
How To Make A Pencil Crossbow - Love this sort of thing, definitely going to be making one of these.
The Complete Chart of Characters’ Past Connections - Leading up to the season premiere next week, i expect a lot more of these things flying around (via @noscope)
Last.fm Visualisations - Oh my god, I might actually start using last.fm just so that i can get myself some meaningful posters and put them up. Also Felton’s annual report is up for pre-ordering. If wasn’t in Lebanon, I think I’d get myself a copy this year.
The Gates Notes - Excellent looking site from Bill. Is it me, or does it feel as though he’s generally distancing himself from both MS and Fester (Steve Balmer).
Plastic Beach- The new Gorillaz album appears to be imminent. Awesomeness.
Banksy film to debut at Sundance - Soo, totally watching this when it comes out. What can I say, I’m one of those poor fools that actually enjoys what the man does. (via @stevemassart)
I’m about to read Robert Fisk’s “Great War of Civilisation”, but I’m reminded of one of my favourite quotes by Kahlil Gibran, and I thought I’d share it with everyone:
My friends and my road-fellows, pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
The quote begins the only other book of Fisk I’ve read…Pity the Nation.
Happy New Year Everyone - Good riddance 2009.
Borders in Administration - How the hell did I miss this news? That’s a real shame as I generally liked the feel of Borders. It was never a massive destination for me (preferred Amazon) but I always liked their magazine selection which was second to none. 90% off if you’re in the UK (I would have been in there from like 5am in the morning).
Interview with Michael Chabon - On a complete sidenote, I’ve always loved the design of his book covers, which I believe are done by Will Staehle.
Grooveshark Icon - Seeing as I’m using Grooveshark for all my musical needs right now, downloaded Fluid, and this pretty little icon by Pat Dryburgh. While I was at his site, I noticed that myself and Pat share a general similar sense of minimalist design, which is always nice to see as well.
Dubai’s Improbable Tale - It’s like a car crash. I can’t get my eyes of how Dubai is going down the toilet. Wish I understood why? Maybe it’s to do with the fact that I hate the silliness of the whole place? Maybe it’s because I feel that the money Dubai spent on UTTER bullshit could have been better spent on sensible stuff that pushed the region forward?
Dubai architecture you couldn’t make up - I remember the cloud in the sky, because we actually were part of that competition (or supported it), and I read about the twisting tower. It’s a car crash I tell you, I can’t get enough of it.
Inside ISO50 - Great set of photos to show the attention to detail.
KAL’s cartoon - Not sure why it’s called Kal’s cartoon but it’s definitely the best cartoon on climate change I’ve seen in a while.
Dear Simon - without a doubt one of the funniest things I’ve read in a really long time. The last pie chart had me on the floor.
Visualizing Empires Decline - One of the best visualisations I’ve seen regarding this sort of thing. Interesting to see how bloody large the British Empire actually was. (via Kottke)
StudioDesk - I want one of these desk.
Iconic TV Posters - by Albert Exergian. Also be sure to check out his site.
R. Kelly - Trapped In The Closet - I’ve not heard of this ‘urban opera’, but seriously this is the funniest shit I’ve seen in a really really long time.
Peugeot electric car design - I love it when manufacturers take old classics and update them, when it actually works (Mini, Fiat 500, Beetle). This isn’t like that.
Swine Flu Visualized - Yeah, Australia got hit hard.
World’s biggest burger 185 pounds - What a waste of a good burger; like anyone ate that.
100 Greatest Hits of Youtube - You’ve definitely seen several of these, now you’ll have seen more of them.
Reading Tray - Always, always wanted something like this. Now if only you could find it in you know shops, I’d be there.
Hellblazer / Shoot - Although I think Warren Ellis is a fat slob of a man, with very very silly hair and a demeanor that makes you want to slap him, his general skill as a writer is actually undeniable (hard as I try). This is from a few years ago and still one of my favourite things he’s written that was never published and made him move away from Hellblazer.
Cuba Landscape - One for the future that looks at the past.
Wow, can you believe it’s October already? Seriously where the hell has this year gone already? Yesterday we watched Godfather and ate chocolate santa. Seriously chocolate santas are already in the supermarkets, WTF? The countdown has begun before I move out of Golders Green after 7 years and go on walkabout. Loads of shit to sort out before then, which all basically starts this week as I order by boxes and self storage options and start getting rid of clothes and unwanted stuff that have accumulated over the last few years. It’s not too bad (yeah you might hear me complaining later on this week) but I know I’ve got my work cut out for me.
In other quick and dirty news, we went and saw Joe Sacco at the ICA this week, which was brilliant, since he met everyone later on and did some signings, which was really cool. His latest books sounds like it’s going to be amazing, so I can’t wait (Footnotes from Gaza). We saw a few images and it does look like it’s going to be a keeper.
On a completely separate note, I’m looking for a good font creator/editor for Mac. I’ve not found any that won’t break the bank (I’m looking in your general ugly direction Fontlab). Fontographer is no longer part of macromedia/Adobe, but surely there’s a nice indie developer out there who has made something that can be used to make a font? I refuse to believe there is nothing else out there.
Facebook Headquarters - Kinda wonder where they do ANYTHING in there. It looks more like a boutique than an office.
Clutch Chair - Chair made out of straws. Something I wish I was able to do when I was a kid.
Travel Through Dubai at 818mph - Great trip on the Dubai metro. What’s interesting to me is I was there like a year ago when this wasn’t even close to being completed, so it’s pretty impressive to have it done more or less. Also it gives you a glimpse of what Dubai is and isn’t (I’ll leave you decide what that actually means).
ain’t no sleep when you’re living the dream - New blog by Kerry Brown, producer on the new Smashing Pumpkins album. He’s trying to keep it updated every day (not going to happen but the sentiment is nice). Speaking of which…
Obama calling Kanye West a jackass - Sooo funny, soo matter of fact, and soo true. It’s a shame that some idiots will probably take this and make a song and dance of it all.
Incredible, amazing, awesome Apple - No wonder everyone feels like they’ve smoked something after watching these keynote speeches. It’s pretty amazing when you see it like this (see what I did there).
Cheese & Burger Society - Oh my god. Seriously, as a burger connoisseur this is my kind of site. Just can’t remember what the actor who’s doing the descriptions is called.
Finalists for the 2009 Best Cover of the Year - My favourite is the Obama cover section, and specifically the Rolling Stone cover.
BMW Vision EfficientDynamics - Amazing collection of photos for one of those things I don’t see very often. A BMW concept car (usually the concept cars I’ve seen in the past are from Japan, with the odd concept car from Renault or something like that)…maybe I’m just not looking hard enough?
Lemonade - Documentary on some of the 70,000 people who lost their job in this, the latest great recession, within the advertising industry. What’s interesting to me is the fact that due to ‘Mad Men’, I’ve been able to peer into this little industry and the characters inside. The documentary itself looks relatively pedestrian and very, very American but at the same time there is something nice from people that have lost their jobs that move forward to something bigger and better. I know several friends (good and talented) that have had to do this.
Inglourious Basterds Comics - With the Tarantino dialogue I presume and the EXCELLENT RM Guerra (he of amazing Scalped series from Vertigo). Beware, this isn’t safe for work (I’m linking to Playboy)…yeah I can already hear the comments from Stathi and my brother.
Usain Bolt runs 100m in 9.58 - The man is INSANEly fast. Hopefully there won’t be a massive doping scandal in 5 years time (I know it’s the cynic in me, but I really am jaded about this stuff nowadays).
The man who walked around the world - Although this is an ad, what makes it special, is that it’s a good ad. Not very often that you get Robert Carlyle doing what looks like a one take 6 minute monologue. Either that or there was some serious editing going along here. Either way it’s a great little bit of film.
Scott McCloud Talk - Great presentation by Scott McCloud. I only recently bought ‘Making Comics’ (thanks to Mike) and it blew me away. In this talk Scott covers some of the concepts he describes in the book, but what blew me away was how confident and eloquent a presenter he actually is. I could tell the guy was smart, but it’s one of those few times where I feel completely and utterly schooled in a way I’ve not felt for many many years. Highly recommended watching. (via sidebarnation)
Inventor believes he can solve Lebanon’s energy problem - There’s nothing like being forced to be inventive to stay alive. Innovation is bred of necessity sometimes.
I Can’t Stop Thinking - Collection of appendix comics for Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics book. I’ve not read it, but these strips and his overall style of using the expanded canvas of the internet with a very very long page, is the only comics that I accept to read of the web. All other attempts fall short for me, because they’re basically recycled printed pages tried to be shoehorned into a website. Fail. All these years later, Scott’s work still stands out as the standard; I’ve not stumbled on anything that is as well put together as this.
How Different Groups Spend Their Day - Interactive graph of how people spend their time. Make sure to flip between different groups. Amazing (obviously you wonder how accurate this all can actually be but still).
Design Observer redesigns - This has always been an inspiration in terms of the sheer amount of links offered and the very simple but effective design.
Thundercats Concept Art - What could have been, but sadly, won’t be. Hopefully in the years to come, the powers that be will see sense and make this money making machine!
Jamie S. Rich’s Shelf Porn - And here I thought my shelves were a mess. This guy beats everything that I could throw at him.
Urbanization of Dubai - From a series of direct photos from NASA. This is one of the most amazing collection of photos, showing how our world is changing around us.
Kevin Smith’s Views on Twilight - I don’t get the whole Twilight rubbish, but make sure you watch this clip to the end, classic Smith.
SDCC 2009 Photo Gallery - A more general, lighter touch gallery.
SDCC 2009 Eisner Award Winners - I’ve got to say, Chris Ware and James Jean winning another Eisner this year is really starting to show a lack of imagination on the judge’s part (even though I think they’re both extremely talented individuals). Ware has won in excess of 18 Eisners in his career, and Jean has one 6 for the same category.
SDCC 2009 Cosplay Photos - So much attention to detail, don’t know whether to be impressed or sad.
Please Love Me - Banksy exhibition near Covent Garden (damn that boy is getting around this summer isn’t he).
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon - Fantastic interview which details loads about ‘The Wire’ of course.
“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?” Steve Jobs - Great quote, great collection of posters as well.
Eat Real. Eat Local. - Great little info-animation which probably describes something similar in most western countries around the world.
The Beatles Rockband Absolutely stunning combination of animation and music. Fell of my chair when I saw this (ps the site is pretty awesome as well).
BSG Worst Ending in the Sci-Fi History - I’ve not had a chance to read this yet, but this is definitely one of those rants that seem like they are really worth reading, when I’ve got a couple of hours to kill and feeling a bit BSG nostalgic.
LG Chocolate 4th Generation - This is what I had to say when the first generation of the Chocolate phone came out (which reminds me I really need to sort out the formatting in the normal post pages). It’s taken them 3 iterations in total before it became what I originally envisaged the ‘next’ generation of mobile phones to be. Unfortunately for LG they didn’t continue the same design aesthetics that made the first generation phone so successful. This new version looks like it could be a winner. The actual hardware looks absolutely fabulous. My only problem is the software. This may be it’s Achilles heel, as it doesn’t seem as polished as the iphone or even Android.
Definitely worth checking out in the future though, when it eventually lands.
Update: Video has been taken down, probably going to come back in like a month, when LG officially release everything.
YouTube - Obama Swats Fly -' I got the sucker'. Old news I know, but I love the concentration on his face before he gets it.
Top Gear Series 13 Trailer - The boys are back. Good casting on the young top gear stars as well.
Banksy vs The Bristol Museum - One word, awesome.
British International Comics Shows - Held in Birmingham on the 3rd and 4th of October. Definitely one for the diary.
Assembled Odaiba Gundam - And I’m called a geek? Having said that I still think that’s pretty cool.
Bleeding Cool by Rich Johnston - A logical step for the man in creating something to hopefully challenge Newsarama for supremacy for all things comic book news.
Quimby The Mouse Animation - So much fun. I think the combination of the music and the simple animation just really comes out in this inventive little clip. Definitely worth a watch.
Thought I’d write down a list of all the areas that this site still needs work on. This is for my own personal use which I’ll be checking back on over the next few months to see what I’ve completed and how long it actually took me to complete.
Add a feature image at the top of the site (integrate design to suit).
Add gallery section. Either going to be via Picasa or a self hosted version. If self hosted then it'll need to be integrated into the design of the site.
Sort out the way comments are presented.
Write code to remove comments as a default (but allow previously posted comments to remain seen).
Add a decent contact form.
Integrate the forum design into the site properly (instead of using the general vanilla flavoured colourings).
Sort out the CSS file to allow a simple IE6, IE7 template. Also include some form of message to point peeps into getting a better browser.
Tart up the 404 page.
The great things I’ve found about the current design is that it allows me to get on with just linking to good stuff around the web. It’s not been designed to provide a showcase for my stuff, but that’s going to have to change or at least I’m going to have to think about a way in which I can tweaks things to not feel out of place. Building on the foundations I’ve set up.
London Underground Comics Convention - After the ‘comics’ convention this saturday, I’m up for something with less ‘CosPlay’ and more comics. Not many of the names on the exhibitors list jumps out at me, but I’ve got a little time between now and then to get to know who these peeps are, and what their work is like.
Scott McCloud Webcomics - It’s been a while since I visited Scott’s website. Not much has changed, but the great thing is the flipping through his online comics, still the ONLY comics that actually were created for the net that actually work for this medium. All alternatives are just trying to shoehorn the rectangular page into a screen, which I have always felt does the experience a great disservice. My favourite is ‘My Obsession with Chess’.
The Hunt For Gollum - Fan movie which was released for the Sci Fi festival in London. Seems to be extremely well made, and it’s there for free to watch.
Here & There - A horizonless projection in Manhattan. I would really be interested in something like this for London as it really does provide a unique perspective of a city.
Diffuser debacle - I’ve been trying to get to grips with what the deal is with the diffusers. This is the best explanation so far, although to be honest with you, which isn’t saying much since it’s still pretty complicated.
Visa advert - Easily one of my favourite songs out at the moment.
A Racing Car Comes To Life - the film tells the story of the RB5 through the car’s experiences so far from factory to track with commentary by Sebastian Vettel. The more I look at this car the more I like it, although I am struggling to understand what the differences between this the Toro Rosso actually are (apart from the engines, one being a Ferrari the other being a Renault).
The Cult of Done Manifesto - Brilliant in every way. I also like the posters, which are under a creative commons license, so I might write a quick post of which printers to use to make posters out of these.
Excessive Celebration Fail - Via one of my favourite website (Failblog) watch this to the very end, there’s a point to his celebrations.
Monsters VS Aliens - The animation looks crisp, and from the trailer alone, I think the Blob is easily the breakthrough character.
Buck Rogers for a Quarter - I have got to give it to Dynamite, even though their logo is terrible and their overall design sense seems lacking, one thing they have got a definite eye for is getting older properties and bringing the right people to breathe some life into them (mainly John Cassaday, but then again, I’d buy Cassaday’s shopping list if he drew it).
Sebastian Vettel explains the new F1 cars and rule changes - Easily my favourite part is the explanation of KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), which up until now I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked (even though Ben, bless him has tried several times to explain it, it would go over my head, every time). (Via Mark)
Christian Bale Goes Bat S**t on Peter Griffin - It never ceases to amaze me how on the pulse Family Guy is with today’s pop culture. These guys never miss a beat.
Inglorious Basterds Trailer - And there you have it. Quentin Tarantino’s 7th movie (if you count Kill Bill as two separate movies).
Save bookmark - Such a simple idea, but actually might be useful.
Durex: Get it On! - Easily one of the rudest but also funniest things I’ve seen all year.
JPG Magazine Archive - Never actually downloaded this magazine, and now it’s no more.
Simple takes time - Jason Santa Maria on design times. I loved the Mark Twain quote, which I’d never heard before, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” So true, as I’ve been struggling the last couple of months to come to a final design for the ‘Kode. As you can probably tell, it’s still not finished.
Explore interesting photos from the last 7 days on Flickr - Excellent site feature, don’t know why I’d not heard of this before. Shame I gave up on Flickr sometime last year.
Warren Ellis will be writing for Wired UK - Either one of the smartest moves by this publication or the dumbest thing ever. If Warren’s blog is anything to go by this could be the strangest column ever, on a monthly basis. I wonder if they’ll adopt the same idea or releasing everything online as well.
No Caprica on the horizon, maybe - Why oh why did the frakkin' Sci Fi channel have to get a hold of the BSG universe. A more respectable network like HBO would have aired and promoted this show correctly.
The art of can throwing - fake or real, it’s all pretty cool either way (via Chris)
Broken Kode has finally reached the 1000 posts milestone. It’s taken nearly 5 years to get to this stage (I’ll be celebrating 5 years of the ‘Kode in January) and honestly there have been several times when I’ve considered shutting the blog down and just keeping a few images and a brief note on here, but I just could never do it, it was like shutting down a part of me. One thousand posts, some good, some bad, some controversial, some stupid, some clever, some offensive, some thoughtful, but one thing I’ve always tried to be is honest.
As always thanks for both reading and providing your comments on the site.
Pixorama from eboy - their first book which collects some of the best pixel art this side of an Atari. Wish they did prints instead of posters (more manageable).
The art of Pixar - A fan-curated gallery of inspiring artwork, good stuff in there.
If you’re in the UK (and maybe you’ve heard from on far) the ongoing ‘saga’ of the ‘terrible’ affair regarding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s messages left on Andrew Sachs' answering machine. Here’s the full transcript in case you wanted to have a quick read.
It’s gotten so ridiculous, that the BBC suspended Ross and Brand over the whole event, which obviously led to Brand’s resignation. From my pov, this has definitely been blown completely out of proportion.
Fair enough when there is some serious foul play (money or flat out defamation and lies) but this was obviously a joke, a bad one, but still a joke. Have we really gone so back that it’s not possible to say anything without fearing hurting anyone and everyone’s sensibility? Comedy is always at it’s best when it’s left to push slightly far. I’m not saying in this fashion but slap down the highest paid presenter in BBC history sends a clear message for everyone else, which basically means sugar coat everything and feed everyone non-offensive shit.
Apple’s new ‘Get a Mac’ ads that directly address the resent Microsoft ‘I’m a PC’ adverts - Although these ads do feel a bit long in the tooth, the best ones are those that have subtle gestures or facial expressions by the actors.
Apple Command Prints by Christopher David Ryan (via theappleblog).
Web without words is an interesting experimental site. Block out all content form a site, so you can see what the layout looks like as a design exercise. So far it’s done CNN and Yahoo.
Picture of the first Singapore F1 race from last night/afternoon - How the hell he got those Alonso shots I have no idea. Awesome stuff (via Daring Fireball).
I’m here to also confirm what everyone on the blogosphere has been saying, the Genius setting in the new iTunes 8 actually works. Creating playlists from a single song that actually is PERFECT. It’s like listening to the radio but it’s actually all of your tunes, stuff you hadn’t heard in years sometimes that work perfectly with the tune you’re listening to constantly today.
And can I also gush at the visualiser which is an absolute peach, yeah, I think I will a bit.
Fair warning - Spoilers abound young ones, spoilers abound.
So I watched the first two episodes of Prison Break last night. With the exception of a few brief moments of brilliance (mainly from Alex Mahone, who continues to be the coolest character of the series) this show has taken the single biggest plunge into ridiculous territory I have EVER seen. After the exceptional first season and the great second series (which remained good until the very last episode), we get the A-Team, minus BA Baracus and the most ridiculous hurried endings to ongoing plot threads I have ever seen. The term lazy writing doesn’t even do what I’m thinking justice because they really showed how much they’ve hacked this concept to bits.
First of all removing all of Michael’s tattoos is a complete joke. Seriously. Not that the tattoos had anything to contribute in the last season, but still it’s such a crock of shit that he got all of those tattoos removed overnight. If only it were that easy.
And then of course there is the whole Sarah is not dead issue. See we had made our peace with the character moving on. No instead they’ve brought her back because her scheduling issues have been sorted out. WTF man? I take solace in the fact that Michael is no longer whispers when he talks…speaking of Whistler, that was quick. I mean seriously he lasted what 2 minutes into the fourth season? His whole international man of mystery routine was far too token.
Sona burnt down? I mean of all the lazy, stupid fucking idiotic plot turns this one really takes the cake. You spend a year watching them trying to break out and the conveniently it burns down and all the inmates escape unscathed and back in the States. You can’t see me now, but I’m rolling my eyes.
And then there was one. T-bag. Easily the character that is going to really have a massive face off with Michael by the end of the season, something tells me that he will come out on top. That or Alex will give himself up (since they killed his family) to take down T-bag. This then lets that idiot Link forgive him or some such rubbish. Hell I’m only watching this now because I enjoyed the first 2 seasons so much. That’s where they should have ended it. Damn you Paul Scheuring, you sold out man. You could have had something great, but instead you extended it into mediocrity.
Brad Meltzer’s ‘Book of Lies’ Trailer - Oddly enough I am actually intrigued by this. Never read a Brad Meltzer novel, so maybe after Choke I’ll pick this up…speaking of choke.
Jamie Hewlett animation (based on his Monkey show) celebrating the upcoming Olympics.
Apparently it’s RSS Day. For all those people who don’t know what RSS is, it’s the internet’s best kept secret (still amazes me how many people don’t know about this). Go the site and change your internet habits forever.
Continuing my illustrators you should look at theme comes the awesome work of Jake Parker. I really like his pen and ink stuff more than his painted work, however both are all shades of great. Definitely going to pick up that little illustrated book of his.
Frakking toasters by Jeanette Atwood is in many ways the best commentary on Battlestar Galactica I’ve ever read (the fact it’s a comic is just icing on the cake for me). Shame there is no RSS link. C’mon Jeanette, sort it out.
The latest Banksy art is a stonker. I’ve not seen this up close yet, but I’m definitely going to be going down the road and checking it out. One Nation Under CCTV is an awesome feat of getting something done undetected in this city. I get pulled on camera something like 300 times a day! And that is what I love about Banksy, there is a message, which he does in a very funny way and presents some magic, in a ‘how the hell did he do that?’ sort of way.
Awesome.
So went to Jongleurs yesterday for part of Reid’s stag-do and I’ve got to say that apart from the compare (is that how you spell compare?) and the last act, the other three were mediocre to bad. The first comedian to come on stage, was mildly amusing but crude as you like, the second guy got confused and decided to do something singing but would mumble his lines when he spoke and didn’t come out very well, by the time the third guy came out we were hoping for someone funny, alas we got death on stage. I’ve never seen that before to be honest. The guy was dying on stage as NOTHING he was saying was striking a real cord with anyone. Also as it happened our table was the lairiest of the bunch (get 15 guys on a stag-do will do that) and having most of his material come off as completely ignorant (there is funny and then there is just plan wrong,…since when were people from Sudan, Asian?).
Thankfully the last guy did save the show slightly and had like 100 or so jokes that he kept rattling on and did a very good job of keeping everyone under control. Which basically made me think about standup comedy in general. The first of which is the fact that it is EXTREMELY difficult to do properly (I knew that was the case, but until I witnessed someone really die on stage I wasn’t clear as to the real extent).
The thing is I’ve been listening to the AWESOME Bugle podcast, which is one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a really long time. Different format admittedly, however the point still stands that new comedic talents do exist however sadly they were not at Jongleurs last night (and based on that I’ll probably steer clear of the place and look for my standup fix in other establishments).
Just got back from a lecture held at the most excellent venue of the IET in Savoy Place just off Embankment tube station where Christian Horner, the team principal of Red Bull Racing gave a pretty good little lecture surrounding F1 in general, his experiences amongst other things.
For me, this was actually the first time I’d ever been to one of the lectures held by the IET. In the past there have been a couple of lectures that I would have wanted to go to but ultimately didn’t have additional interest around me to motivate me to go. It’s like going to watch a movie on your own in many respects. I’ve never been to the movies on my own but I’ve been to lectures or conferences, as it’s usually for something that of my friends I’m the only one that’s mildly interested. Thankfully several other Arupians (he or she who works at Arup) where also pretty keen on hearing what the man had to say.
Of interest is the fact that it takes them 55 lorries to move all their crap across Europe, for the motor home and all the other things. I really enjoyed Horner’s sense of humour which was very well timed, even though he did have a dig at Williams at one point claiming that the team got very lucky for the result in Australia. An interesting thing that came out was you definitely got that feeling that he felt that BMW was the second best team on the track after Ferrari. Another great little story was the fact that Adrian Newey still has the same drawing board he had at Williams and then at Mclaren, which I thought was very cool, much in the same way I use the same pencil that I started drawing with 10 years ago. It was cheap as chips but i can’t work with any other pencil apart from that (I’ve tried, something to do with the overall weight distribution).
Unfortunately there was not that much talk about the cross pollination of technologies between F1 and commercial car manufacturing which was a bit annoying. There was a lot of cynicism (and rightly so) with respect to the bullshit proposals that the FIA have in place to get F1 to become more ‘green’. Yeah whatever the fuck that means in a sport that requires cars to go around a track 56 times burning 2.5kg of fuel every lap (and don’t forget the 55 lorries).
I’ll definitely be on the look out for future lectures. The one that I would have loved to go to was the one held with Jeremy Rushton (the main guy that created Tiddlywiki) something I personally use on a daily basis.
I was thinking about this today and basically, blogging involves removing the additional thoughts that are in your head that take up valuable space. Things that you should think about but not necessarily keep in your brain knocking about. That way it leaves you with more time to do other things, like in my case watch ‘The Wire’ (best police series EVER created) and read a few books (got a couple of reviews for books you really should read) and most importantly for my sanity, create things. That’s when I’m most happy, when I’m creating stuff.
The issue with me is that that part of my brain has been laying dormant as I began thinking and doing a bunch of other things that seriously didn’t really add to my being,…overall…in hindsight and all that. Part of the problem I guess is that I’m not angry enough at stuff, so it’s time to start getting angry again and flex that muscle again. It’s time to start creating again, it’s time to start blogging again, none of this 7 posts a month bullshit.
To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.
This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.
It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.
So that’s what it was. The Formula One season started off this morning in Melbourne. If you didn’t watch the race, STOP reading now and come back once you’ve watched it. Needless to say it’s a vintage race, one of those races to watch in the future.
Right back to everyone else who has watched the race, man that was one of the best races I’ve watched in a really long time. Not only because two of my favourite drivers were on the podium and that Williams is finally getting back up there and mixing it up with everyone else, but also because it seems like this year will be really great fun all the way around. Crucially the thing that has changed and that’s really made the difference to the watch-ability of the races is the fact that traction control has now been removed. What this does is makes it brilliant for people to watch because the drivers no longer have that crutch of a computer sorting things out for them, both at the start of the race but also throughout the race correcting things for them and making sure their mistakes aren’t penalised all that much. That is something that was apparent with this particular race. I mean only 7 friggin cars finished the race, from a total of 22 cars. That’s pretty impressive to be honest and there was no RAIN. Like I said vintage race.
I’m a bit sad to see Sebastian Vettel not get a chance to go all the way which would have been pretty cool and I’m really nervous with William’s choice for the second driver, Nakajima really doesn’t seem like he’s all there to be honest. he’s better than that idiot Piquet Jr, who’s completely all mouth and has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, but for my money Vettel would have been the ULTIMATE team mate for Rosberg at Williams and it would have been really good if they’d sorted that out but alas Toro Rosso know they’ve got a bit of a wunderkid on their hands so I doubt they’ll be giving him up any time soon.
So fantastic start to the season, and after nearly 3 years Williams is back on the podium where they belong and hopefully this will mean many more of this sort of result.
Sky Crawlers - The new Mamoru Oshii film (you know the guy how did ‘Ghost in the Shell’ 1&2 and the excellent ‘Patlabour’ 1&2
Battlestar Galactica season 4 trailer is online. It seems it’s an old one, but i really like what they’ve done with the shadows coming in and out. The good news is that at least it’s coming in March, as originally I thought Sci-fi was going to try and put it out in April. Is there any news as to how far into everything the team is in the development of the series? ie will we be expect some more waiting in between episodes or are they going to show the whole thing in one chunk (yeah I know wishful thinking and all that).
Now see that’s fucking weird. I was having a pretty rough Tuesday at work, so we went out for a couple of drinks after work. I work in Mornington Crescent, which is like at the bottom of Camden towards Tottenham Court Road, so most of our Friday evening are spent in and around the Camden area. It’s an area that’s got enough food choices to keep even the most fussy eater happy. It’s got it’s cinema, Regent’s Park is a stone’s throw away and there are 100s of pubs and bars around the area.
That’s not the weird part in case you were wondering, the weird part was the fact that on Wednesday we ended up in the Hawley Arms that night. This was actually the first time I had ever been in here, even though I’ve been working in and around the Camden area for nearly 6 years now. That’s what I’m trying to get at, the place has got soo many bars and stuff that it’s impossible to have been to all of them unless you make a real concerted effort. Now the pub (which is famous for bringing in the celebrities in the past…not so much any more I guess) was partly burnt in the fires last night. So I kind of just saw it in one piece just in time, even though I’d past by it 1000s of times in the past 5 years.
Hell, yesterday we were in Old Street and Stathi and I were thinking about dropping by Camden along the way, but decided against it since we were both pretty knackered, had we gone up we would have seen the fires. No doubt I’ll see that sometime tomorrow.
I’ve got a question which I was hoping somebody would help me with. I love Google Reader, I really do, loads of great things about this little application to like, in the same way that I like Gmail as well. My only problem with it right now is one function that is not present and I was wondering if others are having the same problem as well, and if there is any easy way to rectify this (like a greasemonkey script or something similar. Basically the way I read my feeds doesn’t allow me to read EVERYTHING in one go. Which is fine, no problem. Those items i’ve not read remain unread. The problem is that when i get back to reading things the newer feeds get placed at the top (which is fine and dandy) but all of the read items are mixed in with the unread ones. So what happens then is that I have to spend a long time scrolling down to the previous items.
Obviously sometimes (read: most times) i can’t be fucked and so i just ‘mark all as read’, which really defeats the object doesn’t it. Anyone have any ideas how to get around this, or is knows whether or not google might be looking to sort this out, or where I can send my email towards?
I thought this was pretty funny as a Flickr protest to the Microsoft/Yahoo merger.
Firefox 2 is slow as donkeys on a Mac. It’s true. Even with my 2Gs of RAM I can still notice the strain, that and it’s constantly crashing for some reason (usually whenever I use Gmail. Alas I’m eagerly waiting for Firefox3 to be released which is looking a lot better for everyone. In the meantime here are a couple of plugins I’ve found for Safari that I think are really useful: (I’ve updated it with a slew more cool little plugins, based on the comments)
And of course we shouldn't forget Pimpmysafari
Anyone got any other ones I should look at?
You Sucjk at Photoshop. You do, you’re awful, and that’s why you’re here. Absolutely brilliantly funny series of photoshop ‘tutorials’ from Donnie. There are 4 tutorials at the moment. Hopefully he’ll continue these because they are pretty good.
The Chicago Spire by Santiago Calatrava. It’s not a secret that he’s my favourite contemporary architect at the moment. Good little promotional website. The thing is though listening to the interview, you’d get the impression that high rise residential buildings don’t get made…erm I’d like to disagree there, hundreds of buildings exist that are high rise are not for the corporations at all. This is unique maybe in that it does have a certain level of uniqueness in design, although some of these ideas have been used before in something like the Swiss Re building in London, by Foster & Partners.
So yesterday I finally saw a celebrity I actually gave two shits about seeing. I creator who’s work I’ve actually enjoyed greatly. We went for a few drinks in Belsize Park yesterday and then decided to go for a bit of food after that. Of course, four people trying to decide on food sometimes can go smoothly and sometimes can go horribly wrong. Well in this case as we were walking up the road towards Hampstead and we see this little French restaurant that’s part of a hotel. I instantly dismissed it as not something I’d really like to go for, however Sophia had been there and recommended the food as being pretty good. So we go have a look at the menu and it was wide enough to allow us to actually cater for everyone’s crazy mood of food that night.
I was last in line and Stathi was right in front of me, so he quickly turns around to me and says ‘Dude, is that Helena Bonham Carter? I quickly turn around and say “Nah, her hair’s all over the place, she’s not looking as glam as i would expect”. In that split second what I hadn’t noticed of course was the person she was with. As we got seated, I did a quick glance over and lo and behold there was Tim Burton. See for me THAT is a celebrity. The actors are not the important bit (more on this later). The director is the captain of the ship. He’s the one that touches the movie in absolutely every single way, story, script, casting, sets, money, promotion, the whole lot. A great director will take unknown actors and make a great movie. A great actor won’t be able to make a bad movie great. He’ll play his part in a great way and shine himself but the movie doesn’t really benefit…not really because it still remains a pile of shit, regardless of how great the actor’s performance actually was. So I generally will follow directors, rather than actors (there are VERY VERY few exceptions to this rule). This little snippet was the source of a relatively heated discussion yesterday as i tried to explain to everyone that I was properly star struck by a creator’s who’s work I’ve been following since Edward Scissorhands, and well I liked Helena in Fight Club, a lot. But i wouldn’t exactly consider myself a fan of her body of work, since except for that movie I’ve only ever seen/heard her in….Tim Burton movies (Corpse Bride and Sweeny Todd).
So there you go, the first ‘celebrity’ that I actually was kinda star-struck. See NEXT week I will be 100% COMPLETELY and utterly star-struck as I am going for the Alan Moore signing in London. For all those that don’t know who Alan Moore is, you guys really have not been paying my attention.
I know I really shouldn’t be excited about this, but the new Star Trek teaser (directed by JJ.Abrams) does look pretty awesome even for a teaser dammit
Fake Steve Jobs accepts one of those crunchie awards. Absoultely awesome video. The guy’s just as funny (probably more funny) in person than as a blogger to be honest, although I do read his stuff occasionally. And while he’s doing that thing he does so well, he also raises some really valid points as well.
A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.
Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they’ve got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt’s own addmission, it’s only 10-20% complete, which is why they’ve decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they’re not there yet.
Now obviously i’ve got a slight bit of interest in what’s going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn’t speak for) gave a year’s worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn’t like it, which is why it never got included into the core.
So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I’m not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I’m not sure.
Obviously they’ve decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.
For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It’s past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it’s completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people….but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting…oh wait we’re already doing that.
Loads and loads of things to write and talk about, especially as this blog is now officially 4 years old today. Got a great deal of exciting things to talk about in the coming month but I think I’ll share this excellent quote by one of my favourite authors Neil Gaiman:
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
Seems like the most apt way to begin this new year off. Happy new year everyone.
Freakangles by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. Freakangel is a long form weekly comic (seems like 5 pages a week) that’s going to debut in February 2008. At some point I’m sure it’ll come out in print. This is pretty old news, but I only just noticed how good that bastard kid Paul Duffield. I know age shouldn’t matter much, but at 23 the little runt is far too good for his age. Go have a look at his stuff. The good news is that it seems that Paul will be doing some cover work for Ellis’s usually visually sub-par work published by Avatar (and also the reason I’ve only ever brought one Avatar book by Warren). It’s not that I think the art that’s published by Avatar is bad as such, it’s all technically adequate I guess, however it lacks a certain amount of finesse and class that Paul is bringing to the table, especially with his cover work for the new Ellis series, Anna Mercury.
Comics are just as much a visual medium as they are a written one; if the creators forget that, and see the art as something any monkey can contribute towards, they’ve missed the point COMPLETELY. It’s something I’ve noticed recently. When was the last time comic artwork truly inspired the reader? From my point of view, there are few artists that do that currently. Joshua Middleton is definitely one of them, as is James Jean, Tony Harris is always incredible to look at, Tomer Hanuka is another up and comer.
Coraline teaser. Literally just finished reading Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, so this is perfect timing as far as I’m concerned, since it doesn’t influence the way I pictured Coraline in my head, which is decidedly different from this animated rendition of her. Still it’s good to see all these Gaiman movies coming out. First there was Mirrormask, then there was Stardust, then Beowulf and now Coraline. Kinda hoping we get Death soon because that would be pretty special.
2008 Pirelli calendar is up. Stunning use of colours. Also really great collection of the previous calendars. Anyone have any idea of how to get one of these?
New Batman trailer online. You know it’s going to be a good week when your monday morning starts with this AWESOME trailer. Summer 2008 can’t come soon enough.
Wakerupper is a new internet service that you can schedule when to have a wake up call sent to a landline or your mobile. Traditionally I don’t get a good night’s sleep when I’ve got a really important the next morning, partly because I worry about missing it. Not available in the UK yet, but hopefully it will catch on and they’ll extend the service worldwide.
Michael Schumacher decides that it’s time for him to take the wheel of the taxi when he was late for a flight. Not sure how much I believe this article on Planet-F1 but it really made me chuckle.
So I got a load of help from the previous post about where I should look for more information about what kind of Mac I should go for. Unfortunately for me, I mentioned this to Graham at work, who’s a big computer hardware nerd…the man has got more computers in his house than spoons (and he’s been collecting for many years). So I mentioned my recent desire to make the jump. I said that I was probably going to hold out for the new Macbook Pro (if it comes out this January as rumored), with it’s ultra thin and slim stylings and trimmings (he already knows how much of a nut I am about computer portability, when I need it portable that is). Soo what does he do? He sends me the link for the Eee PC from Asus. Why did you go and do that for Graham?
For those in the dark (and believe me in a couple of months you won’t be in the dark at all about this), the Eee PC is one of the smallest fully functional laptops on the market for £220 (that’s about $400 dollars or so). 22.5cm across by 3.5cm thick and coming in at a measly 920grams!!!!! Preloaded with Xandros (a Debian based Linux distribution), it’s an ideal toy for the guy and gal on the move. I’ve put that image there because it definitely gives you a feel for the actual size of this thing. We’re talking slightly larger that a typical moleskin, which is just absolutely STONKINGLY small. How fast is it you ask? Well it starts up in about 20 something seconds, which is pretty damn impressive when you’re on the move.
No, I’ve not gone back on my thought about getting a mac, but I have had to rethink what equipment I want and need. The thought process is simple, get what you actually need. I’ve been working on my machine now for about 3 years roughly. It’s got a 64bit AMD processor coming in at 1.8GHz (or something like that). It’s got 512mgs of RAM and a 160Gb hardrive. I don’t ever do any video editing or any rendering (even though I bought this machine 3 years ago under the pretence that I would start getting into 3D modelling). So what do I use my computer for? I edit photos in photoshop, surf the net, code and programme some stuff, use vector illustration programmes (that do sometimes need some juice) and watch downloaded TV series, listen to music and well that’s about it. So is it really necessary to get the beast that is the MacPro? Do I really need the absolute latest processing power? Barring the occasional photoshop work, nothing I throw at my computer will really flex it’s muscles.
So I decided to get equipment that would eat anything I personally threw at it. So I’ve got myself a mac mini (since I already own a 20inch screen, I originally though it was 19inch, bonus!). I increased the RAM to 2Gigs and opted for the version with a DVD writer (since I do still do need this even though I’ve got two external hardrives). It’s arriving in a couple of weeks, and I’ve already started making a list of applications I might need. Expect a lot more silly questions being posted as I try to get to grips with the system. You guys having been doing this for a lot longer so I’m most definitely going to be leaning on you guys for advise and help.
There is definitely a market for the ultra portable computer, however it’s also important that the manufacturers realise that they should be catering to what the consumer needs as opposed to creating products that can do 1000 time more things than the user will ever likely need. Asus seems to have realised this ahead of anyone else, but it’s going to be very interesting to see how the other manufacturers react to this. Is this move going to change how we see computers? Is this going to be the tipping point for Linux? Or is it just a bit of a fad? Am I getting over excited over nothing really? Or is this going to be the ipod of ultra portable computers? I haven’t been able to see an Eee Pc up close since it sold out in like 2 days from release in the UK, but I’m sure sometime next year I’ll have a look at it and make my mind about whether or not it’s actually worthy of the hype.
World Press Photo 2007 Winners. Unbelievable collection of photographs collected from the past year. I guess it’s that time of the year when all these lists start coming through.
New Si Scott creme-your-pants-work. It’s been a while since I was thoroughly impressed by a new artist (in the same way I am with say James Jean). Si has been getting extremely good and his latest collection of work called Resonate is an awesome collection of work.
VectorMagic is a free online application that turns your bitmaps into vectors. It’s the work of two students at Stanford and I’ve got to say that it really does work a charm. I’ll keep an eye on this just to see if there’s any legs in online photo editing tools.
So I had myself a bit of a Facebook purge today. As Facebook is becoming more and more part of the cultural landscape it’s become a bit more important to be a wee bit more careful regarding which people can actually see your details. Maybe I’m being a bit too cautious but the thing is I have been slapped once before regarding the ‘Kode at work. I know sounds strange since I’m extremely careful to make sure I don’t really say anything about what’s going on at work except regarding which projects I might be working on and having a picture taken off the architect’s website. The point is, you never know when certain information is going to come back and really bite you on the ass, and as such I’d really rather not get into too many of those situations in the future (hey I am a blogger and therefore I will no doubt get into trouble at some point down the line).
So I’m off any groups, won’t find me as part of any networks. The only people that can see me are the few that I allow in. Any photos I don’t like I take the tags off and hope they never get seen (exceptionally bad ones are asked to be removed).
The thing is I find Facebook as a concept to be awesome, and I love the implementation of it as well. I like it’s clean lines and distinct design. I like how functional it can be (although finding a decent Flickr plugin is like pulling teeth) I just want all my Flickr photos to be part of my photo albums and that’s it. However as with everything moderation is the best option.
It’s time we all took the word ‘average’ back. I’ve been thinking about this (and actually mouthing off about it as well to anyone dumb enough that will listen to me) but basically one of the things that I have found lacking in the use of the English language is the proper use of words to describe things. When you ask someone about how they felt a movie or an event was, unless it was terrible the general response you’ll probably get is ‘Yeah it was pretty good.’ Or ‘Yeah it was good’. Don’t lie to me dammit. It wasn’t good because if it was you’d be talking about it with a little bit more conviction, a little bit more enthusiasm. Good implies that it had merit to speak of. Clearly you have none to express. No dear sir (or madam), what in actual fact you’re trying to say is that it is merely average. Average is a good word to use when it fits the bill. When something doesn’t shine but moves forward in an adequate fashion it can only considered average.
So for example ‘Cars’ can only be considered as an average movie when you put it in direct comparison to John Lasseter’s previous outings. It had good moments in it for sure, but as a movie it cannot be considered anything but ‘average’ in comparison. Of course there’s the issue of being kind to people. As another example, most definitely do not say: ‘Thanks Grandma, that dinner was most definitely average.’
So like Randall in Clerks II, I’m taking back the word average. I strongly urge you to do the same. Hell you know you want to.
Ok seriously that was as fun as getting my head kicked in by a bunch of chunky school girls while being stuck on a roller coaster feeling a bit nauseous from the doggy fish salad I had last night…. ok you probably get the point. Just recovering from my beast of a man-flu. Monday afternoon I could feel a small ache in my body that only got worse through out the night and then come Tuesday morning that was it, KO on Khaled. I was out. Couldn’t bloody move. Fever. The works. The fact that I’m writing this right now shows that I am actually well on the way to recovery and can actually think straight and get on a do things. So the moral of the story kids? There’s a nasty bug going on that will render even the toughest of men.
So I’m sitting here in Naoto’s house and writing this after experiencing my first week (more or less) in Japan. Seriously i cannot imagine myself staying away from this country. So many things to absorb in such a little time that i could honestly keep writing for a long time. Of course if i did that then i would be at the bloody computer all day and not actually out there exploring things and soaking in everything. Therefore i will try to actually write down as much stuff as possibly can that has made an impression on me and then hopefully elaborate on everything (and include as many pictures as i can) when i get back. These posts i guess will act as placeholders until i get back.
<li><p>The greatest thing for me is being shown around by ?aoto as there are soo many things that you could not possibly know or understand until you actually lived here or someone told you. The little red triangles that are place on the windows so that the firefighters can see which ones can be used in the event of a fire. I honestly thought it was some weird architectural statement.</p></li>
<li><p>Obviously the biggest thing that is easy to notice is just how clean the streets, tube and all public areas actually are. It is completely unreal. No gum stains on the floor, the paint on the roads is as bright as the day they were painted. Not a spec of garbage anywhere, anytime, anyplace.</p></li>
<li><p>We went to the Ghibli museum. Unfortunately you're not allowed to take any photos in the Museum but I have some photos from the roof (which you are allowed to take photos) which is pretty cool. The highlight here for me was the circular strobe light running animation which was beyond incredible. Several rooms where filled with items that where inspired from the movie.</p></li>
<li><p>We went to Kamakura with all the temples (the place has got over 64 temples), however easily the best temple we saw was a hidden one that was far away from everything in the city and that was one of the most serene places on earth.</p></li>
<li><p>My first Japanese style breakfast was a complete experience. For those that don't actually know what this entails, it has miso soup, rise, grilled fish, nato, seaweed and various pickles.</p></li>
<li>
Walked up Mount Fuji. I am completely sun burnt and tired, but by god the views was completely and utterly incredible. It has to be seen to be believed. In fact I'll be sure to share when I get back because it was definitely worth the trip. We didn't make it to the top of the mountain, but we got close and it was a mission going down as much as it was going up.
<li>
Tomorrow we are off to Kyoto and Western Japan which is going to be an experience of epic proportions as it also includes my first trip on the Shinkansen (aka the bullet train).
New Sony Bravia advert. Unlike the last couple of times this one has got bunnies and plastesine. I’ve got to say, it only gets really good and actually worthy of the legacy of the previous two adverts towards the end, so be sure to watch it all the way through.
You know what I find the absolute weirdest thing in the world? I’ve got this Canon LiDe scanner right, got it something like 5 years ago and has served me pretty well in all those years. It’s not the best scanner in the world, but to be honest, based on the fact that most of my stuff is put on the web rather than in print, it’s not exactly the end of the world. The weird thing is that my scanner works right out of the box in Ubuntu. Don’t need to download any drivers, don’t need to mess around with anything, and it works quickly and perfectly. Obviously it’s not all roses right, my Ipod shuffle obviously doesn’t want to play nice with Ubuntu, even though the latest version of Banshee is the music player that I’ve been waiting for all my life. So many great little features have been added to the latest couple of versions since I played last with it. Yeah like that’s any good to me as my fekkin sound card that doesn’t work for toffee and keeps giving me trouble all the time.
So I get back on Windows (because it’s got Photoshop) and fekkin Apache has decided to stop bloody working through XAMPP, so I can’t honestly get any work done for Habari as doing it on a live server takes forever.
I did download the latest and greatest Oxygen icons onto Ubuntu and I’ve got to say they are definitely some of the nicest things I’ve seen in a good long while…shame I couldn’t get the latest version of the Crystal icons to fekkin install (lovely redesign by Everaldo btw), as those look great as well.
Obviously I’ve upset someone in computerland and they’re trying to punish me in every painfully frustrating way. Seriously it’s times like this that I think the magic bullet is getting myself a Mac. But then again everyone says that when all manner of software decides not to work right?
First day of school! Well it’s not really, but today is the first day that the new graduate intake begins at Arup (probably in many other places as well, or maybe that was last week); in any case I can’t help but get that first day of school feeling, alas the difference of course is that once I was the student, now I am the maaaster….of course master of what I still have no idea. There’s a certain freshness in the air about the whole day. Maybe it’s feels that way because it coincides with the autumn finally coming into it’s own (although once again English weather being what it is, we had the absolute best day of the summer on Saturday so there you go really).
Hope everyone has a good day at school today.
So this last week I was in Princeton for my ‘little’ project in Egypt. The highlight of the trip without a doubt however was actually meeting Michael Graves. He was very busy looking at all sort of stones and mural paintings and whatnot for this other project that their office is knee deep into, however he spared some time and we had a bit of chat with him (myself, Steven and Reid) and he signed a monograph for each of us. Incredibly nice guy, very softly spoken and has got this great little smile that shows that he’s seriously enjoying himself.
Going through the monograph and buying stuff from their little design store you get a great feeling of all the different things that they’ve had a chance to influence and design. Notably are of course of all the Alessi products.
My price piece however is an Acme Studios pen (designed by MG) which is not only weighty but is a great little writing tool. The closes thing I can give an approximation to is how the front plates of Zippo lighters are used as a design piece, or statement
(The above image was taken from OC-76’s flickr account, go check it out for more gigs photos)
I wrote this last week but because of various trips I didn’t get a chance to post this properly. So on Monday (3rd of September) Thomas had tickets to go watch Chris Cornell at the Roundhouse in Camden. I’d completely forgotten about this seeing as I’ve had arguably one of the busiest times of my life this past month. So Monday comes around and we go off to see Chris Cornell. Now the issue is that I’m a pretty massive Cornell fan. While I adore the pumpkins, Cornell definitely has the best voice of all the 90s grungers, by a long way. Put him up next to Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Eddie Vedder, Scott Weiland and he trounces each and every single one of them. Until this Monday, I thought that was it really. The thing is though the man has been pretty productive over the last few years, being in Soundgarden, then followed by a solo album, then Audioslave came and then another solo album.
My brother’s a massive fan as well, but like him I felt that the latest album was a bit lacking, which unfortunately it is. However no matter what Chris can still lay claim to being in my top 10 classic alternative albums of all time. With his performance on Monday he also showed that he was without a doubt a superb performer that enjoys himself immensely. Everyone who was there just couldn’t get over the fact about how crisp and clear and POWERFUL his voice actually remains throughout the live act. The man and his band played their little hearts out for 2 and a half hours. The band took a break while Chris continued with an acoustic set and then he only took a 5 minute break and was back for another 30 minutes. To say that they rocked the house is a complete and utter understatement. It wasn’t Chris Cornell, it was Audioslave, soundgarden and Chris Cornell all wrapped into one evening.
This review at Subba cultcha captures a lot of what I felt. Honestly I don’t know where to start explaining which of the actual songs was the best one, because they were all sung with passion. Hard to say this, but easily one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Anyone know where to get a copy of this gig?
Awesome illustration from Christian Ward.
The Phiculator is a great little application, that you can download as a flash file as well (don’t know but I love applications that come as flash files). It calculates ? (phi), the golden ratio. To put things into a design perspective, if you’re trying to make a website that is 850px wide, it gives you the size of the column that splits this 850px line in an aesthetically pleasing way. So your main column would be 525px in that case. Also I really love James Mellers’s site as well.
Blade Runner Suitcase. We’ve been hearing about this suitcase for a while, but it’s not until today that I actually saw what they’re talking about. It’s a real fucking metal suitcase!!! Ok so I might actually go out of my way and buy it now. I was having a conversation with Steven the other day and he was asking to get the theatrical version which he actually prefers to the Director’s cut. Definitely will be interesting to see what he was talking about, because I’ve got to be honest, I can’t remember this movie in the amount of detail he seems to have remembered it. Nice suitcase though.
There is NOTHING I like more during the summer than a cold Greek salad. It’s no wonder I’ll buy all the ingredients on the Monday and make myself one every day at work. However I find it mind boggling that I can’t seem to be able to buy a decent Greek salad in any restaurant that I’ve been to, Greek or otherwise. To spread the love I’m going to give everyone explicit details on how to make the simplest and healthiest dish this side of the Mediterranean.
The ingredients are very simple, for a decent sizes salad (1-2 people) you’ll need the following:
<li><p>2 or 3 large tomatoes. They have to be the LARGE variety. No cherry tomatoes, no small piddly little tomatoes either. They have to be the big and ripe variety. Pay the extra, get the good stuff. This represents the bulk of the salad so don't skimp on this ingredient.</p> </li>
<li>1<p>/2 a cucumber. Generally speaking it's 1 small cucumber, but for some reason I can't seem to be able to get these over here in UK supermarkets so I tend to use half of the ones available.</p></li>
<li>
1/4 or a red onion. Don't get the white ones, go for the red ones. It's all about the correct flavours and this is pretty important. You can have as many or as little as you like, however I find that if you put more it ends up left at the end.
<li><p>1/2 a green pepper. You can try and use a sweet yellow or red pepper, but honestly it won't be the same. The green pepper provides it with that savory taste that you need.</p></li>
<li>
Oregano. You'll need lots of this, the dried variety.
Black Kalamata Olives. Yes you could try for another kind of olive. Maybe something in green, or even something stuffed. Rubbish. Get those ideas out of your head. It has to be a black olive. It has to be big and it has to be full of flavour.
<li><p>Feta cheese. Lots of this stuff. </p></li>
<li><p>Olive oil. The more the better. You could make the whole salad swim in the stuff or you could be measured with the amounts. If you're Greek, you go mental with the olive oil. If you're a bit more concerned about your waistline, then be slightly more conservative. At least 5 tablespoons I would imagine, although I'll be honest I never measure, I just pour until I think it's about right.</p></li>
<li>
Fresh bread. Yes you heard me. Go to the bakery, go to the supermarket, go to the Deli down the road and get yourself a fresh loaf. It's got to be a big loaf so you can enjoy soaking in all the olive oil left at the end of the salad. Trust me on this, it's one of the single best parts of eating this.
Ok so now that we’ve got our ingredients, it’s time to understand the other aspect of what makes it a good Greek salad. It’s all about how you cut the ingredients. I know it sounds slightly strange but it’s true.
<li><p>Tomatoes - The way to cut these is very simple. Each tomato has to be cut into 12 pieces. The way to do this is to cut the tomato in half. From their each half will be cut into six pieces. You might want to get rid of the central piece that is where it was attached to the vine. I find this piece to be a bit chewy and stringy in texture. Some people don't seem to mind it, I'm not so keen on this part.</p></li>
<li><p>Cucumber - It's really up to you how you want to eat this, you can either peel the cucumber or you can leave the skin on. I tend to alternate depending on my mood at the time. However the proper way to cut the cucumber is first down the length of the cucumber, so that you've got two long halves. From there you start chopping each half so that you're left with semi-circular wedges about 0.5cm thick.</p></li>
<li><p>Pepper - Really there is two ways to cut this, both are acceptable. The first is to cut them as full rings. These should be again about 0.5cm thick. The other option is to cut the pepper down it's length and then have thin strips of pepper from that half; again cut down their length.</p> </li>
<li><p>Onion - After you've cut the onion in half, cut it in half again. From there you'll cut thin strips (as in the picture above). Make sure that they're split from each other (unlike the picture above). </p></li>
<li><p>Feta - Again there are two schools of thought about how to present this. Either you have it in a big chunk (or a series of big chunks) or alternatively you crumble the feta cheese (with your fingers) so that it's all over the salad. I'm again impartial to either fashion, although if it's a quick job I go for the easier option which is to have big chunks.</p></li>
<li><p>Add the olives, sprinkle the oregano, pour the oil, tear off some bread and dig right in. </p></li></ol>
Summer on a plate.
So you might have noticed a certain lull in activity on the Kode. The main reason is the fact that I’m EXTREMELY busy at work right now. It’s been absolutely insane. The thing is though, it’s pretty standard fare for the summer as most people with kids tend to take their holidays in and around the same time which makes the rest of us crazy ones that are left behind to hold the fort in the meanwhile. The good news is that I’m actually enjoying a lot of the work that I’ve been involved with (not that I haven’t enjoyed my previous work). One of my latest projects is this tiny little project in Egypt. The architects on the project are Michael Graves. We went to see them in Princeton last week and that was actually pretty cool. My first visit back to the states since last year when I went to my brother’s graduation.
I honestly doubt that I’ll be blogging much during August, as I’ve got very little to say and generally soo tired, I can’t even talk. The thing is though that I really miss my website. I miss the interaction with all the crazy cats and dogs on the net. I miss being involved. Hopefully come September I can have more time to remedy this situation.
The second official release of Habari, version 0.2 is out the door. Everyone has been working real hard, always with love, always with passion. One of the things that this release includes is the user manual which is included with the release. Yes, when you download the software, you’re downloading the manual as well. For the manual we’ve chosen to use the awesome Tiddlywiki for this purpose. Don’t be afraid get involved. Spread the Word!
Ars Technica has a great little article about Hack Week. Novell recently has a week where they freed their developers to stop work on their daily routine and work exclusively on an open source project of their choosing. Great little idea which seems to have spawned a lot of great contributions back to the open source community as a whole. Slowly but surely I guess we’ll get there, eventually.
I rarely pimp the company (in fact I never mention the company except in my contact page) but you can find 72 pages from the much larger Arup Design Yearbook 2007. There’s also a sampler of last years book which has got some pretty cool things to look at as well.
Update: Seems the website is down,…now that is might strange indeed. In any case you can also get a link to the pdf from here (that’s still working).
Just got back from watching the Transformers with Yanni. To be honest, I really don’t think I could have watched this movie and enjoyed it as much as I did with anyone but Yanni. See we both grew up watching and playing with the Transformers. We’ve had countless arguments about them , with them and because of them.
So what did I think of the movie? First off, this isn’t a movie for everyone. Not everyone is going to appreciate the whole idea of transforming robots. If you’re a guy in your mid to late 20s this movie was made for you and me. Classic lines like:
You've failed me once again Starscream.
Echo straight out of the cartoons we would watch on a Saturday morning. The story was adequate in that it chugged along and there was something there in-between the awe-inspiring action scenes. I don’t usually get like this, but this movie was all about the robots, transforming and kicking the shit out of each other.
Forget the bullshit attempts at humour, I swear that asshole who tried to write the American Pie riff needs to be taken outside and given a good kicking. It had absolutely no place in this movie. I’m sure it was some toss-jockey producer saying that they need more humour in the movie. Some of the humour was done well, like with Bubblebee and his great music choices at the beginning of the movie.
Can someone explain the relevance of the Australian chick and the fat man? Comic relief and what exactly? Easily the most REDUNDANT characters I’ve ever seen in any movie. Also I’ve got to say that John Turturro’s role was a tad bit annoying. I love John (Big Lebowski being his crowning achievement as far as I’m concerned) but what the hell was this role all about?
Anywho, enough about the peripheral characters, lets concentrate on the stars of this movie, namely the Autobots. It’s great how they explained the whole morphing into cars and whatnot, that was very nicely done. What I didn’t really care for was the whole product placement within the actual fekking movie. Was it really necessary to have the whole Ebay thing? Or every car being a GMC? Or what about Nokia being Japanese as well? Or the Pepto Bismol? I mean seriously great chunks of this movie was nothing more than one big advert.
However all of that disappeared, the second you saw Bubblebee transform into the newly supped up version of himself. Or Optimus Prime transforming for the first time. Starscream and Megatron transforming in mid air, combined with the sound effects and the music is enough to make you forget about all the short comings of the movie, because basically they COMPLETELY kicked it out of the whole theatre. I’ve never seen anything like that. It was meant to be larger than life and the effects delivered every step of the way.
Bring on the sequel.
Christian presents a great little list of things you didn’t know (or may not have known) about the Firefox web development toolbar. Anyone have something similiar for the Firebug plugin?
Amazing advert for Epuron, easily one of the smartest adverts I’ve seen in a really long time (via Frederik Samuel’s always excellent blog). As if that wasn’t enough in the comments someone pointed out another excellent advert for the Dove self esteem fund. Excellent viewing all around.
I’m looking at javascript libraries and it’s honestly proving a bit of an arduous task. We’ve got Moo.fx and Moo.fx2. The first has been superceeded by the second (obviously). Both it would seem can be used with prototype.js (or the lite version), however Moo.fx2 can be used as part of Mootools, and this is where things become more complicated.
Ok so you go over to Mootools and when you go to download the library, you get like 40 options (most of which I honestly don’t understand in the first place so you end up with something that is 42k rather than 3k).
It also seems less friendly than moo.fx on it’s own, but it does definitely look a hell of a lot more slick and polished and you can see a lot of time and effort has been placed into the overall setup of the information and the site itself.
However for a complete noob like me, it’s a bit overwhelming. So I decide, maybe it would be better to use JQuery. From first glance it doesn’t look as ‘polished’ in it’s overall slickness as the moo.fx but I know that WordPress, Habari and Drupal are going down this particular route in terms of their preferred library of choice.
Finally we’ve also got script.aculo.us as well, just so that we’ve got all our options in front of us.
Honestly I’m a bit perplexed as to what to go for. It seems that for a site, Mootools will provide all the kinds of animated effects that I could possibly want and the community behind this one is pretty strong with loads of documents and tutorials all over the place. However something tells me that jquery is the way to go, even though it’s not as flash. What’s a guy to do?
I honestly have no idea how I happened to get this togglegoogle on a couple of my machines (well not my machines but random machines at work, on my dad’s PC etc) but it’s a great little tweak to google which I actually honestly thought was part of their constant updates. For some reason it just organises everything very nicely. Also can someone please explain to me how to change the background in igoogle, because I was able to change the theme once and then the link that says ‘select theme’ is no longer a link.
Great little homebrew video of the Daft Punk song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” (via Chris Diclerico)
Rarely, someone says something to me that really resonates with me completely and changes the way in which I think. It’s not often, but when it is said generally speaking it will have a lasting effect on me for a great long time. One example of this I can give is when I saw Michael Moore in early 2003 when he was living in London and doing a serious of ‘talks’…more like sessions where he talked about whatever was on his mind. We were able to get tickets for his last ever performance. A lot of things stick out in my mind from seeing him live, but one of the things that he harped on about that remains in my mind is loyalty cards. I honestly thought these things where American inventions (as did most of the people in the audience as well), but apparently they are clearly a British thing.
For those wondering what loyalty cards actually are, they’re basically store cards that enable you to accumulate points which later on you can cash in, you get 1 point for every £1 you spend. Every 100 points you get £1 back or something like that. Anyway after his rant (which involved talking about people’s privacy and information theft and other some such) I’ve NEVER carried a loyalty card in my life… I didn’t carry many back then but I did have a couple, all where thrown into the crowd (he was collecting them back then).
Anyway recently Fern was talking about the amount of plastic that we as human beings use in our everyday life, for food packaging. Open your bags after you come from the store, if you’re as bad as I am, almost 90% of the stuff you’ve bought is covered in plastic in one for or another. Water, humous, vegetables, orange juice, etc. She then started talking about how there have been cases where the amount of plastic starts infiltrating your system, tiny particles that eventually make it to your eyes, which are then covered in a thin film of plastic.
Needless to say that sort of freaked me out and it’s stuck in my mind. Unfortunately I’ve got to work extra hard now to find a method to try and change the packaging in which I actually buy things, or consume thing. It’s incredibly hard, I’ve got to say. In my life I have boycotted several things. Coca cola (I used to drink 1 a day, at least), Marks and Spencers, Danone, L’Oreal , Nestle (except for Kit Kats) and a few other things. It was very difficult to do this but I managed and it’s a habit. How the fuck are you supposed to stop using plastic?
The good news I guess is that plastic is being made from things other than petrolum oils and rather using different more organic elements, however I’ve not really found out any more about it and so I sit here looking at my plastic containers thinking of my eye balls. Sometimes ignorance is complete bliss.
I’ve never been anally probed (nor do I ever wish to be) but I doubt it feels quiet as bad as I feel right now. The Smashing Pumpkins are playing at Shepherd’s Bush as I type this. I was outside the venue trying to get tickets. Needless to say we didn’t get any tickets as they which were going for £150 each. Let me say that again, one hundred and fifty pounds each. Fucking touts. Seriously. I don’t have any overtly elaborate ways to describe what I’d like to do to you assholes because I’m pretty angry at the moment. I was there along with another 3 people who knew just how much I love the pumpkins trying to get tickets for me as well, but the tickets were ‘sold out’ in a matter of seconds. So how do these fucking shit-stain leeches on the green puss that comes out of a gangrene wound that’s eaten by a fly that’s about to die because it’s gotten violated by a camel get a hold of so many tickets between them?
And to pour piss and vinager over the wound, Pearl Jam played London Wembley Arena yesterday and I only fucking found out today. I’d have given my left nut to watch Pearl Jam live as I’ve never had the chance (even though a couple of years I was actually thinking about going to a festival just for them). Man that really upset me this afternoon when I found. Genuinely was upset about that. I didn’t think I could get more hurt but today was obviously just one big day of disappointments.
So what next? We’re thinking about going to the Reading Festival. That’s in August, however all the tickets are OBVIOUSLY sold out. Yeah of course. I doubt it would have made ANY difference if I had tried to get tickets on the day that they came out. So I guess Ebay is the only route forward.
This is part of the reason I don’t generally go to live concerts.
Just sorting out the html and slowly hacking the css file. The idea is to slowly chip away at the actual code slowly but surely. I’m not in much of a hurry as I’ve got SOO much stuff left but I find that I enjoy writing more by actually having this new evolving design live.
It’s a funny thing about how much information your brain can actually hope to take in a single moment, a single day, or a single experience. For me this is made clearest when I go to Fopp. For those in the dark, Fopp is a store in Britain, which I believe (but this could be COMPLETE bollocks as Kevin told me this) started off in the back of this guy’s car in Glasgow selling music and other assorted greatness a reasonable, stable prices, without the stupid .99 bullshit. Yeah like 11.99 will make me think it’s £11 rather than £12 I mean seriously stop insulting my intelligence you asshats. Anyway, Fopp’s opened this massive megastore on Tottenham Court Road. This place is pretty huge. Originally I thought that was great. Bigger is better right? Wrong.
It’s completely overwhelming. I go in there and I’m completely lost in a sea of music and books that I have no hope of trying to whittle down myself. I end up actually buying nothing because I’m completely at a loss as to what seems like a good deal and what I feel I’d get just because it’s at a decent price. Also I don’t want to think about the range of stuff that I don’t get because I don’t actually see it.
Back to the original topic though, I’m glad when I found out that I’m not the only weird person out there that has people in his MSN contacts list. They’ve been sitting there for years and I’ve never once had the inclination to use the function to contact these people. I can’t explain it, they sit there and part of me would like to know what they’re up to but at the same time another part of me feels a certain comfort that they’re there anyway. It does sound strange and maybe a bit anti-social but like I said, your brain can only take on so much information, before it’s on complete overload.
By now you’ve seen the latest news about the modifications to the Batsuit which looks brilliant and makes sense at the same time (to do with the cowl and the rest of the costume being seperate elements that overlap). The latest news that has come out from the upcoming Nolan sequel is the batpod. Now Michael’s not digging this and if you go down further neither is Joen, must be a Danish thing, nooch. The guys are missing the point here BIG STYLE. Nolan is a Brit. So what is the best selling British comic book? 2000AD. Who’s the star of that little weekly magazine? None other than Judge Dredd. And I believe that is where the mystery of this whole design lies:
The design is most blatantly inspired by Judge Dredd. Where the 1995 Sylvester Stallone movie made a complete farce of the hog (they made it fly for the love of god), this design is wearing it’s inspiration on it’s sleeve and for my money (as a comic book fan) it’s a great little nod to a character that has crossed over with Batman on NUMEROUS occasions, most notably in the excellent Judgement on Gotham with art by Simon Bisley.
The difference between the first Batman movies (which I actually rate) and the Nolan movie is that one is trying hard to be as realistic as possible, while the other is trying to be as stylish as possible. Each have their own place and I bet the affinity for the Burton stuff is because we all watched it when we were 10-12 years and Batmania was in full throttle during that year, but as movies stand, the Nolan movie stands WAAAY far above the rest of the Batman movies (we don’t mention Batman and Robin…..EVER). A huge amount of thought always goes into his movies and just because it’s a massive blockbuster doesn’t mean he doesn’t stay focused to make the ultimate Batman flick. That and I believe Bale is a much better suited Batman (and Bruce Wayne) than Michael Keaton.
Wall-E teaser trailer up. Wall-E is the new movie coming from Pixar next year. From the brief 20 seconds or so of actual Wall-E time it really does seem that this is the most detailed animated outing to date (check out the scene with Wall-E bringing up the dust around him).
Easily one of the best new animated characters I’ve seen in a good long while (I put him in the same league as Homer Simpson, Pinky and the Brain, Daffy Duck, Bender). Ryan game me the second season of Family Guy earlier this week and I’ve just caned the whole lot. Obviously the real star of the show is Stewie, the maniacal baby genius. Whenever there’s a show that’s got any decent amount of Stewie in it, you KNOW it’s going to be good.
It’s really strange but it seems to me that Fox gets some decent programmes made as pilots or proper TV series which are genius, they get this loyal following and then they cancel the shit, only to bring it back a couple of years later with their tails between their legs. In this case they canceled it not once but twice before bringing it back (the word dumbass comes to mind but hey at least they rectified the situation).
Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me how good this show actually was? I mean I’ve not watched Entourage, but that’s really my fault as people have told me it’s good so I’ve got no excuse; but Family Guy should have more people ranting and raving about it. Yes I’m blaming you. All of you. You know who you are.
DAMMIT LOIS!!!
Dimension, the latest iteration in Opera’s incredibly cool mobile browser will be released on the 19th of June. For all those who are somewhat in the dark about this browser it’s one of the essential downloads for anyone’s mobile phone. The thing is the Opera guys and gals have been incredibly tight lipped about what the new features of the latest version is actually going to be. Personally I would like to have the option to see the ENTIRE webpage and then zoom into specific areas. Would DEFINITELY make my browsing experience that much better.
Also as I’m browsing on a phone, what I would also like is the option to SAVE things so that I can read them once I’m in a tunnel or something. It just kinda seems that much more logical. Cache has never been as important I don’t think.
Geeze that took a long time but I can finally report that I’ve actually sorted out the Kode’s version 6 mockup. Now you might say:
"How the hell is this relevant you lazy fuck? Sort out the full implementation of the site instead of telling us about the damn mockup".
Ah patience young Padawin one, the significance here you see is the fact that this final mockup has only come after 21 FAILED attempts. 21 attempts, and iterations and tweaks and modifications. That’s an insane amount of time spent on designs that are not going to be used….EVER. Some of the ideas where pretty nice but the overall package lacked a je ne sais quoi.
So how is this interesting to you? Easy, I actually realised what I was doing wrong and to be honest it’s a fundamental element that I employ in all of my works that seemed lacking in this instance and I decided to go down a completely different route, one that was more clinical rather than conceptual as I usually do. I’ll try and elaborate. When I design or draw something, I usually think of a concept and run with it. I may be trying to emulate a specific feel or idea. Version 4 for example was influenced by my rereading Akira at the time. I loved the cables and the detail which is where that particular design came from.
For this one, I just wandered aimlessly. Moving from one idea that I thought was killer to the next. Sadly only some ideas were any good. In general I was missing the overall picture that combined the design.
A new Broken Kode will be appearing shortly.
Ice underneath the seats in the London underground? Summer is finally here and it’s pretty fucking disgusting on the tube. It’s hot, it’s stuffy, it’s sweaty and it’s 8:30 in the morning so the trains are rammed. It’s also more humid as well so people (myself included) are sweating perfusely. There’s been loads of talk about what to do about it, but it seems that there might be some kind of solution in the future. It’s an interesting solution and one I honestly hope actually works because there’s currently two ways people address the issue, and that is to effectively miss the traffic. Either get up earlier or go to work much later, but even then that’s not really addressing thet problem.
That’s MUCH better. After the complete and utter BOREDOM that was the Monaco grand prix, the Canadian Grand Prix delivered in spades. I seriously enjoyed this race for more than one reason. I’m a bit disappointed for Nico Rosberg, whom I think is an exceptional little driver and seriously one of the future stars of Formula One. He had it there to be much higher up there, but alas if Mclaren can get it wrong for Alonso, I think I can accept that the Williams team fucked it up for him and caused him to get a 10second stop go penalty.
However good on Wurz for coming out of friggin NOWHERE and claiming third. The guy was 20th on the bloody grid. That is a superb drive all around, no matter how fortunate you get with the safety cars etc. Speaking of safety cars, 4 of them. There was more crashes in this race then I can care to remember. Some of them were seriously lame, others like Robert Kubica’s unbelievable take off into the walls was pretty scary. Crashes on the race track are only acceptable (it’s part of racing at 320km/hr) when the guy in the cockpit gets out shakes the dust off and gets onto a motorcycle back to the paddock. Good to hear that the man got off pretty lightly with just a broken leg. Ralf never really recovered from the crash in America a few years ago.
Tomorrow however you know that all the news will be on Lewis Hamilton’s maiden victory. It’s amazing if you think about it since he’s only driven 6 F1 races in his life, so rather than wait 100 races or whatever he’s had it in the first 6. That’s pretty amazing and probably going to raise all expectations that he could be a world champion this year. The thing is and I know it’s not his fault, but I’m REALLY starting to get pissed off at the ITV coverage. They’ll spend something like 30 minutes before the race concentrating on Lewis and asking the drivers and everyone about him rather than concentrating on other aspects of the sport and other drivers. It’s really over hyping and it’s just getting annoying. Yes he’s having an exceptional debut, yes the story leading up to him getting the drive is great, but honestly how many bloody times do I have to hear it again and again.
Well it’s been a bit too long coming, but I think I’ve found a theme that I can get to grips with relatively easily. I’m going to be hacking Depo Clean, adding parts of Fauna and some K2 in for good measure. I had a look at Sandbox and I’ve got to say that I was pretty turned off by the function.php file that they’ve added in there. It just makes the markup so much more difficult to understand at first glance which is what made me keep looking for alternatives that just did the job cleanly. In any case Depo Clean probably best resembles what I’m aiming for in the end anyway so it helps that I like the markup as well. The next time I do this I’ll be converting this markup into something that can be used with Habari.
Interesting developments over at Six Apart. Lets dig up some of the things I said back in the day about this shall we. For all those in the dark, MT was the defacto CMS you would choose if you were in the market to get yourself a blog with comments setup on your server back in 2003-2004. Of course what happened was the Six Apart crew got a bit greedy at the time and all this free effort by the community was kind of slapped in their collective faces when they introduced the updated version 3.0 which was built off the backs of the community and sold back to them. The original pricing scheme was a complete farce but they revised it when they got the unexpected (erm yeah) response.
What this did was move all those people who were originally using MT to convert to an alternative. Some went to Textpattern, most went to WordPress.
3 years on, SA are now doing what they should have done way back for version 3 and maybe have kept some form of dominance. Currently however I feel it’s far too little too late. Do I give a shit about MT? Not really. I’m not interested in remembering how to write templates using MT-Tags and other bullshit. I’m not interested in revisiting the past. I will say however that the admin looks nice, and it’s also very cool that the actual engine dealing with that is the same as the one dealing with the blog itself, so I’m definitely going to bring that up with the Habari folk.
Ah yes, Habari, whatever happened to that initiative you might ask? Loads have been happening in the background but nothing massive for me to personally talk about. I’m sure once I get some more free time I’ll return to more active contribution and discussion, but I’ll leave that post for another day.
The new London 2012 branding was unveiled today and seriously, it’s very funny how the organisers have got this soo spectacularly wrong. I don’t even know what the fuck this piece of shit is actually meant to be (also check out the absolutely heinous website) .
Update: Seems they’ve launched the site 4 days early since they saw what an absolute pile of shit their ‘placeholder’ actually was. I mean my placeholder is not better but at least you can read the text and it doesn’t hurt your eyes from the sheer stupid colour choices.
I’m to understand that it says 2012 but I mean seriously, what the hell were they thinking.
What I find really ironic is how the British design press (Creative Review, I’m looking at you) kept harping on how the Athens Olympics logo just wasn’t all that great. Personally and I’ll admit that my opinion on the subject may be slightly biased but I thought the Athens Olympic logo was miles better, miles and miles better.
So a couple of weeks back (maybe it’s more, I’ve got far more annoying things in my life at the moment to really remember the time lines for shit like this) Bryan’s girlfriend Jen posted on his website (that was taken offline at the time) that things were not going well with him at the moment and that Avalonstar might continue and it might not, and it was all terribly cryptic and oh so very very O_o.
What many of those outside didn’t see was what went on behind the scenes, on the 9rules member’s message board and obviously in many people’s email boxes. Scrivs is a bit pissed off at Bryan for many reasons and I got to thinking about this very slightly and I think there’s really two sides to this story with some leeway afforded to both parties, all depending on your perspective I guess.
So what’s the deal you ask? In a nutshell, we’ve got Bryan’s girlfriend posted that he (Bryan) was taking the site down for reasons undisclosed. Didn’t really say why or what the actual reasons were but I guess if you always have the worst thing on your mind you might be forgiven to think that there was some SERIOUS shit going down. Subsequently what happened, IMHO was COMPLETELY over the top. When people tried to contact him, they got no response, which perpetuated the worry/curiosity . Presents were discussed, wallpapers, cards, a website was built to make sure he understood that he had support. Does that sound a little overboard to everyone? I thought so too. I’ve got to say though it’s a terribly nice gesture and it shows that a community does exist for those in 9rules and that they are willing to support one another, which is kinda where some of the resentment is coming from I guess. All this support for false pretences of the equivalent of a bad hairday.
The thing is though, Bryan didn’t actually ask for any of this. Bryan didn’t say “Hey guys, see you later, shit has hit the fan, but if you feel the need to ask what’s going on, don’t email me because I’m not going to be discussing it at all, but email Scrivs, Tyme and Mike over at the 9rules network, or Jon Snook while you’re at it, since I’m part of that company, or Matt Mullenweg since I used to work for him.”
He didn’t ask for people to react in the way that they did. He didn’t ask for all of love that was sent his way (some would now argue that he doesn’t deserve that love anymore). I guess he couldn’t really predict what would happen or how things would shape out. Did he mitigate that? He did eventually but I guess based on the original reaction I guess he might have been feeling a bit like people were going to rip him a new asshole for being so melodramatic about the whole thing and therefore thought it best to keep shut and let people try and forget about the whole thing. Yes, he could have been a lot less cryptic in the first place and decided to take the site down and put it on hold and tell everyone that this is what he wanted to do for a little while because the design of the site was giving him some serious issues that he needed to sort out or whatever. He didn’t for whatever reason. It’s his site, he’s free to do whatever he wants. I mean Oxton did something similar a year ago or whatever.
The thing is that if you reacted to the message in any way, you reacted of your own accord. What I mean by that is that you chose to give this your time, effort and energy to whatever this situation. I personally chose to ignore it and I guess that’s why I don’t feel like my emotions have been cheated. I’ve been on the net a while and have read loads of things. Some nice things, some not so nice things. I’ve read about people’s mother dying, their wife having a miscarriage, loosing their jobs, divorcing one another and the list goes on. People sometime write about these things because it helps them get things clearer in their minds. Maybe helps them get over things. That’s part of what blogging is all about. I feel that when people are ready to talk about things on their sites they will do so (or not) in their own time. Once those things are open for discussion by the person that originated them then it’s an incredible boost if there is additional support from strangers on the net.
Having said all that, I can definitely count at least 5 people on the net that I’ve never met, and whom I may never meet (although it would be damn cool if we did in the future) whom I would really go out of my way to help them out if they so much as whispered it in my direction. These people I consider my friends, but I haven’t placed that level of trust with anyone. Like I said I’ve been reading and doing this for a while now that I know it’s a bit of a waste of time and effort to place that emotion for everyone and anyone, it can be misguided at best or make you feel cheated in the worst case.
So I picked up the Guardian today, mainly for a CD which has excerpts of the ‘Great Speeches of the 20th Century’. They’ve posted those on their website, definitely worth a read (or a listening if you can) as there were a couple there that I’d never actually heard, just heard of.
Is it just me, or has the yearly ‘reboot’ phase kinda gone down like a bit of a whipper this year? I’ve read one website that I actually read participate in this year’s event. No the ‘Kode hasn’t really jumped into it this year, although I’ve been working on a redesign for a little while. The problem is actually two-fold. One is that I’m not feeling as creative as I have been in years past, and secondly I’m failing to see the point in doing this anymore as most people who read this don’t visit the site. They read it via their RSS aggregator. It’s only those crazy souls that come via search engines and actually typing a comment in here (I love you both, although those that leave a comment even more).
Does it matter anymore what my site looks like? I’m finding it hard to convince myself at the moment, and I’m lacking that dramatic flair and energy that is needed for a proper redesign.
I’m going to post a collection of one liners that are rattling in my head, probably going to make it into a regular sunday evening thing:
The Offspring Greatest hits album dualdisc is pretty damn good listening. Reminds me back to when I was 13 and was about to take on the world. 30 was a lifetime away.
So we're talking with Rosie and Dom about ethnic minorities and how it's actually a lot less than you might expect. I know that statistics are made on the spot in general, but the one quoted seemed a bit low, which lead to us talking about the first wave of the black community into Britain in the 50s and 60s and how people of a certain age who had not seen black people until that stage felt/dealt/reacted with the new world order. Which then triggered the memory of me meeting my first black man, must have been 12 years old or something; I honestly can't remember his name, but he was from Mauritius. I remember he was a very softly spoken guy and very very gentle in nature. The only thing that made an impression on me was his hands and how the palms were slightly coarser than mine. Such a strange thing to take back.
Lewis Hamilton is a great little rookie, however I'm really not liking the shitty HYPE that British media seems intent on throwing his way. I mean seriously you see this shit year after year. They build them up just so that they can slap them down when they put a foot wrong. Really shitty as far as I'm concerned, and I don't blame Ron Dennis trying to shield his driver from all that bullshit.
Clerks II is how a DVD should be made. It's got about 6hours of extra material and Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier have seriously spent a lot of time to make it a special experience. You're not buying the DVD just to watch the movie a couple of times. It's really about the DVD experience and really using it, with multiple commentaries, bloopers, interviews, behind the scene footage and the list goes on. I put this up as one of the great DVDs of last year, easily.
Just watched Christopher Nolan's first movie, Following. Seriously, it's one of the better indie films I've seen in a really long time. Black and white, shot in various locations in and around London, check it out, great little twist at the end.
Diet is going well. I must have had a serious fat day last Sunday because I'm about 2kg less this week. Part of that I guess is the running, part is the diet changes, part is the psychology as well I guess. I'll keep the updates on this going.
I bought an ipod shuffle last week, first Apple product I've ever bought myself, and I've got to say I'm loving the size. It's like part of my clothing now. It never runs out of juice and it stores enough music to last me my runs, my trips to work and around the place. It would be nice to have a display but when it comes right down to it I don't think it's completely necessary for the function that I am using it in. Does this mean an Apple mac isn't far behind,...hmm probably not.
So Ubuntu Feisty Fawn came out this week. I downloaded it for my laptop. They still hadn't sorted out the bugs that I had reported that I had confirmed that had tried to help solve, that worked in 2 previous versions. I'm talking my laptop into the office to get Windows installed on the machine. I want to swear at Canonical, but alas it's not completely their fault, although it's really annoying not to have this sorted. Renders my laptop really annoying to use to be honest, so much so that I haven't been using it for the past couple of months properly.
SMODCAST (love that name as well, especially how Kevin introduces it and everything). Easily one of the best podcast's I've heard in a really long time (thanks for the heads up Michael). I've gotten into listening to dvd commentary while working on something as I can actually get through a lot of things, and listen the plethora of commentaries that I generally have no real time to listen to.
Google Reader Theme by Jon Hicks. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe this. I wish someone would do something similar for Gmail, because there is just soo much cruft and rubbish in gmail. The code is great and the functionality is great but google couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag in most cases. Their forte is making applications usable and fun but not pretty look at.
Better Gmail. Ok so it’s not as cool looking as the Google Reader theme, but it’s a definite step in the right direction. My favourite part and something I really wonder why google hasn’t sorted out instead of just giving us more and more space is icons for the attachments. Such a simple thing and yet so essential to searching for things in a human fashion.
First look at the original Iron Man grey suit. I’m actually really looking forward to this. A marvel movie that doesn’t completely suck. To be honest ever since X-men 2 and Blade 2 the Marvel movies in general have been a let down. So much so that I’ve not seen Elektra, Ghost Rider or Fantastic Four.
So I’m talking to Fern yesterday on Facebook, and when I say talking I actually mean ‘Wall-ing’ her (yeah it’s not the technical term for it but alas it sounds funnier). Anyway, so she’s dissing 300 and calling it gay porn or some such rubbish, so we started talking movies. I asked her whether or not she was excited for the new Chinese flick that’s getting prepped for release in the UK this weekend, Curse of the Golden Flower. Her response, I’m quoting here:
It's one of those Chinese films for foreigners. The trailer didn't even have any words! Even if it features Jay Chow.
See the thing is I’ve heard this kind of response nearly EVERY time I’ve asked someone Chinese about a Chinese movies that makes it into Western theatres. For most people the Chinese outbreak came with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee a few years ago. I was raised on a staple diet of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee movies. So much so that my parents have had to watch Drunken Master 1 & 2 several times over with me because I kept renting it from the video store again and again, mainly because I’d seen all the ones in the store and because I loved the interaction with his Master when he was training him. I also loved the food scenes, where you know he’s going to eat the entire house, then get drunk, then not have any money to pay then have a big massive fight. To be fair though I’d not really experienced the full extent of Asian cinema, not by a long shot.
So today I decided to goad Irene into telling me what the deal was with the dislike of Chinese people to exported certain exported Chinese films. So she gave me the standard foreigners line, followed by a curve ball (I’m not actually quoting Irene here but work with me people I’m getting to my point):
It's nothing we haven't seen before, since the 1950s. In fact some of the better stuff weren't movies but TV series.
That’s fucking interesting. Where the hell are they? What are they called? What’s the deal? Name them. Of course they’ve all got Chinese names. C’mon guys it’s not my fault I’m not Chinese, I’ve come to accept that you’ll never hand me the Chinese menu at the restaurant (you know the one with all the authentic good stuff), why are you being stingy with your bloody cinema and tv programmes?
So I’m asking everyone that knows of any good Chinese series (preferably set in the Emperor Chinese era) that are actually ‘good’ and not for foreigners (but with subtitles) for me to get into. After all Battlestar Galactica won’t be back for like at least 6 months, Prison Break won’t be back for a similar amount of time and Lost can only keep my attention for like 45 minutes a week.
Massive shout out to Jos Buivenga over at Exljbris for the truly excellent and awesome fonts he’s got on offer for free. When he says “Quality Free Font Foundry” he’s seriously not lying. Excellent stuff. I love Delicious and Fontin are both fonts that I’m going to definitely try and use in a future iteration of the ‘Kode.
Great little interview with Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson over at Gnome Journal. The most interesting part of the interview was this little side project, Art Libre Iconset. An integration of Gimp, Inkscape and Scribbus would be great, not that I use Gimp (but that’s another post for another time).
Smashing Pumpkins, Zeitgeist will be out on 07/07/07. I remember where I was the last time an official Smashing Pumpkins album came out. Actually this is a funny story, not haha funny but funny. The pumpkins believe it or not where not all that massive over here in the UK, even at their absolute height (you know that Today Today song, or was it Tonight Tonight). Eh, well for those that knew good music sure they were up there but most people over here back then were still into brit pop and the Britney Spears rubbish was starting to take form as well.
So there I was one of the few rangers that had this unhealthy obsession with the pumpkins. Something about their music seriously struck a cord with me (no pun intended). It was like well I could hear the genius in everything they did (except the James Iha stuff, that was always a bit too, soft for me, which is weird since he went on to join A Perfect Circle who are anything but ‘soft’), anyway I digress.
It’s a Sunday and everything shuts at like 10 oclock in Nottingham. I do mean everything. The thing is though the last official ‘new’ album Machina the Machines of God was actually released on the same day as some Oasis album. So HMV had this promotion going on where if you came into the store at midnight you’d get the album a full 8 hours before most sane and normal people would get it, but the real cherry on the cake was the fact that they were handing out these promo cds as well which were limited to the first 100 or something like that. Was I there? You’re damn straight I was.
Thing is there was a bit of a problem with transport. Like I said it was all about Nottingham, 10 oclock on a Sunday everything is shut, even the fekkin buses. Dunno if this has changed or what, but I walked from the house on Cycle Road into town. I’m walking down Market Street (for all those people who are into comic and CDs, you’ve got the BEST comic book store in the UK, Page 45 and one of the best music stores in the UK Selectadisc) at least they were there when I was walking down the road to buy the latest pumpkins CD and it was about this time when I saw the craziest shit I’d seen up until that point in England.
2 guys in a Taxi cab driving up the street, I’m walking down the street. The guy in the back seat of the cab starts pummeling the guy in the front of the seat. I can’t remember completely but the cab driver took his hands off the driving wheel to try and calm the two idiots killing each other in his car. I think the cabbie also took his foot off the pedal so the car started rolling back down the hill. Obviously the guy has no where to go so he takes a few hits to the head and then he opens the door to get out, CAR IS NOW MOVING BACKWARDS. I think he just manages to either get out of the door’s way or to go under the door (and I could be making this part up but it happened so quickly that I think I can be excused if I fuck up my story ever so slightly) but he’s on the floor now and the car accelerates backwards and turns straight into the glass facade of a shopping centre (I think it was Debenhams, not sure). Glass everywhere, cabbie has his head in his hands, but the guy that started the fight hasn’t finished. He gets out of the car and starts looking for bits and pieces off the ground, bits of car, whatever and starts throwing them at the other guy who’s in the middle of the road.
All this is happening with me walking past them which my umbrella (hey it was raining) and a bit of ongoing traffic. For those thinking that this was in some back alleys or something like that, think again, this road is literally off the main square, the police where in the corner having their teas and telling drunken girls to go home rushed over in like 10 seconds. I just walked on, glad to not have been caught up in the foolery and promptly bought my CD.
I miss Nottingham, always had a bit of colour, but most importantly I miss the Pumpkins. It’s good to have you guys back.
Blender 2.43 was released today. To my mind (and I’ve said this many times before) is the most professional open source project EVER. This is how open source should be. Every release is golden, and this one is a keeper. From the new website, the excellent release log, feature videos and the list honestly goes on. Download it NOW!
Battlestar Galactica season 4 official press release! It’s about Frakking time they made this official. After last month’s story on cbr that they were thinking about cancelling the series this is good news. Notice the rubbish about it being renewed for at least 13hours though. What’s that all about? Those assholes got it wrong the first time when the first series aired in the UK for the first time because they thought it wasn’t going to do well in America.
Interesting article on the Guardian regarding the new UK mac adverts, some valid points while others seem like their there to goad people into a reaction.
Let me start off by saying that Inksmith is what I view as my biggest online failure, after a fashion and this is what this particular post is about. Whenever I announce a project or something I usually deliver, notice I said whenever I announce a project. I may be a blabber mouth an I do get excited about things and have the urge to talk about them, however I never announce until I’m 100% certain I’m going to follow through (seriously if I didn’t do that I’d be writing this sort of shit all the time).
I might take some time to bring it forward (usually I take a lot longer that I could possibly want) however the fact of the matter remains that I will see things through. It seems that ever since the ‘announcement’ of Habari a few moons ago, some have brought up Inksmith as a way to bring discredit to Habari (at least the negative connotations that Inksmith is presented in infers this). It’s as though the fact that nothing moving forward on Inksmith is telling of stuff that might not happen on Habari, which honestly is the single most preposterous idea I’ve ever heard. These are two very very different things and I find those that mention them as though they’re linked in the same way done so as an act of ignorance/stupidity/lack of understanding etc. Here’s why.
The first fact brought forward is to understand what the two things actually were. Inksmith simply was an idea to create a community for bloggers. No this wasn’t a rip off on 9rules. I wasn’t creating a blog network but rather an area for bloggers to get around and be themselves. Oh sure there wasn’t really a central theme for us to bandy around, but what I wanted was a nice buzzing community that helped each other out and was open for people to get to know each other re our love for blogging. It wasn’t ground breaking and it wasn’t anything crazy, but it would have been fun and loads of the guys where well up for it. The best part of it all was the pictures on the coming soon site. I really liked the fact that we were all pissed off in those photos. It delivered what Inksmith was all about, angry people on the internet venting :).
Habari on the other hand is blogging software.
So where does the similarities lie you ask? As far as I can tell it’s the fact that some of the names attached to one project are now attached to another. So does this mean I’ve tarnished the credibility of the others on that list (since it was my idea)? Maybe and I guess they are the only ones I owe an apology to, because I didn’t deliver on my part of the bargain, so to everyone that was attached to the Inksmith project I apologise profusely. Let’s get something clear here, if I ask someone to be part of something I take their commitment seriously. I generally don’t like to waste ANYONE’S time as time for me is the most important commodity. So I genuinely feel bad about wasting those people’s time. We had some great discussions and it did prompt a lot of people on the internet to discuss the deal with being anonymous on the internet and using handles.
Why didn’t Inksmith take off? Because I didn’t have the energy to kick it off. 2006 was one of the toughest years on me from many many respects. In fact from May onwards I can definitely consider 2006 as one of the darkest times in my life from many angles. Which is actually reflected in my blog. What, you think that the dark motif was because I was joining in with the trend for darker sites at the time? No, Broken Kode is an extension of me and it reflects my mood in many cases. When my mood changes so to does the colours on my site, and the design itself in many respects.
So why didn’t I get Inksmith started? Honestly it came down to the amount of energy and enthusiasm I had to provide for the project, which after completing FOFR and Shuttle and 2 websites for clients and my on website and a bunch of illustrations I just didn’t have any more to give, until I was in Greece in October/November. At that point I had charged my batteries and I had decided that it was time for me to pull my finger out and build Inksmith all over again. For all the negative assholes that don’t believe me here’s the logo I created on the plane back to the UK:
So why did I stop that momentum? Simply put because the day I got back from the UK Chris had emailed me about Habari. In Habari I basically found another way to solve the problem that I wanted Inksmith to solve in the first place; the difference of course is that we’d have a central idea to gather around and that would be the software.
The community coming together around Habari is one I’m very proud to be a part of in the first instance. Final word to those that decide to put Inksmith in my face one more time, seriously try and do something constructive with your time, I know I am.
Forest was back in town for the weekend and we were catching up as I’ve not seen him since the summer. We’re shooting the shit and he asks me how my artwork and design work is going. Of which I had to answer with the truth, in reality it’s not. Oh yeah sure I’ve recently been playing around with Habari, but to be honest Habari is a hobby which I’m enjoying being a part of, but I wouldn’t say it’s stretching my artistic muscles. It’s definitely making me take a much more pragmatic approach to design and I’ve done this before but I know when my artistic muscles are being flexed and sadly I can’t really claim the last year to have provided me with any level of truly artistic expression and in talking with Forest I kind of inadvertently voiced the reason why.
I’ve heard in the past that there are two sides to the way the brain works (I could obviously be making this shit up so if you’ve got links whatever please do send them over) in that it’s operates and functions with practicality in mind, maths, engineering, science. And then there is the creative side of the brain. These two areas don’t cross over very often but when they do you get freaks of nature like myself who do engineering by day (so it’s all about calculations, making things work/fit) and by night I draw and I create, or at least that’s what I thought I could do easily.
The harsh reality of the situation however is that I’ve obviously FAILED in that respect (chalk another failure on my part, one of many in my life) What I’ve found to be the case however is that if I’m submerged in engineering, my other drawing energy and concentration seems to disappear. I guess much like many people I need to be in a particular frame of mind. The music that I’ll be listening to has to inspire me as well (I draw a lot better when I’ve actually got music I’m really into at that particular moment in time); my mind has to be a blank, and I have to have focus. Cutting my drawing based on pesky stuff like eating and sleeping is the bane of the entire exercise to be honest.
So what’s the solution you ask? Well now that I’ve ACTUALLY identified the problem (which I always knew but I’ve not properly voiced until now) it’s really up to me to MAKE the time for drawing and retrain myself to my current situation. Originally I thought I’d have trouble finding the time to do all these things. See it’s not a question of whether or not you have the time to do something (at least that’s how I see it), the harsh reality of a busy working life is that you’ll never find the time. It’s up to you to seriously make the time and it’s up to you to train your mind and schedule your time in such a way so as to accommodate those things that you want to do. My problem it would see is my psychological status and my willingness to tackle the creative avenue in front of me.
So it’s time to be pragmatic about things one more time and really put in the hours of building and creating once again. Hopefully that’ll manifest itself in several unfinished projects that have been laying around the place in the attempt of making them a reality again.
It’s been a truly exciting time for Habari on the design front (not that it’s not been exciting on the code front, but I can only really properly comment on all things design to be honest). Since the last time we talked, Michael has been a busy boy with absolutely everything under the sun. All these ideas have been filtering through the designs as we build towards a unified look for the administration panel.
Remember these mockups are just that mockups, we’re still meandering trying to sort things out, this is an open design process so things are going to change. Don’t think that what you see here is gospel and how it’s going to be, don’t be quoting me fekking Jakob in my face about usability and whatnot. These are the formation months, trust me we’re going through MANY MANY loops and discussions. So with that in mind let’s begin shall we.
Stage One:
Final Stage:
We’re still playing around with loads of things here. The header and footer are still up for discussion but the main ideas are there. We’re definitely going for the easiest installer award with this release.
Michael’s been pretty busy and he’s got his ideas regarding the media browser on ‘paper’. Once we’ve ironed out all the kinks and how it’s going to work I think it’ll be the most special media browser on any blogging platform.
We did have a great deal of interation of ideas between us on the logo. Work is still ongoing in this area and probably will be for a little while longer as we try and find ourselves the best fit for what the logo means to the community and how people will view us effectively.
Remember nothing is set, everything’s up for discussion. As always Spread the news!
This is the first (hopefully) weekly instalment of the comings and goings on in the Habari Design Community. As this was our first week ‘out’ it was obviously a pretty wild and exciting ride with an immense amount of interest from all people around the world. What’s fascinating to me is that the people at the table currently trying to shape the design aspect of Habari. We’ve got Michael and myself working on all things admin at the moment, with comments from the entire community. Bryan Veloso has joined the team and he’s going to be handling all the website related stuff (from main site to wiki design to whatever the hell else we can keep him busy with) and we have the truly talented Yoram who’s kindly offered to do the icons, so as far as I’m concerned we’re in pretty good shape regarding the graphical direction the project is going to have.
A great deal of work has been done in the logo department. However we're still not really decided on the direction we want to take as the current options on the table haven't been a unanimous 'HELL YES'. There are merits to all of them but I think with respect to the logo it's better to just wait for that one idea that jumps out at us and really makes us all smile rather than settling for a right here and right now solution. Here's a few examples of what are on the table:
A lot of work has gone into the installer as well. I'm not going to comment on the design of the installers, because that's out in the wild going through the motions.
We’re still hammering through these back and forth, but the idea is there, one click install, degradable JS that makes parts of the install appear as and when the previous section has been completed and verified.
Very minor tweaks going on here, except of course the colours. The pink is displayed for when you hover over the log out button.
More work going on this part. We've been having a lot of discussions regarding the number of buttons we should have. The subtle addition to these mockups is the slider for the tags (think increasing/decreasing the tags on display).
Remember nothing is set, everything’s up for discussion. As always Spread the news!
It’s been one hell of a couple of days since we first talked about the Habari project. There’s been a slew of reaction to the news all over the internet (go to the pingback section of that post) and to be honest it’s far exceeded all expectations I could have had because I honestly don’t have any. See I wasn’t completely sure how everyone would react over the news and therefore I was preparing myself for a little bit of a fight, in so much that we would have to prove the meritts of the software before we got people actually wanting to join and help build the community.
This in turn got me thinking to what all this meant and so I’m writing this post for several reasons. A couple of them is to dispell any rumours, a few others is to point everyone in the right direction should they want any more information, while others is to address concerns I’ve heard from people over the last couple of days.
There's been a lot of speculation as to why we're doing this. I'm not going to speak for the others (because they're doing a pretty good job of it themselves to be honest) but I'll tell you why I'm doing this. I've been talking to (read: boring) many of my offline friends with just how cool this is going to be. The first thing that they ask me is "Why the hell are you doing this to yourself? Why are you working for free again? Why are you spending your free time doing this?" I can only answer by saying that it's incredible fun to be part of an online community of like minded people who are trying to make one of my favourite pastimes (ie blogging and tinkering with my website) a more enjoyable experience. I love being involved in open source projects and this is without a doubt one of the biggest things I've ever been involved with.
When I first started looking for an alternative to Movable Type I had two options. The first was WordPress the other was Textpattern. I chose WordPress for the community. That community however has changed. It’s core has shifted into something different. The thing is though I can’t really say that this is the community’s fault. This shift actually can be attributed to something else. The fact of the matter is that WordPress developement has stagnated as far as the .org user is concerned.
The only explanation I can give is that this is because the WordPress development shifted it’s attention. Shifted from the .org section to the .com section. I’m not going to condem the guys for doing this, in fact in most cases I understand them doing this. However this move and shift hasn’t gone unnoticed and obviously a lot of energy flying about the WordPress community has either gone into the ether, ignored or shrugged aside. All these thousands of people out there that have contributed in the past feel as though they have been forsaken. That could be part of the reason why a great number of people genuinely got excited about the prospect of a new system, written from the ground up that might address questions. It’s all about the community. It’s all about the people that you interact with and that help you along your way.
What you think the latest release of ‘features’ on WordPress.org is a coincidence. It’s obvious (to me at least and this feature could have been in development for months, in which case I apologise) that this is a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that obviously has made them sit up and think about the situation. It’s not every day that several prominent developers (Robert, Owen, Michael), at the very least in the past otherwise they would not be in the credit box on wordpress.org, decide to leave and start something on their own; it’s a sign that something isn’t exactly right in the community. My absolute favourite one however is this one (I only saw this because it was lying in my referrer log), so yeah go and hammer that link and lets get it up there at the top :) lol.
Don't be silly. Nobody is trying to kill WP. We're not aiming to make software that is better than WordPress, we're trying to make software that is better than ALL blogging software out there. Lets be clear about this there are quite a large number of open source projects that allow you to do essentially the same thing. Their degree of complication obviously varies, however the fact remains that there are many alternatives. As it stands it's considered that WordPress is the best alternative that's available on the market. So it's obvious that people would think that we are in fact trying to create something that out does WP. Also many of us have come from a WordPress user base, however that doesn't mean other people from other backgrounds cannot join the fun. But would we really be getting involved and doing something if we didn't feel like there was a void to be filled? Room for one more solution that offered an alternative way of doing things? We're ultimately here because we feel that we can contribute back and put our efforts into something that can aid people and can provide a fun platform to share their thoughts, photos and media.
We don't even have a developer's pre-release. The reason it was announced in any fashion was because one of the core developers moved his site over and was the first person to actively use the code for his site. That's a MAJOR success, one that deserved to be celebrated. In a weird twist of fate, outing slightly earlier than anticipated was actually an incredible great thing. Why? Because people that were on the fringes, thinking that this was just all wishful thinking might actually hold some legs. As such this little buzz has gotten several people wanting to contribute, and here's one reason why:
Habari is a fresh start. We’re all in the unique position that we’ve been blogging for several years now. We’ve all had our share of experiences with open source and we’ve all seen several different packages in our time. We’re at the stage now that if we had a fresh start we’d do things slightly differently and hopefully better. And that’s what we’re aiming to do.
I guess that might be the greatest draw to the Habari project. We're pretty open for people who want to contribute to the project, in fact the way that this project has been set up, it's ideal for people wanting to contribute as it's got a completely different structure in it's development, in that it's a meritocracy. It's a great way to make sure that the software comes first and that there is no one person who veto's everything or has final say in everything.
So were do we go from here? Well one of the things that I shall be doing as I'm coordinating the designers on this team is to give a recap every Sunday of this week's activities on the design front. What we finished off and what we've got to look forward towards. I'll be including pics and so everyone is always welcome to chime in and add their two cents to the design either here or in the dev mailing list.
Well Chris broke the news about, Habari, a new open source blogging CMS platform. While he didn’t want feel it correct to mention in the post who was involved, I’m going to step forward and put my hand up as the designated pixel pushing monkey of this motley crew.
What I find amusing is that as this news was released by Chris, I read this post about how any new blogging software would not stand a chance because of WordPress. Man I love a fucking challenge. I mean reading that post you’d think we’d be fools to even consider making a WordPress alternative. I guess all I can say to that is: Colour us DAMN foolish.
Back in November Chris approached a few of us to see who would be up for helping design for the new project he was working on. His timing couldn't have been better to be honest with you. See I had a MASSIVE itch that just needed to be scratched. I had definitely not said everything that needed to be said about blogging administration panels, especially since the last one I was actively involved with didn't exactly go exactly the way it should have.
I felt pretty burnt the last time round to be honest, so much so that I really thought it was best for me to steer well clear of any open source involvement in the future. However like I said in that post the most important thing that I got out of the online experience was the collaboration with the guys. If it was anyone else asking me to do something apart from Michael, Joen and Chris I’d have probably declined there and then. I didn’t join the team because I didn’t have anything better to do (as it will become clear in the coming months), but alas because I really want to create something that I can be proud to have been involved with and that I will find a joy to use. Something that I can contribute towards and that others can contribute towards as well in an open fashion.
So when Chris came forward I was all too happy to say yes. Considering that I had actually contacted another developer (I’m not going to mention him by name but needless to say he was also having a similar itch which says a lot about how things stand in the current open source blogging world) about starting our own blogging CMS, it was interesting that others around me felt the need for an alternative as well.
The great thing about the Habari project is the fact that it's a clean slate. Imagine starting on the ground floor. There were no presidencies, no set stringent codebase that couldn't be altered, no existing userbase that might be confused and the list goes on. This is a decidedly different beast than Shuttle.
Those who don’t learn from the past end up repeating the mistakes again and again. So my approach to the graphical development of Habari is slightly different. Simply put, I’m going to be as transparent about the design process as you can imagine. I’ve seen several times in the past couple of months on the project, that through being open about the design I’ve been able to seriously move it forward in ways that I very well might not have considered. Ideas are what will make things move forward. At the same time it’s important that one person takes the bull by the horns and really goes to town on the design. Others should jump in with as many suggestions as possible, all the time because that’s how the innovation will continue and the project will not stagnate.
I will be going into a lot more detail in future posts regarding all the design decisions and what everything does and how it all fits together, so be patient, it'll all pay off in the long run I promise. As we've only recently kind of decided about colours (although knowing me I will probably tweak them, but I'm trying to be very good about this and sticking with this colour scheme), posting this will give people a feel of the quality of final product we're going for (and I'm not going to even talk about the code, the others are more than capable of that).
The following jpg is but a mockup, however Chris has implemented a fair chunk of this believe it or not (with probably like a 2 week old mock up), I’m telling you the man is a machine that will not be stopped. His dedication has forced me to make sure that I bring my very best to the table. It’s a bit of pressure that I’m actually relishing. Keeps me honest about things.
Continuing in my series of the best of 2006, just finished my post on the best graphic novels of 2006 over at Splash Panel.
Easily one of the coolest gadgets I got this year was the Blackberry Pearl (or 8100 model). I’ve been playing with it for like a day now and I know it’s going to be something really special to use for a good long while. Although it’s a nice site, the images really don’t do it much justice. It’s honestly a thing of beauty in design if you have it infront of you. It’s only slightly larger than my previous Ericsson and packs a serious punch with respect to the number of features it’s got in it.
The only annoying thing I found was the flap you put the SIM card in doesn’t stay set, but opens until you put the battery in there. Minor annoyance but it’s a real shame as this could have scored some more points of rock solid construction. Another thing that is really starting to PISS me off, is the fact that none of these phone manufacturers have clocked onto the fact that it would be nice to have a normal earphone jack as opposed to some piece of shit they’ve concocted for you to plug in your earphones.
What’s interesting is that I was able to get the phone and a whole new package that suits me down to a T while paying less. The issue with a lot of these packages that many operators provide is that they’re honestly not tailored very well for the average user. They either give you an immense amount of time in “off-peak” hours that are not always useful, so you end up not using all of them, or they give you too little minutes during normal times. The good thing however is that after a year and a bit of using my phone regularly I’ve got enough bills to know exactly how much a use and of what. No need to guess these things (as I’ve had to in the past).
hmm got to check how much that costs on the internet to see if it's cheaper.In the end T-mobile based on their Flext system which effectively gives you a pot of money every month that you can use for either calls or texts all from the same pot. Obviously I've opted for the unlimited internet service on there which is brilliant to be surfing the web while waiting on the train platform or even walking to and from places. You know when you're in any store and you think to yourself:
Well now it’s just a few clicks to check the net there and then.
Seems that Opera is definitely the little browser that could. Seems that this little browser is a hit on the Nintendo market. I’ve got to say that Opera Mini (opera for mobile devices) is MILES better than the standard BlackBerry browser. For a start they’ve cut away a lot of the clutter that the BB browser has when the menu is pressed. People on that size of screen don’t want to scroll FOREVER. We want something quick and to the point. Sure the browser is being updated pretty regularly as far as I can tell. It’s got RSS integration which is essential for all mobile devices as far as I’m concerned.
The Home page is EXACTLY what you want to see when you first log into the browser. Oh sure I’m as self obsessed as the next guy, but having BK as my home page on my BB seems a bit of a waste of space, although it’s definitely interesting to see how the site renders on a mobile phone (I’ll be sorting out a seperate mobile spreadsheet in the not too distant future).
The Application Opera Mini has attempted to access the network. Would you like to allow this?The only annoying thing for me at the moment (which I'm not sure if it's got something to do with the actual browser or t-mobile's settings) but effectively every time you use Opera it asks you:
If anyone’s got a way of stopping this fekking annoying message coming up everytime Opera is used please, pretty please with a cherry on top drop something in the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.
For those in the T-mobile camp wondering how to sort this out onto your Pearl, here’s the steps I took:
From your Pearl go to http://mini.opera.com and follow the instructions.
<li><p>Chance are after you've tried to connect it'll fail on your ass (it did on mine). Thankfully Opera have already forseen this problem and posted <a href="http://www.operamini.com/help/connect/?provider=T-Mobile®ion=UK">this page</a>. Note that this is for the UK market, although as you can see they've sorted everyone out for the rest of the world as well.</p></li>
<li><p>Go to Options > Advanced Options > TCP and then put the information you got from that page.
Turn off, remove battery, turn on and it should all work.
As I continue my review of 2006, go read part 1 if you want to find out my thoughts on The best of the Net 2006, I’m turning my attention to movies. Interestingly I think this year has been one of the worst years for movies in a really long time. That isn’t to say that I haven’t enjoyed a good number of movies this year, it’s just that I found less time for movies this year, which I can probably attribute to the lack of quality flicks being shown this year.
Most disappointing movie of 2006 for me personally was X-men 3. Seriously they were on auto-pilot for that movie. Another minor disappointment for me was Superman Returns. Not because it was a bad movie, but rather because it wasn’t as great as I actually really wanted it to be.
However the PRUNE of all prunes surely has to go to Rocky Balboa (and that’s considering some of the stinkers I’ve seen this year, I mean it’s got Last Holiday for fuck’s sake). I mean seriously what the hell were they thinking when they got round and signed all the contracts for this? It’s one of the most ridiculous concepts I’ve ever heard and it’s really strange that Hollywood is so lame that it has to create another sequel. They should have stopped after 2 and called it a night. Hell I might even stomach 4, but seriously Rocky 6? I haven’t even seen this and sure as hell am not going to bother wasting my time with it. What next Die Hard 4? Oh shit yeah they’re going to be making that.
I started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. This is mainly about design on the net, internet applications, websites that caught my attention on the net for one reason or another. So without further adieu here’s the Squeaky Kode Trophies for the year of 2006.
It’s taken me a long while but I finally bit the Flickr bug as well and got myself an pro account as well. I’ve got to say that I don’t use it as much as I should do but that will be changing in the not to distant future.
For my feed reading I’ve jumped on the Newsgator bandwagon. I’ve got a lot to write about with respect to FOFRedux and will hopefully go to using that application in the not too distant future sometime next year, but in the meanwhile I’ve found the Newsgator service to be exactly what I was looking for.
So I guess it’s not so much that I had a specific internet application, but rather the fact that I actually decided to use several of the plethora of applications out there for use in the first place.
If you think I’ve missed something pretty fundamental just drop a comment and I’ll be sure to add it into the list or create a whole new category for it.
This “little” Eboy poster is so apt for capturing what I’ve been experiencing for the past year and a half as I got more into the internet in general. What’s great about the poster is that you actually notice more and more stuff on second and third viewing.
New Citroen ad - Mutation. It’s good to see that they moved their ideas forward and didn’t do another Transformer ad. The Bonobo music is absolutely brilliant. (Hat tip: Pixelsurgeon).
Blue Dragon from the fine folk at Mistwalker. Dammit, they’ve actually got me considering getting an Xbox 360 as it’s what I expected Final Fantasy 8 to look like (7 was and is the only Final Fantasy game I’ve played, but when I mean played I mean bought a Playstation just to play…(thanks to Aurum3 for the heads up, I might have to kill you guys).
Check out the new Sony Bravia Paint Advert. I’ve got to say that these adverts are taking over the same status as the Levis ads of the mid 90s. You know the ones that would propel music artists into the limelight and just make little contributions to pop culture. Even more flamboyant than the bouncy balls.
Flickr Cards. What makes this strange is that I only sorted out my flickr account yesterday (yeah I’ve been resisting this for a while now). I love print as well.
Finally my wishes for a mobile that actually provides me with what I want have been answer with the latest Sony Ericsson M600i.
I honestly don’t care that it doesn’t have a camera, as I find that feature a bit superfluous for my liking in a mobile phone anyway. It’s also fantastic news that mobile phone manufacturers are starting to utilise touch screens a little bit more, thus reducing the overall number of buttons on the phones, simplifying the design completely. Even better than a Crackberry.
In my mind this is exactly what I was trying to get last year. A phone that lets me:
On a similar but unrelated note, by the very nature of contracts in the UK, I end up getting new handsets every year; while this is a great thing, it’s also a terrible waste, as I’m massing a collection of handsets. All of them work, but they’re different generations. Randing from a battered Ericsson (when Sony hadn’t merged) to an oldie Nokia, the LG chocolate phone and my Sony Ericsson K750i. Definitely make a nice collection of how quickly technology for mobile devices has ramped up in a small space of time, but what the hell am I supposed to do with all these handsets? It’s not like they’re vintage yet so I can sell them on ebay as a collector’s item, and it seems like an awful waste chucking them in the bin. I mean where do ipod mini’s go when they retire? I ask because I’m eying up either a Zune or one of the new ipods.
There seems to be a bit of resurgence in the design and web development UK market. This is a very good thing as it’s been pretty poor the last year or so. When I cleaned up my room a couple of weeks ago I kept looking at my old magazines like I do and there seriously is a great deal of inspiration to still be gleamed from them. For web development I highly recommend .net. The magazine had a makeover a couple of months ago (including their website, which has a lot of great stuff on there) and has a great deal of good people working for them.
Unfortunately for the more artwork/design inclined, the available mags out there are slightly more hit and miss. While I do love the class that emanates from Digit, it does lack a certain amount of fun in their features. It seems less made to showcase designers and their work, and more inclined to actually provide information on what’s going on. Now that Computer Arts has gotten rid of the previous editor-in-chief and promoted Paul Newman into that position the magazine is definitely more readable. The problem is that they still continue to make the majority of the magazine tutorial heavy. Yeah guys move on already. There is a lot more to talk about than how to use photoshop and illustrator to do stuff. You might think I’m just jaded because I don’t use either, however the fact remains that rather than providing tutorials about design and how to development your skills, and more interviews with design firms and creatives, it’s all about filters and put this layer here etc, which in my mind is a complete and utter waste of space that could be used for something more useful.
As a sidenote, the recent Jason Arber (a man whom I have a lot of respect for) article on typography and fonts was completely wrong, which I have no doubt is going to spawn some serious amounts of letters being sent to CA. Basically (and I’m completely paraphrasing, except where I’m going to be quoting the man), he said that he doesn’t understand why there is a need for font designers anymore. We’ve got enough fonts, and here’s the kicker, which is I guess meant tongue in cheek, but he still said it:
In time, and with enough re-training, these poor creatures could become normal members of society.
Oh, dear, he didn’t just say that did he? As if that wasn’t bad he then gives the following as well:
Do you think these sick font designers will be happy when they've created a million fonts? Two million? A billion?
Oh dear again. You might as well call all those writers and tell them we’ve got enough books in this world, all the directors we’ve got enough movies in this world, all the musicians that we’ve got enough music in this world and to all artists that we’ve got enough art in this world. This is what is known in the industry as letterbait (read it in the recent Wired). This has got letterbait written all over it.
We definitely need better font management systems (I’ve been using Character map for Gnome and absolutely loving it), but saying we don’t need any more fonts and then insulting the font designers is just plain wrong.
That was the longest trip I’ve ever made. Now it wasn’t actually boring nor was it particularly uncomfortable, it’s just that had some chinese guy sitting next to me that decided he was going to take up all the arm rests and go to sleep from the word go for like 6 hours. There was no British courtesy in any of his actions, so that annoyed me a bit.
Then we arrive into LAX. My brother had warned me that was to expect ‘special’ treatment as an Arab. In a way then I was completely calm about the situation that I found myself into. I’ve got to say that the people working there were extremely courteous however it makes you wonder exactly what the system was/is trying to achieve or prove.
So he gets my parent’s passports out of the way and then he asks me if I’ve registered before. Seeing as this is my first time in America, of course I hadn’t. So he walks me to the other end of the airport. While he’s walking the blue line (seriously it was a blue line on the ground with arrows), he gets asked by the people there:
Where you going?
VIP coming through.
To which they gave a little laugh at, of course I understood that my time in LAX airport was about to be extended somewhat. An hour of waiting later I had been through the process, which involves filling out a form (which I’d already filled out for my visa application form, so I don’t know what the real reason behind this actually was). They had my finger prints and photo both taken in the embassy and on my visa itself, so it just makes me wonder why I had to go through that. Luckily I wasn’t completely alone, as I’m sitting there and I’ll generally speaking, talk to anyone. I get to talking with the guy sitting right opposite me, turns out it’s Said who’s got Iranian roots. We sat there dicussing ‘war’ stories of how we’ve been treated in airports throughout our lives. It was very funny, because everyone was really serious around us, pissed off at being there and here were these two idiots laughing their asses off.
So we get out of LAX finally and onto the highway, aka the freeway. It’s an interesting concept. The massive roads go through the cities at high level. You get off at various junctions and travel DOWN to get to different residential areas, with mainly fast food places and petrol stations.
We pulled into one of those where I had a cream cheese and butter bagel, thus came my first taste of America.
So the new Computer Arts issue is out. I guess I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this magazine. Generally speaking I can’t wait to get it and when I do it takes me a total of 2 days to read through EVERY SINGLE page, and get annoyed by the corporate whoring of EVEYRTHING. I guess being a jadded about corporate culture can do that to a man, but when they put a thumbs up for Quark City or whatever the fuck they’ve called buying a small town in India, as a good idea I kind of loose patience.
See I approach design and graphics and illustration from a completely different angle to them, but then I can afford to do this, I’m not a professional graphic designer, in that I don’t do this for a LIVING. I do this because I love to illustrate and design and learn new programs. My favourite parts of the magazine are the interviews and the showcasing of people’s work. I spend ages going back to something I saw in there and grabbing some sort of inspiration.
One of my original ideas last year was to create 12 images in one year and have them put as a calender. Now I did a bit more than 12 illustrations, however not nearly as many as I wanted. So I’m going to set myself a new target this year. I had said I want to draw more this year, however I never actually got round to specifying the number. Well I think this will be the hardest thing, but at the same time it will teach me to really hone my skills to accomodate for speed and pressure. So I’m going to set a target of 1 illustration a week for the year of 2005, except when I’m on holiday.
Currently I’m 3 behind, although CoCo up there does qualify as an illustration, just need to retweak an A3 image with him in it. So I’ve got to do 2 this week and then one every week after that. It could potentially be one of the hardest things I do in terms of keeping up the work, but after 1 year I will have an emmense body of work of which I can actually have a very decent portfolio.
I’ve got a few more tweaks to BK I need to get round to completing as they were originally part of the design, it’s just I’ve been taking a breather from it all and realigning my ducks as it were and gaining a bit more forward thrust of this crazy year.