March 2002
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Tuesday 26
singularity
The 21st century is when things start to get really, really interesting. I've just finished reading Ray Kurzweil's bonkers-but-brilliant The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he posits that this century will see the emergence of machines (i.e. computers) with greater-than-human intelligence, and that eventually mankind and the machines we have created will necessarily merge. I love all that stuff.
Sober (ie boring, no-fun) critics may be put off by his more extravagant claims, but it seems undeniable to me that we are poised on the brink of a technological explosion which will make the industrial revolution, and indeed the computer revolution thus far, seem as insignificant as a gnat's fart. Kurzweil calls this merger between human and machine intelligence the Singularity. See him talk about it at edge.org.
Call me a naïvely optimistic sci-fi geek boy (go on, I love that) but I really believe that before the end of this century that we may be able to scan our brains, uploads our consciousness into hardware, and effectively live forever. Yeah, right. Bwah-hah!
Maybe I have been reading too much Greg Egan, maybe I have eaten too many psychedelic mushrooms, but I am totally looking forward to uploading. And no need to worry about not having a body, processing power will be so insanely vast that we will be able to simulate any body we like, with totally convincing accuracy and verisimilitude. I'll skip the nostril hair part, though. Then we can all eventually transfer into inorganic substrate, learn all there is to know with our massively augmented intellects and perfect memories, never again need to be concerned with material gain, and leave Real Reality to all the cute animals and birdies.
Also, the sex will be really, really great...
...erm, not that it isn't right now, you understand?
If you don't have Real Player, you can always read about Kurzweil's Singularity.
frown
I was thinking of opening a bank account with smile. But hey, "smile doesn't work with a mac". Apparently they are working on it. Sigh. Marginalized again. They also recommend using Netscape 4.75 (!) and don't recommend using standards-compliant browsers such as Netscape 6 and IE 6. Jeepers, get with the program, people!
UPDATE: smile got back to me within an hour after I bitched about not being able to use their site in an email feedback. Turns out mac users can use it, there is just some flakiness when using, ahem, "Netscape Explorer". Maybe I will give them another go...
toothsome
Apple goes bluetooth. Pity the little adaptor is so ugly, it will clash with my powerbook. Maybe they could sheath it in fetching white polycarbonate? I do so like my peripherals to accessorize nicely. I suppose I should start thinking about getting a bluetooth phone. I will have to "lose" or "break" my current Siemens piece of crap.
Actually, I would be glad to see the back of it, as it has by far the worst user interface of the three phones I have owned thus far (my old Nokia was intuitive and lovely). Virtually every time I use it I end up irritated – pressing the power off button to go back in a menu? Silly.
phony
Irritating, but not as maddening as when I try to top-up my credit with the Virgin automated phone system from hell. After about 10 minutes of listening to maddening blurbs I managed to navigate through the system to the point where I could give my card details, and then: "I'm sorry, we appear to have a problem with our processing system..." at which point I was put through to an actual live human, to whom I gave my card details again. She came back to me about a minute later "I'm sorry, we appear to have a problem with our computer system..." at which point I hanged up (hung up?) and resolved to invest in a carrier pigeon.
Monday 25
Mmm...pop music
Exciting developments in the world of music software. Native Instruments have announced the imminent arrival of mac version of their mp3 dj software Traktor DJ Studio. Soon I can fulfill my dream of delivering a kicking set from my beloved powerbook. Mind you, i might decide to use Ableton Live instead. Spoilt for choice. Native Instruments have also announced their monster new software sampler, Kontakt. Yum.
I suppose I will also be needing a Kenton Control Freak MIDI controller. No, forget that, I'll have to get a MidiMan surface one. That's more like it. It is about time people started inventing new ways to control music software.
Of course, you are probably asking yourself, what is the best OS for music making? OS X, natch. Oh, and of course let us not forget Reason 2.0 for OS X.
Friday 22
youzabilitee
At work I am currently struggling manfully with the redesign of our checkout system, which is an interesting challenge. We don't get too many complaints at the moment, which suggests it isn't so bad, but then you never know how many people give up halfway through and leave the site in disgust, never to return. I did learn that about 1 year ago a study by creative good found that 43% of online customers gave up in the middle of the checkout procedure. Holy moley. A large part of that dropout rate was due to people being put off by the idea of 'creating an account'. They figure 'why should I create an account? I only want to buy one thing...' As is so often the case, amazon seems to have cracked the problem, by getting customers to create an account without ever calling it creating an account, and breaking it down into a number of steps ordered in such a way that it just seems an essential part of buying a product. Clever fiends.
If anyone could recommend any particularly painless e-commerce checkout procedures they have had lately, I would be very grateful.
Another important part of the user experience is what you do when things go wrong, which 37 signals call 'contigency design'. They have written a white paper on this very topic. Bless them.
At the moment, our contingency design leaves quite a lot to be desired, in all honesty. We hope to rectify this situation in the very near future...
reading list
I also made a list of information architecture (IA)/interface design/usability
websites this morning, as I was feeling virtuous, and was smugly pleased to
realize that a number of books which repeatedly crop up in recommended reading
lists are already on my bookshelves. Heck I've even read some of them. I will
be making a reading list page just as soon as I have enough energy spare to
tackle such a task.
Tuesday 19
get the bad folks with beards
You might like to watch this guerrilla news network video montage of the media presentation of the war on – sigh – evil folks. I love the web.
mxstasy
I have downloaded flash mx, and it seems to be a vast improvement on Flash 5, at least in terms of getting stuff done on the timeline without ripping hair out. The property inspector is great, at last the colour picker has been sorted out, and so on. I wonder what Macromedia's strategy for Director is now? What with the – ahem – imminent arrival of broadband, shockwave might at last come into its own. Oh, who cares? I need a break from computers and digital stuff...
33
Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be 33. Wow. How did that happen?
Monday 18
iBong, apples, bongs, applebongs
Infinite thanks to Matt for alerting me to the existence of the Mac Bong (or iBong). Much more useful than the famed MacQuarium, methinks.
Do you know what is great? I have TWO Mac SE30s in the attic, just waiting for a decent project to come along. So, do I make an iBong? Or does anyone have a better idea for what I can turn them into?
Speaking of bongs and apples reminds me of that great impromptu bong solution, as illustrated boy some illiterate halfwit with a crappy website on geocities: the apple bong. They actually work surprisingly well, imparting a fresh tang to the smoke and cooling it nicely. Not that I am a big stoner or anything. In fact, I havent gotten caned out of my box for over a month. For shame. But if I do again, I will be sure to head on over to highbastard.com, a site geared towards the older, more discerning stoner.
I wonder if us Apple fans could persuade Jonathan Ive to design us a bong? A petition, perhaps?
múms the word
Splendid and lovely Icelandic fourpiece múm will release their new album, entitled Finally We Are No One, in May, according to good old pitchforkmedia. They now have their own official website at www.randomsummer.com, but as their is nowt there at the moment you are probably better off at their approved fansite, where I found a link to download an MP3 of their One World session, which I am acquiring as I type. Rah!
I am very much looking forward to the new múm album, not least because the long-awaited geogaddi is, you know, let's be honest, kinda boring and samey.
I was lucky enough to see múm live a few years back, in the back room of the Portland Arms in Cambridge, where they were supporting the fantastically named, jolly quirky and waaaay Icelandic band Spúnk. I wonder what happened to them? I thought they were destined for greatness, what with their songs about truck drivers and homosexuals.
norfolk'n'good
Adrienne and I went up to Norfolk on saturday, which is akin to trekking to Patagonia, if you are forced to rely on the public transport system. You know how Norfolk folk have a reputation for being – how can I put this delicately? – thick as pigshit? Here is the conversation I had with the bus driver in King’s Lynn:
me: two returns to Fakenham*, please.
bus driver: Returns?
me: Yes, please.
bus driver: To here?
me: ?!...er, yes, returns to here. [what i said] No, returns to Ulan Bator, you arse [what I thought].
Then he spent at least two minutes trying to program the ticket machine to give us two returns to Fakenham. Clearly this was a most unusual and esoteric request. The whole concept of a return ticket seemed to be beyond his experience. Eventually Adrienne got exasperated and asked:
Adrienne: Excuse me, can't you just take the right amount? Surely people always ask for tickets to Fakenham?
b. d.: no.
Which seems a tad odd, it being the X98 King’s Lynn to Fakenham service. Eventually, after another three minutes of bleeping, consulting numerous sheets of paper, muttering under his breath, Einstein managed to sell us our tickets. Which was nice.
Arent we terrible snobs?
Anyway, while we were in K.L. we went for a wander around, and I am pleased to report that they now have a proper statue of local boy made good, Captain George Vancouver, who charted thousands of miles of pacific northwest coastline (clearly the bus driver was not a descendant) pausing only to found the lovely city of – surprise – Vancouver on the way. Adrienne was beside herself with excitement. No, of course she wasn’t.
[Fakenham is the world’s most boring town. It’s funny because it’s true.].
Thursday 14
X marks the box
So the Xbox went on sale in the UK today, or rather at midnight last night. Woo. And to mark the event, last night during ER they aired one of the coolest adverts I have ever seen, ever, period. The one with mosquitoes in the jungle making banging techno music. I had no idea until near the end what the advert was for, all I knew was that is was really, really cool. If you saw it as well you probably know what I mean – grubs breakdancing, mozzies forming a huge, pumping bass cone, a beaver wearing headphones made of mosquitoes, all rendered in pretty much photorealistic detail. Awesome. I hate Microsoft for making me like their product.
Actually, I was already kinda annoyed with them for the coup of getting exclusive rights to Halo, which, in case you have been living under a rock, in a cave, underwater, under the ice on Europa, is quite a good game. The guys who made the game, Bungie, they used to be mac game developers, you know. I remember many happy hours playing Marathon, reminisce, fondly remember, etc.
So anyway, if anybody knows who is doing the Xbox advertising, or knows where I can find that ad on the web, please let me know. ta.
nippy
Bit nippy, out.
mr. logic
Erm, erm, so last night I found out how to build, at least theoretically, a clocked R-S flip-flop. Pier, are you proud of me?
Wednesday 13
HTMinimaLism
37signals has redesigned, in their trademark super-minimal, clean and easy to comprehend style. Very nice indeed. I am hoping that the next version of play.com can be similarly sharp, and maybe even, who knows, validate [yeah, right]. Although I was hoping to do the majority of the presentational styling with CSS, inspection of the 37signals source codes reveals that even those gurus of less is more have resorted to all sorts of nested-table-with-background-image tricks to make their design work in the evil browser.
massive geek
In case you were in any doubt that I am a massive geek, I am currently reading the fantastic CODE by Charles Petzold, which explains, step-by-step, in crystalline detail, how computers actually work, from the ground up. So clear is the explanation of boolean logic, how to build logic gates from relays, and so forth, that Iam reasonably confident that I could now build a binary adding machine from bottle tops, baling twine and twelve hamsters. Highly recommended, even if it is published by Microsoft Press. >Gak!<
mame maimed
mame.dk has been forced to remove all its game ROMs by some nasty copyright holder. Sheesh, what is wrong with being able to download and play Defender on your PC? It isn't as if anyone is losing out. Is it?
Monday 11
game on
With the advent of OS X, it seems that the macintosh might at last become a viable gaming platform. Apple certainly seem to be making the right moves, with the new 1GHZ towers being the first PCs to feature the new nVIDIA geForce 4 Ti Turbo nutter bastard graphics card. This card can apparently run Quake 3 at 115fps. [Can somebody explain these framerate figures bandied about for games? I mean, film runs at 24fps and that is perfectly adequate to fool our brains into perceiving a continuous moving image, what with persistence of vision and all. Why do we need 115 frames per second? But I digress]
Maybe us macolytes will not be the ginger-haired stepkids of the gaming fraternity for much longer. I am almost febrile in anticipation of getting my sweaty, palsied mitts on a copy of Black & White, which of course has been out for a full year on PC. At last some software to actually stretch my dual processors, gig of RAM and graphics card. Not that I will be playing it at work, honest guv'ner.
My interest in gaming goes in cycles, waning and then waxing with the advent of the next generation of consoles. I bought a Dreamcast when they came out, was blown away by Soul Calibur for several months, and then it gathered dust under the TV table for six months, until I sold it off. I almost completely ignored the launch of the PS2, and was utterly indifferent to it until my friends Tim and Pier bought one apiece the other weekend, and I spent many very happy hours playing Grand Theft Auto 3. What a fantastic game. I never thought I would so enjoy driving over a pedestrian, reversing back over him, then getting out and wailing away on his corpse with a baseball bat, all the while giggling maniacally. Does that make me a bad person? Huh?
So anyway, my jones for games has been reawoken [reawakened, mebbe?] once again. It seems clear that the computer game industry is hoovering up much of the best talent in the fields of programming, AI, animation, architecture, and so on and so forth, and videogames will doubtless become the preeminent artistic endeavour of this century, if it isn't already. And you can quote me on that. I await the next generation of multi-user, broadband gaming with pathetically childish glee. Just imagine GTA4 as a massively multiplayer world, which rumour has it is exactly what it is going to be. Wooh! Anyway, enough of me flibbling on, I suggest if you are into gaming and you haven't read it yet, you check out Trigger Happy by Steven Poole. It is doubleplusgood
Having said that, Supercade and The Ultimate History of Video Games look pretty spiffy, too.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...
powers, that be
At the weekend I managed to pick up a remaindered copy of Plowing The Dark by Richard Powers, which is highly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, if you can bear his fantastically pretentious prose, which I can, just about. Also, the cover of the edition I got is just about the most horrendously ugly mish-mash farrago I have ever seen. No wonder it was remaindered.
shiny new apple
In other news, it appears those scamps at Apple were so quick to repair my powerbook because they have actually just sent me a new one, with my hard drive in. I believe this to be the case because it is absolutely scratch-free, the right hinge which was still a little squiffy has miraculously healed itself, and it still had one of those little bits of clear plastic over the IR port. Which is nice. I was reading an interview with the musician BT, who is a big mac fan, in which he stated that his DVD drive is dead, but then claimed that “everybodys DVD drive died” so I guess it was such a common problem that they just figured they would send out new machines. Or something.
Not that I am ungrateful, but they could have given me a combi-drive, bastards.
funny dream
I had a very funny little dream last night in which I was in a car showroom, looking at new cars, when a guy came in who had antlers on his head. He approached a salesman and announced “Hi, I am looking for something with a sunroof...”
I woke up giggling, as you would. Stupid brain. The dream reminded me of that late, great weirdo website the antlerarium, which was a gallery of photoshopped images of celebrities with antlers; a simple yet brilliant theme. When I tried to find it on google, I somehow ended up on a hardcore porn site. Go figure.
Friday 08
pretty table toys
gone now. sorry.
Thursday 07
Bollocks
It occurs to me this morning that “Bollockbuster” would perhaps be marginally more amusing than Cockmaster. But I guess they are both fairly pathetic. I would like to apologise for the excessive use of the rude “fuck” word in the previous post, particularly to any in-laws who may be reading, and would like to state for the record that I will try to return to a polite level of discourse in future. Thankyou for your patient forbearance. Swearing is neither big nor clever. Although some studies indicate it may increase the size of your penis.
I apologise to any US readers who of course will have no idea what the word “bollocks” means, apart from those culturally aware types on metafilter who endeavour to keep abreast of our amusing British idioms. For the rest of you, I recommend this slang dictionary. It is the dogs bollocks.
Wanker
I am reminded that it appears to actually be true that many US citizens are also unaware of the precise meaning of the term wanker, or even that it is rude. I know this because a friend of mine told me that when she was a student at UC Berkeley, she and her housemates had a birthday cake made for their other housemate which was iced with the legend:
You see how I am introducing a little graphical excitement into this weblog? Pretty pictures to break up the tedious grey chunks of textual drivel which flows from my fingertips like so much vile, mindless effluvia. I mean, its not like I actually spend any time thinking about what to write, or polishing my prose to a hard, gemlike brilliance, is it?
I would include boring photos of household objects, but I don't have one of those new-fangled digital cameras. I do have and old-fangled digital camera, but it is effectively obsolete.
Apple is Ace
I am sure nobody has thought of this design before. Anyone want a t-shirt? Well, it seems that Apple may have an even bigger hit on their hands with the new iMac than the old iMac. Even financial analyst types are singing their praises. Might be time to buy a share. Or two.
Wednesday 06
Cockmaster
I really, really fucking hate Cockmaster. Who of course are not even remotely related to that marvellous, top class operation Blockbuster. Ahem. Anyway...
What a terribly depressing experience it is, attempting to find and rent a halfway decent film from those twats. Why do I hate them so much? Let me count the ways:
1) Seven thousand copies of The Fast and the Furious. Ten Copies of Lesbian Vampire Chronicles 4. Guess how many copies of Memento? Two. And they are both fucking out all the time.
2) Those fucking roof speakers, endlessly blarting out an irritating stream of inane, cretinous drivel voiced by tenth-rate wannabe DeeJays who are compelled to shriek “COCKMASTER”at least once, if possible many more times, in every fucking sentence. “Welcome to COCKMASTER, your number one choice in COCKMASTER rental entertainment. COCKMASTER is great, you mouth-breathing fucks! COCKMASTER, got it? You are in COCKMASTER! Are you annoyed yet? By my tinny screeching? Huh? Huh?” etc.
Yes, I know I am in COCKMASTER; the flickering yellow striplights, stench of fetid popcorn butter, the dirty, smelly, unflattering electric blue nylon Polo shirts sported by the poor, doomed souls who man the counter are all the evidence I need to know I am in cock-smoking BLOCKMOTHERFUCKINGSHITBUSTER. Fuck.
3) “Do you want a big box of chocolates with that terrible film you are forced to rent due to the absence of anything betraying the merest scintilla of intelligence?”. “No thanks”. “Why not?”
4) The logo is shit, the colour scheme is shit, and the website is really, really shit.
5) If you are a member of one branch, you would think, in a rational universe, that you could use your membership card to rent films from other branches of this hideous franchise in the SAME FUCKING TOWN, would you not? You would think wrong. Obviously that would just be too much of a colossal fucking logistical nightmare. They might have to network stores together on the interweb, or somefink.
6) When you have an overdue film, they send you a letter thanking you for “taking advantage of our extended rental facility, at a cost of just £50 per day”. Or something. Those fucks in head office must have been up all night, thinking that one up.
7) Slightly snobby this one, but the staff, bless them, are not generally the brightest bulbs in the pack, if you - neanderthals - know what I mean? And some exhibit frankly questionable personal hygiene traits.
8) I really hate those roof speakers.
So anyway, there is a good DVD rental store in town, Heffers, but of course it closes at 5:30pm, so I rarely get a chance to use it. Arse. At least I can get The Sopranos from movietrak.com.
Zis Apfel ist gut!
Imagine my delight this morning when my beloved powerbook returned from Apple Repair a scant week after I sent it off. Which rather makes up for the previous two months to fix a hinge debacle. DVD drive seems to work okay, all is good at the moment. Of course, now that the warranty has expired it will probably explode tomorrow or something.
Tuesday 05
Nutscrape
Today I have been tackling the Sisyphean, some would say foolhardy, task of designing a new site for play.com which renders nicely and is soopa-fast and CSS-tastic in new, compliant browsers, but which fails to completely feck up in Netscape 4.x. Aha ha hah! I am not entirely sure why I am bothering. Life would be SO much simpler if I simply chose to ignore the existence of that miserable excuse for a piece-of-poo. The cunning methodology involves doing simple CSS which even Notscape can unnerstand in one stylesheet which is linked to, and then overriding those simplistic stylings with more sexy stuff in another file which is imported. That is the theory. In effect, I cannot even get the stupid browser to stop popping images out of the table cells they are in.
Why oh why oh why is anybody in the entire web still using it? huh? Upgrade, already!
tea up!
A great idea for the branding of an imaginary new chain of Northern English tea shops to challenge Starbucks: Ta Ducks! Well, we thought it was funny. Very bad and hurried logo:
nut allergic freak
Nice to see me old mucker Tim (and Liz) at the weekend. We must do it again soon, and next time get badly drunk. Tim designed the Feisar logo for WipeOut Fusion, I do not think he will mind me telling you; his company Good Technology did the graphics and some in-game flash stuff (I think). Nice. Me? I make banners.
Monday 04
Flash MX ahoy!
Macromedia unveils Flash MX. Looks like they have done quite a good job of fixing annoyances, implementing decent new features and generally making it a bit less of a pig to use. Which is nice. I wonder what MX stands for?
Friday 01
iblag
Cunning youngster uses iPod to pinch software.
And, an iPod fansite, iPodlounge. Smashing. I am still utterly delighted with my iPod, but I do wish in the next version (10GB drive, Windows Compatible) that they would slightly bevel the front edges, as they were sharp enough to cut through my earbud cables when I inadvertantly wrapped them just a leetle too tight around the case. Oopsie.