november 2002
fri | november 29
inflight entertainment
My good friend Peter Chilvers and I realised the other night that we both have the dubious distinction of featuring in ‘inflight entertainment’, myself in a snowboarding show called ‘Board Stupid’ which was originally broadcast on Channel 4 and in which you can see me falling over a lot, and Peter in a documentary about his old company, Creaturelabs, which he thinks has only ever been shown on Lufthansa flights.
Neither of us has yet been mobbed in the streets.
wed | 27 november
moving to london
We are in the middle of moving to London, which is why posts have been scanty lately. All very relaxing and not at all stressful.
I’ve had a lovely ten years in Cambridge, and will remember it with fondness, but it is definitely time for a change, and I look forward to seeing what London can throw at me. Hopefully lots of work…
brazilian colour
As you can see, I am in the middle of another redesign. The grey is temporary, until I can concocot a more interesting colour scheme. We all need a bit of colour in these dark winter months. I may have to glean some inspiration from the wonderful colour combos of ace brazilian designer Nando Costa, of hungryfordesign fame, who is featured in this month’s Creative Review.
audi do that?
My current favourite TV ad is the Audi Quattro Bull. A simple idea, brilliantly executed. We do have the best TV ads in the world, as well as some of the most talented post-production houses.
adtastic
Oh joy! The framestore site linked to above also has quicktimes of several of the mother favourite recent ads, including the Xbox champagne and mosquito ones and the best advert of all time™, as voted for by the great British public.
Now all I need is quicktime pro so I can save them to disk. Of course, I did have quicktime pro 5, but QT6 overwrote it, so I have to buy it again. Thanks, Apple. D’oh.
wed | 20 november
moving on up
I’ve decided to bite the bullet and move this blog over to moveable type, so I can implement commenting, trackbacks and so on. I will also try to sort out an RSS feed, in the deluded belief that someone, somewhere might find my content worth syndicating.
tue | 19 november
traktor
NI have at last released Traktor DJ studio for Mac OS X. Now how about doing the same with Reaktor, chaps?
In other exciting OS X music software news, Ableton have announced Live 2, the latest version of their fantastic and revolutionary live performance sequencer, which I really should play with more…
sat | 17 november
connectedland
A great piece on the emerging interconnectedness of all things/people being driven by wireless comms, and the interweb thingy. via v-2.org.
berlin
Steven Johnson of Feed and Emergence fame has a blog. About time, too, young man.
small worlds
I am also concurrently reading Small World by Mark Buchanan (Nexus in the US), an extremely interesting summary of the emerging science of small-world networks (six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that), and one of a veritable flood of books on what is clearly now a hot topic. See also Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Small Worlds by Duncan Watts and in a similar vein but of particular interest to blogging types, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger.
light
I am reading Light by M John Harrison, his first science-fiction novel for about thirty years, and he has only gone and blown the roof off the mutha, and reinvented the genre and all that jazz. Seriously weird (unheimlich, even), and in the words of Ken McCloud, almost unbearably good. Any universe which features a planet named ‘Motel Splendido’ is a winner with me. Now if you will excuse me I have to get back to my twink tank.
prongs
I have been unable to successfully dial-up for the last week, which was frustrating. I thought I might have a corrupted modem script, but it turns out that the problem, as diagnosed by my smart friend Chris, was simply that the little metal connectors in my modem port had been bent down so that they weren’t making proper contact with the modem plug. I sometimes forget that this lovely titanium slab is simply a mechanical device, albeit a fairly complex one.
Reminds me of William Gibson recounting his surprise after eventually getting a computer (as we all know, he wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes portable typewriter) and being astonished to hear the cooling fan come on, as he imagined that computers would be solid-state devices.
sat | 09 november
cat zapping
If you are a cat-owner and happen to have a laser lying around the house, you may find that cats go nuts for lasers. One can easily get a kitty to frantically chase the wiggly red dot for several minutes. If you get good, you may be able to make them perform ‘handbrake turns’ and 360s on the kitchen lino, or if you have two cats you can sometimes get them to collide amusingly, after which they invariably attempt to look nonchalant. Big fun.
Be warned however, that after laser fun your cat may become singularly unimpressed with, say, a ball with a bell in or a piece of string.
On a side note, my father-in-law’s cat Alfred enjoys sitting on his lap while he is surfing the web and gazes very attentively at the monitor, which begs the question: are there any websites specifically for cats? You know, with flash animations of mice and wounded birds. I feel there must be…
fri | 08 november
jaguar scanner
Can anybody recommend a cheap flatbed scanner which works with OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)? Or would that be rashly optimistic of me?
tue | 05 november
ga-zingy menus
Dave Lindquist of gazingus.org has built some nifty drop-down menus using CSS, unordered lists and a soupçon of JavaScript, which degrade nicely in older browsers, and are semantically meaningful. Which is nice…
shirty
Threadless.com has redesigned, and Thomas Brodahl (who has one of my Obey shirts, if I recall correctly) has opened/launched stolen shirts, all of which makes me think I should really, really get off my fat, metaphorical arse and set up a tshirt section on this site in order to pimp my wares. After all, if Dogfish in Cambridge can sell Maharishi shirts with pictures of Monkey on them for 39 quid, there must be money to be made. Most of the overpriced shirts in these trendy/clubby/skate scene emporia are pretty lame…simply make a reference to drugs, blaxploitation movies, simians or retro 70’s kids TV and the punters lap it up.
Perhaps I will learn from experience and actually make a slim profit, this time.
On a related note, I saw a great tshirt on a website last year which had an illustration of a gibbon’s (or possibly Orang-Utan’s arm) protruding from the mouth of a cement mixer. If anyone would happen to know who makes that shirt, I will be forever grateful. It just touched a chord, in some mad way…
blast from the past
One of the fun things about moving house is rediscovering old crap from an earlier life, about which you had entirely forgotten. I dug out my old, dusty boxes of audio cassettes [remember them?] and have been having a blast revisiting Queensryche’s magnum opus, Operation: Mindcrime on the car stereo. Massively pretentious crap, of course, but I have found myself humming snatches of it for several days now, which I find profoundly disquieting…
“It’s an underground revolution working overtime!”
bricks | books
Sometimes I wonder why I have so many books. Like, f’rinstance, when I have to move fifteen boxes of them from A to B. I just can’t seem to bring myself to throw them away, even the tatty second-hand science fiction. I have all these books I am probably never going to read again, but I insist on dragging them around after me wherever I go. If these books were bricks it would hardly be more ridiculous…
‘Hey man, what do you have in all these boxes? They are really heavy!’
‘It is my beloved collection of bricks! I take it with me everywhere, no matter how inconvenient or illogical it may seem. My putative offspring may enjoy these bricks some day. And bricks do furnish a room, don’t you think?’
One day I will just give the lot away. Really. Except my design books. And any signed ones. And I can’t really bear to be parted from most of my novels. Sigh…
Please hurry up and build a decent resolution eBook, will you, tech wonks?
