Category: Random

• Rufus Wainwright’s Gay Messiah “He will fall from the stars – Studio 54 – and appear on the sand of Fire Island’s shore. Better pray for your sins, Better pray for your sins, ‘cuz the gay messiah’s coming…”

My attempt to get my flat sorted out and all my filing and bits of paper organised for upcoming tax-related horrors is not going well, so I’ve decided to shame myself into getting stuff done by broadcasting the whole grimy process online (see below) and keeping all the photos generated through the process here. So now if I look too much like I’m slacking off you can all shout at me or something. Refresh the page (every thirty seconds or so) if you want to see how much I’m bunking off.

• U2log.com – one of the first and best single-subject magazine-style weblogs
  I’m not a great fan of U2, but it’s still an impressive site – and more importantly was created way before Gawker media and the current fad for commercial webloggery. I wonder if it makes any money…
  (categories: U2 blog blogs bono celebrity commercial design edge editorial fansite magazine music musician publication traffice weblog webloggia weblogs)
• Design Observer on “The Incredibles”
  Basically talking about the role of design and the character of the designer within The Incredibles. Mr Biddulph and I went to see the film a week ago and tried to encourage our boss, Dan Hill, to go and see for the design alone.
  (categories: animation architecture art blogs cgi commentary design film incredibles movie movies news pixar review superhero technology theincredibles visual)
• The seventy most beautiful words in the English Language
  Includes: smile, gorgeous, enthusiasm, banana, paradox, galaxy, kangaroo, whoops and gazebo. Weirdly does not include: badger, potato, geranium. Stupid survey.
  (categories: beautiful beauty english language linguistics logos poll survey word words writing)
• Mr Biddulph goes to York
  He takes a screengrab of his GPS/map position every thirty seconds along the way, and then turns it into an animated gif. I want one.
  (categories: animation cartography geo gif journey location locative map mapping maps train transport travel visualisation)
• Visualisations of the Typophile Smaller Image Generation Experiment
  Tom Rankin shows various visualisations of the emergent upper and lower case alphabets and numerals that came out of the Typophile Smaller Image pixel-by-pixel experiment.
  (categories: average character collaboration contention emergence letterform letterforms numerals pixel socialsoftware typography typophile visualisation)

• Blogcritics say Star Trek is finally back!
  And you know what – I agree with them. Once last season’s ghosts were exorcised, it’s actually started to be a watchable and interesting piece of TV again. My name is Tom Coates and I am a geek.
  (categories: critic enterprise fiction opinion review scifi space startrek startrekenterprise television tv)
• Electronic Arts as a modern-day sweatshop
  “On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added – noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.”
  (categories: consolegames consoles electronicarts employment games hours overwork sweatshop technology videogames work workplace)
• Hewlett-Packard are developing a “privacy protection system” for cameras
  I wrote about something similar to this a while back. The basic concept is some kind of widget held by the potential subject of the photograph that communicates privacy preferences to the camera, changing the way that it functions.
  (categories: camera cameraphone camphone gadgets hewlettpackard infrared photography picture preferences privacy technology)
• My post on Camera Phones and privacy from June 2003
  “If I were a private nervous person who didn’t want photos taken of me at all, then I could set my camera to a ‘leave me alone’ mode. If someone tried to take a picture of me on a ‘normal’ setting, then they’d find that their camera simply wouldn’t work.
  (categories: cameraphones camphones interaction manners photo photographs photography preferences privacy rude socialsoftware ubicomp)

• Memberships available on Metafilter for a one-off $5 donation to the server fund
  The donation does not entitle you to any special treatment and if you misbehave you will be ejected. I quite like this approach as a way to deal with bandwidth and a way to cut down on rogue users abusing the system.
  (categories: barbelith commercial community donation internet membership metafilter moderation onlinecommunity register registration user username web)
• A simple and mesmerising count-the-stars game
  The combination of some of the most peacefully infuriating buddhist-tetris-like music and weird instinctual gameplay made this an ideal way to waste ten minutes.
  (categories: computer cool entertainment flash fun game games guess instinct mind perception visualcortex)
• Pixelfest collaborative artwork
  The latest contender in the collaborative pixel artwork stakes is Pixelfest – where each day each person can change the colour of one pixel. Very slowly an image is emerging.
  (categories: art collaboration collaborative color colours creative design emergence iteration livingpicture pixel pixels socialsoftware)
• Mr Webb, Mr Patterson and Terry Wogan at the BBC Radio and Music Awards last night
  How awesome is this photo? Various colleagues of mine won an award last night at the BBC’s Radio and Music Awards for their work on mobile phones and photography.
  (categories: bbc mattpatterson mattwebb photo photograph photographs radio radioandmusic terrywogan)

• The Smaller Picture by Kevan Davis So the Smaller Picture has been in my head a bit recently – individuals choose whether a pixel is on or off and over time a picture emerges. This picture represents the collective visual understanding of the concept…
• Typophile’s version of The Smaller Picture This is just depressing. As I understand it Typophile’s hosts couldn’t handle the script that ran the Smaller Picture’s letterform and alphabet version. Someone has to step in – this was a beautiful and important project.
• Death of video recorder in sight The death of the video cassette recorder appears to be in sight after the UK’s largest electrical chain said it is to stop selling them. Dixons will phase out VCRs due to the boom in DVD players, sales of which have grown seven-fold in five years.
• The new logo for the upcoming new series of Doctor Who Right – a few things. Firstly, lens flare is not cool. It’s just not. Secondly, it’s all a bit Farscape. Thirdly, it’s lame. This is all I have to say on this subject. I bet the theme music has no bass in it too. No BBC themes have enough bass.
• Is Sex Inspectors the creepiest show on TV? They get people to film themselves having a shag, sometimes in infrared to not be – you know – too disturbing or anything, and then give them advice on ways to masturbate and stuff. And this weird presenter woman watches it all!

• When Your Co-Worker is Away
  How apposite! And on the day when my co-worker appears to have bunked off work because he is “ill” or something. Bah! I shall have fun with this forthwith…
  (categories: art chair coworker desk fun funny humour mischief office photo photography photos postits pranks tinfoil work)
• Design Engaged Presentations
  An ongoing list of links to Design Engaged presentations compiled by Andrew Otwell who dragged the conference out of his head and directly into reality. I really wish I’d been able to drag a paper together in time.
  (categories: amsterdam andrewotwell conference designengaged powerpoint presentations)
• Design Engaged book list
  At the end of Design Engaged, we all stood up and wrote the names of three books on a post it and stuck it on a wall. Here’s the complete booklist – again assembled by Andrew Otwell.
  (categories: amsterdam andrewotwell bibliography booklist books conference designengaged postits powerpoint)
• The Apple Store opens on Regent Street – we’ll be visiting it later today
  On Saturday November 20th, Ron Johnson, Apple’s Senior VP of Retail, and John O’Grady, General Manager of the Apple Store, Regent Street, cut the ribbon to signal the opening of the world’s largest and most anticipated Apple retail store.
  (categories: apple applestore london regentstreet retail shop shopping store)
• Media Guardian on the listening figures for the BBC’s RadioPlayer
  According to Simon Nelson, controller of radio and music interactive at the BBC, the figures are an indication of the fact that internet listening, and particularly catch-up listening via the Radio Player software, has “gone mainstream”.
  (categories: bbc guardian listeners music newmedia ondemand radio radioplayer rajar simonnelson statistics)

• The Hand Up Project: Attempting to Meet the New Needs of Natural Life-Forms
  “We acknowledge that such trans-species caregiving may in fact be a form of control. In recognition of this paradox, the new structures are aesthetically based on the architecture of Giuseppe Terragni, an Italian Fascist active in the 1930s.”
  (categories: aquatic architecture art artist beach beaches building crabs entertaining funny glorious hermitcrabs humour lifeforms nature sea)
• Slightly implausible Greeks get hot under the collar at the suggestion that Alexander the Great shagged the odd bloke
  Drives me mad this stuff – firstly because it’s not always been the case that a man who porks another man should be considered unmanly (sometimes quite the opposite) and because Alexander’s relationships with men were clearly unusually passionate.
  (categories: alexanderofmacedon alexanderthegreat ancienthistory bisexual classicalstudies classics gay genderpolitics greece hellas hellenism hellenistic homosexual identitypolitics politics sexuality)
• Entertaining Wonkette post about the other night’s West Wing episode
  The episode in question had this whole plot about webloggers not being journalists and not understanding (or at least not caring about), “not on the record”. Alleged Wonkette rip-off site was really ugly.
  (categories: blog episode journalism journalist media politicalweblog politics television westwing wonkette)

• Secret Santa 2004 – where the whole weblogging community comes together to buy each other happy nice things Don’t tell me you can resist. This is like our fourth year of running Secret Santa for the web community with Denise doing the design, Cal doing the code and me doing the bloody copy for the site and e-mails. We suffer for your pleasure! Sign up today…
• Project Honey Pot aims to get website owners working together to stop spammers collecting e-mail addresses It’s an interesting project this, that uses fake e-mail addresses on people’s sites to assertain which bots are connected to which spammers – which means that other people can take action against them. Very nice.

• Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut who frankly deserves a hagiography
  “We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
  (categories: america beautiful coldturkey conservative corruption cynical drugs fossilfuels kurtvonnegut liberal politics president terrible whitehouse)
• Music piracy ‘does hit CD sales’
  “The study contradicts a previous report, conducted in 2002, which said swapping songs online had no negative effect on music sales.”
  (categories: audio cds copyright corporate downloading drm itunes mp3 music recordcompanies rights rightsmanagement sales statistics)
• Matt Biddulph writes about deli.cio.us for XML.com
  Del.icio.us and tag-based structures like Flickr are still interesting the hell out of me – mainly because of the possibility of the sudden creation of a completely new layer of information worth mining and manipulating.
  (categories: api article delicious design developer development ethnoclassification folksonomies folksonomy mattbiddulph platform socialsoftware software tagging tags technology web)
• Flash interface for insanely detailed 2 gigapixel photo
  An extraordinarily high-quality digital image that allows you to zoom in to a ludicrous extent. It’s a bit of a shame that the place they took pictures of is so banal, but hey…
  (categories: camera dorky flash gigapixel industrial industrialpark interface pan photography photos stitching zoom)
• Photographs of President Reagan
  “There was this odd moment where Mrs. Reagan and President Reagan were having this little private chat and right in the middle you see Michael Jackson.”
  (categories: 1980s 80s america american culture kitsch michaeljackson photograph photography politics popculture president ronaldreagan strange whitehouse)
• Lorry rescues car from sea – with hilarious consequences
  If it’s real of course, which it might not be. And then of course if no one got hurt in the process. Which they very well might have been. Still, pretty awesome visuals…
  (categories: calamity car catastrophe dock humour image lorry photography pictures sea)
• The Apple Store Regent Street Preview Gallery
  Pictures of the new Apple Store to open tomorrow morning on Regent Street in London. There are apparently 250 grab bags with a value of over £700 for sale for under half that price, if you’re prepared to wait outside for six-ten hours to get them…
  (categories: apple applestore architecture computers imac ipod ipods mac photography retail storefront windowshopping)