plasticbag.org

So work’s still going a bit nuts and I have no time at all. It should all be over soon (couple of weeks max), then I’ll be throwing myself back into the world more than ever. In the meantime, a few little catchups from the few things I’ve managed to get done outside the BBC.

I went to see Harry Potter on Monday with my younger brother and bloody Cory who did his ‘taking photos of the “don’t take photos” sign’ thing to general hilarity from the rest of the auditorium. Again. And – of course – the Englishman dies quietly of shame inside (but it wouldn’t have been the same without him). Personal verdict – still flawed, but better than anything else in the rest of the series so far. Four stars. Well done to all involved etc.

And on Wednesday night, I finally got to see the Pixies in concert at Brixton Academy. It was a dream come true in many ways – and one of the most tight, sharp and systematically well assembled concerts I’ve ever been to. But it was also a slightly sad experience I think – tinged somehow with the fact that I’ve worn all the songs to the bone with repeated listening. Looking on the stage it looked a bit like Frank Black and Kim Deal felt pretty much the same way…

This weekend I’m planning to detox a bit tomorrow and generally get my head in order – maybe teach myself some more Illustrator to stop myself going nuts with thinking about the web. And of course I’ll be at NotCon on Sunday, as indeed should you be.

From a relatively old article (at least in terms of webloggia’s attention-span) comes some pointers on improving design through simplicity:

• Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.
• Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.
• Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.
• Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.

This is a good set of assumptions for trying out new ideas and building new products and pretty close to the way we’ve been working in R&Mi when we do our rapid prototyping sprints. I should really write that stuff up sometime…

Yesterday evening, after a few too many cocktails with lovely people from work and an emergency Italian meal, we walked back towards Charing Cross to catch the tube only to see a van full of police officers looking weird and mischievous while playing the theme tune to Mission Impossible incredibly loudly and driving up and down the Strand. They all looked about seventeen, and like they were wearing their dads’ uniforms. These are not the uniformed whores from Morrissey’s The World is Full of Crashing Bores and that’s quite nice. I wasn’t scared of them or anything. But I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence either…

The TV miniseries Earthquake 10.5 is just airing in the UK. It is – bluntly – an unmitigated pile of shit. Interestingly if you search for it online, pretty much the first thing you get is a long page by earthquake experts explaining precisely why it’s total bunk:

Fiction: There can be a magnitude 10.5 earthquake
Fact: The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs–the longer the fault, the larger the earthquake. In order to have a magnitude 10.5 earthquake you would have to have a fault that circles the Earth – no such fault exists.

Fiction: Thinking an earthquake is an aftershock because they couldn’t find an epicenter – all earthquakes have epicenters
Fact: Aftershocks ARE earthquakes!! The only difference is that they occur after a larger earthquake instead of by themselves.

Fiction: Nuclear explosions can “seal” faults
Fact: Nuclear explosions CANNOT seal faults. Earthquakes are part of a global tectonic process that generally occurs well beyond the influence or control of humans.

Additional Earthquake 10.5 fictions that are enough to drive you nuts:

• An earthquake creates dust clouds visible on satellite radar
• Using the term lateral skip
• Earthquakes can cause trucks to sink in dirt, long after the earthquake happened
• Scientists being able to successfully predict earthquakes over short time intervals
• Plates conjoin at 324 feet below the earth’s surface
• The magnitude of an earthquake in progress cannot decrease/stabilize
• Water draining into the faultline
• Fault opening at the ocean and water rushing up the fault

Now I know it’s churlish to expect entertainment to be completely accurate, but this is just a few things from a list of dozens! I’d like to think that people doing stuff like this had some grasp of what they were talking about, but evidently not…

Apparently some people using IE6 are having trouble logging into Typekey via plasticbag.org and as a result can’t post comments. Most other browsers seem to be working OK – certainly all Mac browsers that I’ve tried – but obviously this is a problem that I need to resolve. If anyone has any idea why this is happening (presumably I’ve messed up some aspect of the template), then I’d be delighted if they could e-mail me on my normal e-mail address: tom {at} plasticbag {dot} org. Otherwise I’ll look into it more thoroughly tomorrow evening, once I’ve slept and worked the requisite number of hours.