Sunshine, warmth, buds on the trees, still light when I get home after work. I love spring.
Archive for March, 2004
In a momentous moment of web history, Strong Bad answers his 100th email.
Quicksilver completely rocks my world - an amazingly useful launcher (and so much more) for OS X Panther. Check it out now, you won’t be disappointed. And it is freeware!
Mouse Rugs are great. No, really, they are. We will be selling them at Firebox soon enough, but I have been enjoying my Tibetan Tiger for several weeks and it is definitely the best mousing surface I have encountered. If only I had a tiny USB Dyson to hoover it…
Audiolunchbox.com looks pretty cool - thousands of albums available to download as high-quality DRM-free MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files. The emphasis is on indie rock, such as pitchfork faves The Wrens, but there are also some great ‘electronic’ album such as the “The Present Lover” by the very excellent Luomo (Vladislav Delay to his parents).
At only 8 or 9 USD per album it is pretty good value for money, particularly if you live in the UK and resent shelling out £15 or more for CDs. I hope to not ever buy CDs again sometime soon. Due to excessive concertgoing as a youth MP3s sound just fine to me.
Ooh ooh! My hand is currently being featured at BoingBoing. The Magnetoids thing. There was an immediate spike in site traffic as a result. We’ll have to get BoingBoinged more often…
Undergoing a bit of a redesign at the moment, after all I am a designer daah-ling, I shouldn’t really leave the default Typepad template as is. (Yes, that is my actual brain up in the top banner, from an MRI scan done when I volunteered for an experiment investigating something to do with linguistic processing at the MRC in Cambridge.) Everyone should get a brain scan done, it’s fun!
It seems to work okay in Firebird/Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari on the Mac, Firebird on Linux and even, gulp, IE 6 PC. Drop shadow effect is achieved via Dan Cederholm’s excellent “Faux Columns” trick.
I’m rather looking forward to seeing the remake of “Dawn of the Dead“, featuring as it does a remarkable new innovation in the shape of fast zombies! Historically, of course, the zombie has always been a slow-moving, shambling creature and so any tension in early zombie films was always diluted for me by the thought that the protagonists should just, like, run away and their problems would be solved. But fast zombies, that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.
As a young teen I was something of a zombie movie/video nasty connoisseur - I was in the enviable (?) position of having a father and uncle who were budding ‘entrepreneurs’, on a small town scale, always hatching a new crackpot get-broke-quick scheme, anything to avoid getting a proper job, bless them. Anyway, in the early days of VHS (circa 1982) they invested in a state-of-the-art Ferguson VideoStar VHS player and a primitive projection system. So primitive, in fact, that it was literally a portable colour TV in a pine box with a lens at the end, which projected a weak, milky, magnified image onto a 6ft wide concave silvered screen. The picture was terrible, of course, but it pitch dark it was just about watchable, and besides, we didn’t know any better - this was WAY before plasma screens, man.
Their brilliant business plan entailed installing said projection system in the back room of the Globe pub in our home town of Wells-Next-The-Sea, hiring videos from the local spar shop at two quid a pop, and then charging customers two pounds each for admittance to the venue. Being shrewd operators, they quickly figured out that the bored youth of Wells would be the most avid customers, particularly if they showed video nasties which they would not otherwise be able to enjoy at such large size and poor resolution. So it was that I spent many pleasant saturday evenings in the summer of ‘82 in the company of my peers (from whom I was largely completely alienated since I went to boarding school and was also a ‘brainiac’ and hence they hated me, but I digress…) watching such time-honoured classics as Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombie attacks shark and bites of sharks dorsal fin, Zombie pulls screaming victim’s eyeball towards wooden splinter in slooooow motion, etc), C.H.U.D. (’cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers’ run amok), and the not-very-good-at-all “I Spit on Your Grave” (woman exacts revenge on gang who raped her by killing them horribly). It never did me any harm.
Sadly, some lily-livered do-gooder caught wind of their inspired corruption of the youth of Wells (yeah, right) and the operation was closed down soon after. For shame. That was the end of my big-screen zombie fun, because there were no cinemas for 30 miles (which seemed a long way when I was a kid, and before I married a Canadian, which nationality has an entirely different conception of ‘a long way’ than us Brits), and the zombie movie as a genre had long vanished before I managed to claw my way out of Wells to somewhere which actually had culture. Ho hum.
Imagine my delight, then, at the recent resurgence of the horror film genre in general and zombie movies in particular. Advance notice has it that Dawn of the Dead is actually rather good. I shall be disappointed if there isn’t a considerable advance in brain-eating special effects in the last twenty years.
It was my birthday on Saturday. I’m 35. Wow. That was quick.
Yesterday afternoon I went the see the Brilliant exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which certainly lives up to its name. I was quite entranced by the beauty, ingenuity and intelligence of the designs on display. The recent development of new light sources such as white LEDs and electrolumiscence has led to some really exciting new ways of thinking about lighting. My favourites included the LED table and bench by Ingo Maurer, which embeds tiny white LEDs between sheets of glass whose current is supplied via an invisible conducting film, with the result they appear to be ‘magically’ twinkling with no obvious power source and Rachel Wingfield’s “Digital Dawn” window blind, which incorporates electroluminscent dyes and photo sensor technology to create a beautiful, dynamically reactive artifact - the lower the ambient light, the more of the design becomes illuminated. I wandered around with a huge smile on my face and resolved there and then that I would try to design some lighting fixtures/lampshades/LED jewelry. (I have this idea for a perspex/clear plastic bracelet which incorporates white LEDs powered by a faraday coil - so the more you agitate it, the brighter it lights up - ideal for clubwear, eh?) How hard can it be? All I need is to think stuff up and then get my friends with technical and electronics expertise to work out if said stuff is feasible and then build it for me…
In one of those happy coincidences, last night I stumbled across designboom.com, which offers online product design courses. This year’s courses are all on…Lighting design. Yay! Much as I love web design, I’ve lately been feeling the urge to make stuff - you know, actual physical artifacts. Another inspiring aspect of the exhibition is the way that many designers these days are using everyday found objects to prototype their designs - one lampshade was made entirely from polystyrene drinking cups and another from a cylindrical cage with polystyrene sticks pushed through it - stuff you could buy at the hardware store for a few pounds. According the the accompanying book I bought, this is quite a theme among cutting edges designers, who feel duty bound to confront the issues of mass-production and recycling. I must say that I feel quite inspired to create!
Oh, I nearly forgot the best moment of the weekend - at the exhibition there were several items on sale, one of which was a carrier bag with a chandelier printed on it - the carrier bag acted as the lampshade, with the addition of a cardboard disc to keep it a safe distance from the lamp. An elderly American couple were examining it and the wife said to the girl behind the counter “What do you get with this bag?” to which the girl replied “Nothing, the bag is the thing”. After a puzzled look for a few seconds, the lady exclaimed “Oh my, the bag’s the thing? The BAG is the THING!” Her husband laughed and said “Hey honey, sounds like you found the secret of the universe….the BAG is the THING!” It was a very postmodern moment. Heh.
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