the alhambra, granada, jan 2001. click image for slideshow.
December 2001
03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 10 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 17 | 18 | 19
Thursday 20
Hi YA!
Just discovered a nice weblog by the name of exploding fist and heavens to murgatroyd if he isn't already linking to little old me. Schweet
LOTR
Wow! I can't wait to buy the Lord of the Rings DVD and watch it once and then put it on my shelf, where it will remain, forlorn and neglected, for all eternity!
computers
So I spent several hours yesterday and a few more today reformatting my hard-drive, reinstalling OS 9 and software, replacing backed-up work files, downloading browsers and apps, doing all of that again for OS X.1, so that I had a nice, stable, spring-cleaned system. Then I made the completely foolish mistake of installing the developer tools. Which completely fucked up my computer, crashing half-way through and sending everything so pear-shaped that I could not boot either OS. Very, very irritating indeed. I may reconsider my decision to get an apple logo tattoo...
drugs
Sometimes computers make me want to take drugs. Or get pissed, which is different. Remember: alcohol isn’t a drug, it’s a drink.
tees
Great t-shirt designs at not on my shift. [Memo to self: do more t-shirt designs.]
Wednesday 19
Canadian Supernova
Researchers at UBC in Vancouver have created a supernova in the laboratory. Go Canada!
Linux is toast
Will OS X kill Linux? Kimbro Staken thinks so. I intend to install the developer tools and then get Apache configured and then install and learn MySQL and PHP, any day now. Really.
Tuesday 18
portfolio section updated
Yes, hard to believe but true, the portfolio section now conforms to the new design standards. Now all I need is to build some more websites that I will be happy to put in there, heh.
animation section updated
Yep, the latest redesign is slowly percolating through the site. Animation is now ready for your perusal. Speaking of animation, Wildbrain have also redesigned, using that new-fangled Flash technology.
ha ha! look at the doggie jump!
One of the very many reasons that I am starting to deeply love OS X, despite it's teething problems, is the way that an application icon jumps up out of the dock when said application wants your attention. This is cool at the best of times, but it is really really cool when the doggy icon for Fetch does it. Ha ha! Good boy! Sit!
Wacom whack off
The Wacom Cintiq LCD tablet is, pretty much, the bomb. El Bomberino. Dope as fuck, chef. At last we can draw in the same place that the drawing will appear, just like with pencil and paper technology! No more annoying and confusing disconnect between action and reaction. I expect this technology to be incorporated into the next generation powerbooks. Along with Lithium Polymer batteries which double as the case, 30 Terabyte Hard Drives, et al. The Wacom Europe website is pretty darn spiffy, which is more than can be said for the American site.
The only thing is, one would get greasy palm prints all over the screen, unless one wore a cotton glove, or summat.
Monday 17
two-track mind
As my wife would tell you, given half a chance, I only ever think about computers and drugs. Yesterday I was perusing The Pursuit of Oblivion, which seems to be a very interesting [and completely pro-drug biased] social history of mankind’s desire to get badly monged, and the various vain attempts to stop us from doing what we like to our own brains, ferchrissakes, by the authorities. [when they are not busy making colossal profits from drug trafficking themselves, natch.]
Then I flicked through and almost immediately bought USED: Browser 3.0, thus proving Adrienne’s claim.
all change again
Gosh, it has all change again! Fancy. I just can’t leave well enough alone. Seems to work okay in most half-way decent browsers. The nav bar is supposed to look like brushed chrome, er whaddya fink? Got a few invalid characters to hunt down and then it should even validate. Yoink.
yr so dmpd
Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching teenage girl getting dumped by her boyfriend via text messaging. She was quite relieved and I was once again amazed by the ways in which technologies change our lives. What I wouldn’t have given to dump a girl by txting when I was a lad. Not that I ever had any girlfriends as a teen, sigh.
Friday 14
fubar
Hmm, my hosts went fubar for a day there, but we seem to be back in action. Sadly, I have nothing interesting to report, except that flaky things are happening and my oh-so-clever DHTML goodies are broken (can't see the external links layer). i will try to fix stuff next week.
Thursday 13
Opera Woes
While I am pissing and moaning, there seems to be a rendering display in Opera 6 for PC, concerning display of flash files. When one scrolls the page, the flash files stay stubbornly where they first appeared, and superimpose themselves over other content in a malicious and irritating fashion.
If you have Opera 6 and are desperately keen to confirm this for yourself, go to play.com find a page with flash ads in the sidebar and scroll away. Is this the great usability gnu punishing me for my sins?
arse candul
well, it looks like my bold decision to install OS X on my work machine has backfired nicely. X still works fine, but OS 9.2 is completely flaky, and will now not let me start any applications without freezing, and of course when I try to force quit I get the dread Gfinder window of doom. Hurry up and cocoa-ise your applications, you lazy bastards!
rant on
Like everyone else I am going to link to Owen Briggs' excellent design rant. Required reading for all web designers outlining a new and sensible 'onion-skin' approach to designing web pages, or whatever we will end up calling them. Of course I feel compelled to redesign this blog page again, givren it's unnecessary complexity and silly layer-using shenanigans. But then you are used to me messing with it every few weeks, neh? Just trying stuff out. Maybe, just maybe I will use colours other than grey and shades of orange?
glad to be grey/raining jism
The only problem being, grey is such a great colour (or ‘shade’, if you are of the pedantic tendency)…
INTERJECTION: I just overheard my colleague Chris shriek [ejaculate] the following bon-mot across the office: ‘It's true, if you go to a Bonobo colony there is jism* raining from the sky!’
…anyway, back to my fascinating discourse on the colour grey. Oh fuck it, I can’t be bothered any more.
[* being the colloquialism for semen, and not the renowned Jordan Institute for Standards in Metrology: JISM. Snarf! Somebody really should tell them…]
tarkovsky fest
Artificial Eye will be releasing Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Andrei Rublev on DVD in January. Of course, I’ve never seen either of them or indeed any of his films…
Wednesday 12
elegantly wasted
After getting home at 2am and laying in bed for 5 hours, staring at the ceiling and pondering how to build a three-dimensional sound system (among other things) I came to work. And it has been a gradual, even elegant downhill slide all day. I guess the decision to avoid alcohol and tickle my synapses with alternative funstuffs has been vindicated (as long as I don't end up like Boxy an Star). Now I'm going to go and try to sleep, afer running five miles at the gym. Wish me luck.
vancouver blogs
Sylloge is back! which is a good excuse to link to a
few Vancouver weblogs. without further ado:
caterina.net
| 50 cups of coffee | um, help me out
here?
malenky bit poogly
Office Christmas party last night = carnage. Much fun had by all, too much fun had by some, who have failed to appear this morning. I didn't drink alcohol, stuck to 'Moloko with knives' (or something), and I was feeling just jim-dandy until about twenty minutes ago, when swimmy-head feelings started to kick in. Amusingly enough, I am interviewing a prospective web design candidate in 30 minutes, the poor sap.
Quick, must think of intelligent and incisive questions!
Q.: So, are frames evil?
Q.: Who would win a fist
fight between Jeffrey Zeldman and Jakob Nielsen? [go Jeffrey!]
Q.: Also, what would win a fight between a blue shark and a grizzly bear, in zero gravity?
Q.:
What makes you think you can replace a genius like me, huh?
I think I need to work on them some more…
Well, he turned up early and it went quite smoothly, which is a relief.
i am a genius, apparently
Yes, it's not every night that your bosses tell you that you are a genius, is it? I expect I will get a massive bonus and payrise…glad I spiked their drinks. [joke]
Monday 10
vansterdamn!
Hurrah! Adrienne has been offered a place at UBC law school, clever her! It is only 6 months now until we move to Canada, beginning to seem mighty real. Hey, I wonder what is happening down at the Vancouver Port Authority today?
Presenting Virtual Vancouver. I love love love that place.
RSI ahoy!
More fabulous twitch-fest frenetic shoot-em-up vertical scrolling action for mac heads in the shape of Deimos Rising, the long awaited sequel to Mars Rising. And it is OS X native. Rah!
soma
The weekend was, for various reasons, lovely. Spent the entire weekend with Adrienne, which made a very pleasant change - we don't get to do that very often, what with her shiftwork - and we spent a good four hours on saturday looking out of our bedroom window at cats, smoke, birdies in the trees, and suchlike. We told each other how much we loved one another, talked a great deal about all sorts of extremely interesting and amusing topics, remembered how unbelievably amazing the world is, went for a walk, watched Bridget Jones's Diary, got stoned and went to bed.
On Sunday, for whatever reason, I felt calm, peaceful and somewhat tired. So I spent a delightful several hours poring over Alan Fletcher's increasingly amazing the more I look at it "The Art of Looking Sideways", a book which is massively addictive at the best of times, but even yet still more so when one is in a particularly, um, receptive mode.
Friday 07
so i said to him, i said...
inpassing.org – overheard conversations straight outta Berkeley. Brilliant. I love Berkeley, crazy place. And PKD lived there.
magic mirrors
very cool tech at the new prada stores, including 'magic mirrors' - which are actually semi-transparent LCD walls with mirrors behind them. If you twirl round quickly, you will be able to see yourself spinning due to the slight time delay incorporated, so-called 'elastic design'. That is one seriously excellent idea.
[The above two links half-inched from the ever-clever v-2.org]
cos i'm a lucky man
Last night we went to the gym. I didn't really feel like it, but I hauled my ass there anyway. Imagine my delight upon finishing my gruelling exercise regimen to find a twenty pound note, soggy, on the floor of the changing room. Did I hand it in? Did I be jiggered! Am I bad? Would you have handed it in? I've done that before, and always felt a bit of a sap, knowing that in all likelihood the recipients of my good samaritanism would get to spend this windfall down the pub. So this time I thought that I would cut out the middle man and spend it myself, raising a glass to the poor sap who dropped it.
I've been having a run of luck, as about a month ago I found 30 quid in cashpoint machine. Which was nice. I figure whenever one receives such a windfall at another person's expense it is essential to spend it on alcohol as soon as possible. It's what they would have wanted.
funny little habits
As somebody who has reached the pinnacle of physical fitness I find that Kellogg's Sustain is the only breakfast cereal sufficiently scientifically engineered to keep me running like a finely-honed machine. Ahem. Anyway, I was just remembering last night how, whenever I bought a new box of Sustain, within several hours it would have been rechristened "Wankstain" via marker pen graffiti, by an esteemed ex-housemate. Every time. Just thought I'd share that with you, for no particular reason.
geek orthodox
A lovely, clever personal website, one point zero: lots of clever stuff going on [via Jeffrey]. It's no good, I'm going to have to learn PHP and MySQL in order to implement interactive goodies. This page is still nowhere near XHTML-compliant, for which I apologise to any webstandards wonks prefusely - lots of legacy crap in my ripped-off Javascripts which needs sorting out. One day soon, honest!
Thursday 06
nanoloop!
You may be aware of nanoloop, the music sequencer which runs on a Game Boy. (You may not, but it is sooper cool, yes?) In a fabulous development, an album of nanoloop songs, entitled nanoloop1.0 is to be released by the Hamburg label Disco Bruit, featuring compositions from such electronic music luminaries as Vladislav Delay, Hravtski, Merzbow, Pita and Stock, Hausen & Walkman. Yay! I'm so getting that, and a nanoloop cartridge. I was getting bored of Mario Kart Super Circuit anyhoo.
[hat tip: pitchforkmedia. com]
Wednesday 05
Bring the Nøise
I just wanna say how excellent Solid Ether by Nils Petter Molvaer is. It is my favourite Norwegian jazz-breakbeat hybrid album ever. And Mr Molvaer uses Reaktor as well, like all the best people.
bloggorhoea
I appear to be blogging like a maniac today. Sorry about that.
I love those meeces to pieces
Hurrah! We have booked our tickets to Hamburg to go visit Heiko and Lisa, and while we are they we get to see Mouse On Mars play a gig! Yay! And even better, it will be our first wedding anniversary as well. Double rah!
Wil To Power
The rehabilitation of the reputation of Wil 'Wesley Crusher' Wheaton continues apace! Rah! Go, Wil. A cameo in the new Star Trek movie as well. Anyone who loves Tool and the Pixies so much is fine by me.
Troy Hurtubise –bear fighter, insane Canadian.
I rilly rilly want to see this film. Quelle nutbar.
Rollers instead of feet…
Can anybody be a pal and point me to any downloadable MPEGs of the Segway in action? I can only find realplayer files which are inaccessible through my firewall, and plus I want to have the footage on my HD so I can edit it to amusing spoofy ends. Matt?
Forget it, I found it. What a brilliant toy. If I had a million pounds, I would buy one straight away…You've got to be a miserable sod not to love it.
Why Segway is übercool:
great for old people with limited mobility
great for fat, lazy people
great for dogs to chase
segway hockey/polo!
It will be great for places with lots of cycle paths, wide sidewalks etc. Like, oh, just to pick somewhere at random, Vancouver! Not that I will be personally retiring my inline skates, of course.
Wake up and smell the kwaffee
Yesterday morning, while laying in bed drinking my coffee and staring at the willow tree outside our bedroom window, I considered how cool it would be if I could arrange for Jeremy Bowen and Sophie Rayworth, the BBC breakfast news A-team, to sit in the tree suspended from harnesses and tell me the news. When I am king of the world that will definitely happen.
Failing that, it would be nice if I could have a scrolling LCD news feed on my coffee mug. This is what it actually says on the coffee mug I was using while musing these musings:
I GAVE UP SMOKING, DRINKING AND SEX.
IT WAS THE WORST 15 MINUTES OF MY LIFE.
ha...ha...bonk...[that was me laughing my head off, dear reader]
I am thinking of building a collection of bad coffee mugs. I already have one for high-speed vacuum pumps and the aforementioned, so I'm off to a flying start. And also, I think I need a mememachine coffee mug.
Girl on a motorcycle
Adrienne is thinking about taking the test and getting a motorcycle. She had one in Berkeley and liked it a lot. But she isn’t sure if she should get one here, as she is only here for six months. I think she should get one. What you do guys think? Let her know:
Yes, you must get a motorbike! It will be much fun!
No, don't get a motorbike, it is not sensible, and you must be sensible.
In case you can't make up your mind, you might want to see how superfly she looks with her old motorbike. (not to mention happy)
Pho-ku, yo mo pho ho (in a nuoc mam sauce)
We had dinner at our favourite little Vietnamese café last night – Pho. Wouldn't it be great if there were a Vietnamese restaurant called Mo’ Pho? Or even – Phuc That Mo’ Pho Ho (!) Vietnamese is such a great language, every other word sounds rude.
Of course, a cursory search with Google reveals that I am completely unoriginal: Bring me mo’ pho! Mo’ Better Pho And so on...
Pho is pronounced 'Fuh', apparently. Even better.
Period Costume Martial Arts Horror Werewolf Movie of the Year!
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned how totally great The Brotherhood of the Wolf is! Trust me, you have to see it. It is slightly over the top, like a fever dream, and very, very French, and it stars the great Vincent Cassel.
Check out the trailer.
Imitation is the sincerest form of rip-off
Is it just me, or is the design for www.dvd.co.uk spookily reminiscent of my own design for www.play.com? Only not as good, natch.
Oh, and the truck animation on movietyme.com came after my truck animation on play. But that could just be a spooky coincidence.
I don't suppose that I am the world's most original web designer, but it makes you fink…
X
I've decided to take the plunge and make the transition to OS X at work. Which means working in BBEdit instead of Dreamweaver, but that is what proper web designers use anyway, eh? Plus it means I can start playing with PHP and MySQL and become a bigger geek. Like I need that.
Final Cut Pro 3 for OS X has been announced. Rah! I was reading an interview with IDM wunderkind Cex at Pitchfork where he talked about him and his friends making little 3 to 5 minute films at the weekends (classics such as "Anarchist Carpet" and "Ass Shark"), making them up as they go along, which sounds to me like a damn good laff riot. And my homey Chris has a DV cam just begging to be used. All we need is to get off of our fat arses and do something, neh?
Loop Soup Poop
Last night I went to the first night of a new electronic music/breabkeats/glitchfest type thing in Cambridge called Loop Soup. The principle is great, the place was packed with trendy young underground things (literally, as the club is in a cellar bar), the lightshow was amusing, and they had a working C64 running BMX Biker by Codemasters! The only downside is that the music was uninspiring, wibbly and a bit crap. Maybe it livened up after we left, but at least Chris and I were left thinking "we could do better than that!" Which we could. Just wait until we've finished our first song, it'll be going up here, you can be sure of it.
Judging by the dense pea-soupy wafts of boo-smoke filling the venue it seems that people have really decided that smoking hash in public is just, you know, OK. Which is nice. Beats the thick-necked populace braining each other outside the Regal (our worst mega-pub) of a weekend...
Tuesday 04
Reg Jackson - Driving Instructor! Raconteur! Wit!
My driving instructor Reg is great, really great. Today for instance, he talked for about 30 minutes about his new exposed beams in his 1935 bungalow, with the occassional interjection "prepare yourself for the roundabout", but then right back to his home improvements, with the occassional discursive aside about the Tudors' use of horsehair as a binding agent in plaster. I'm bound to pass first time at this rate.
And Reg Jackson is just such a perfect name for a driving instructor, no?
10 days
10 days to repair my laptop. 10 farquing days! gnnnnn...
monday 03
apathy
I'm having one of those days where it is a constant uphill struggle to get the brain into gear and to think at all creatively. I hate that. just want to go and lie down in a darkened room. hmmph. Looks like I picked the wrong day to start filling in my moodstats.
x-effects
Oh joy, kalloo kallay! Adobe is releasing After Effects 5.5 and it is OS X compatible. Rah! Surely only a matter of time before P’Shop is cocoa-ised, eh? I’m still patiently waiting to make the switch to full-time OS X goodness. Having gotten into computer music and audio in a big way in the last few weeks, I was excited to learn that yet another string to OS X's bow is that it looks like being the ultimate operating system for musicians, due to the new-fangled Core Audio technology. Bring tha noize!
segway
IT/Ginger is revealed: Segway. Way cool. Not that anti-gravity device I was hoping for. Can we soon expect to see huge, bewildering herds of massively obese Americans clogging the sidewalks of major cities, never getting off of their Segways, indeed, customising them to provide all home comforts? I hope so, it would be so 2000AD.
Borag Thung, Earthlet!
Man, I used to really love 2000AD. In fact, I bought the first ever issue, and the next 200 or so after that (showing my age). It rearranged my head as much as (or moreso than) any other literature I have read since. Strontium Dog, Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein, Nemesis the Warlock and of course, Dredd. Fond memories. Of course, if I still had the first 200 or so issues they would be worth a few bob by now, but my mum chucked them out while I was at boarding school. Hmmph.
Top Ten is a great new comic by the lovely Mr Alan Moore. How would you police a city where everyone has super-powers? Find out.
Futura2000
I was at a loose end at the weekend, having had my usual sitting-in-Borders-playing-on-my-laptop option removed, so I decided to go analogue! I bought a cartridge pad and a marker pen, and attempted to do some graffiti-style tagging. I'm somewhat surprised I never got into that whole culture, as I was well into calligraphy (which ain't that much different), and I had a skateboard in 1979! ;). The graffiti influence is of course extremely obvious in the complex, layered works of hot young web designers such as Mike Young, Josh Davis and all that crew, but has always been tangential to my interests, me being more into tedious minimalism (seeing as I can't draw, or anything...) BUT!!! I had loads of fun coming up with ideas for tags, characters etc, and only stopped when the fumes from the pen rendered me insensible. What with that and my recent intense fascination with breakbeats/techno (and the realisation that I can DO IT MYSELF) I appear to be heading for a creative upheaval. I feel so old sometimes…
Some seriously good graffiti-style yummies: 123klan.com.
bored again
I'm already tired of this design for the blog. In fact, I'm intending to redo the whole site, just as soon as I can be arsed. Only…web design bores me greatly just now. Pity that it is my job, eh? Maybe I will design a t-shirt. Or a snowboard.