paving slab, kings parade, cambridge.
February 2002
05 | 08 | 11 | 14 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 22 | 26 | 27 | 28
Thursday 28
Schizo, Schizo, SchizoCats!
I know Metabastardfilter blogged it ages [well, a week] ago, but you HAVE to see the schizophrenic cat art of Louis Wain. While the metafiltoids get all intellectual like, and pontificate on the nature of mental illness and what we can infer from artistic representations of such, I just thought the pictures would make ace birthday cards [call me shallow. and i have a degree in psychology, so there.]. So I made one:
And a general purpose greetings card:
Fun!
I passed my driving test
Much to my amazement, I passed my driving test this morning, at the first time of asking. Despite doing my three-point turn in five and nearly pulling into a layby on the dual carriageway instead of the exit. 12 minor faults, so not a flawless drive, but heck, good enough! Consider me chuffed and surprised.
So now at last I can hold my head high and declaim to the world:
“I, Rikki Dominic Abel, am a DRIVER and hence, by extension, a REAL MAN!”
Anyone fancy a beer tonight? I can barely wait to start raping the planet.
I guess I should add that I spent three extremely angry hours last night looking for the paper part of my licence, to no avail, which I eventually found this morning, folded up all neat and small in my wallet. I laughed. And I cursed the DOT for being such luddite trogs that one actually needs a paper part of the licence. Get with the rest of the world, you stone-age dullards.
Reg Jackson: driving instructor, raconteur, wit.
A big shout out to my homie, ace driving instructor and source of endless amusing malapropisms Reg “not Reggie Jackson” Jackson for excellent instruction and also filling me in on all manner of driving lore and arcana, such as:
“I’m not being sexualist, it is just a fact that women tend to lose concentration at junctions more than men, and any other instructor would tell you the same”
and:
“The worst drivers are your asians. You see, driving ain’t part of their culture, is it?”
not forgetting the classic:
Reg: “One thing I’ve noticed, the more economic someone is, the harder they find it to drive. Your professors, they are very economic, their minds are somewhere else”
Me: “you mean academic, Reg?”
Reg: “Yeah, academic, what was I saying?”
and finally:
“we’re not doing it for real, we are assimilating it”
Reg, I salute you!
[He is actually a very nice man, just not very, you know, economic. Ooh, I am such a snobby biatch.]
hurrah, wifey is back!
What makes today even more special is that Adrienne is back from Canadia today, after 11 long days away, during which time I have been sleeping diagonally in the bed, the novelty of which wears out on day 2.
Wednesday 27
Speaking of DVDs…rant rant rant…
Speaking of DVDs, if anybody can point me in the direction of a website where I can get hold of high-resolution scans of upcoming DVD releases, I will be eternally grateful. Cdcovers.cc appears to be dead. The reason being, I am doing print adverts for play.com, which leads me into another minor rant, vis-a-vis publishing houses. And ISDN. Why do they all still use ISDN? Can anyone explain this to me, in this world of reasonably cheap, at last, no thanks to those BT cocksmokers, anyway, reasonably cheap broadband access?
Oh, I hear you say, why not just send them files as email attachments? Well, of course they can’t receive email attachments which are more than 3MB in size. Some of them can’t receive email attachments at all. One company explained helpfully that the Mac they do layout on isn’t attached to the internet. At all. Whadafuh? It all seemed so simple at first – design the ad, convert to PDF, send it off. How naïve I was. Of course, it doesn’t help that we are usually given zero days notice. So instead of scouring the web for usable images I am ranting and raving here. Venting spleen. Avoiding the task. Goofing off. Procrastinaterizerating.
Because of course, it wouldn't be possible for the film studios to send us high-res images of the films they [presumably] want to sell. I asked about that, and it was pointed out to me that this could only happen in a rational world where people act in a logical fashion.
Dont even get me started on Warner Bros and Harry Fucking Potter and J.K Fucking Rowling’s insistence that all adverts for said masterwork of modern cinema must be personally approved, or something, prior to exposing to the public gaze, lest, presumably, lest naughty graphic designers decide to photoshop Manson-style inverted crucifixes onto the boy wizard’s shiny forehead.
Which gives me an idea.
And why hasnt there been a more sizeable anti-Potter backlash? Everyone knows that the arch-satanist Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is almost infinitely superior. I’d like to see Rowling win the Whitbread Prize. Mind you, given that she is now the second richest person in the universe and Philip Pullman still lives in a garden shed I doubt she is losing any sleep.
Fast and Fatuous
Having nothing better to do, like, say, boil my head in a bucket of owl’s blood while having um-bongo performed on me by Jivaro tribesman, last night I watched the DVD of The Fast and the Furious. Hoo-wee! I imagine that if one were a 15-year old bag of pus and hormones it would vie for greatest film of all time status, but one is an elderly, balding, married 33 year-old, and one thought it was arse. Those cars sure were fast, though. And some of them had green fluorescent lights underneath them, the cars used in the daring heists on articulated lorries, which involved driving really FAST around and underneath, for some reason, said trucks, then firing a harpoon through the passenger side window, after whcih one of the villians attaches himself to the other end of the metal hawser attached to the harpoon and then jumps onto the front of said huge goods delivering behemoth, clambers in through the smashed window, and eventually overpowers the driver all the while being beaten around the head and neck with a baseball bat by said, fairly mardy, driver. Hello? Hellllooo? Anybody home???
And so but then there were several (but not enough) cars going rilly fast scenes, interspersed with the oh so lame excuse for a plot, and loads of hot chicks wearing skimpy togs. And a love interest thing. And then the good guy who turns out, really stunningly, to be an undercover cop, at the end, he lets the villain go! Because he fancies his sister?! How very unprofessional.
But then, as xXx2bLoNd4uxXx insightfully points out at amazon:
I think that the fast and the furoious was the best movie i love paul walker and jarule so much i think they have the tightest cars an the coolest stunts plus the hottes guys ... i definatly recomd this movie to ppl of about 11-29! girls an guys!
I stand corrected. You dozy, slackjawed fucknut, with not so much a brain, more a watery nubbin atop your spine.
Maya Maya Maya!
Attention all Mac OS X users! Why not head over to Alias|Wavefront to download your copy of Maya Personal Learning Edition? I know I did. Woo! And indeed Hoo! Only a matter of time before I am a 3-D animation genius.
Tuesday 26
Go Kanada
Canadians have a reputation for being whiners: an interesting and funny essay written before Canada totally owned the USA in the Women’s and Men’s hockey finals, which double whammy has unsuprisingly vanquished, at least for the moment, the endemic Canadian sense of second-rate parochialism (according to several Canadians I know, not me – I am that strange breed, a wannabe Canadian).
Ah, I remember watching Beachcombers as a young kid, and being vaguely aware that the show must have come from a strange North American country which was sort of like the USA (they spoke the same way) but just a little, well, different. I dont remember much about Beachcombers except that it was kinda slow moving, one episode apparently revolved around a new doughnut machine in Mollys Reach, and there was an irascible curmudgeon called Relic. Who knew that Relic was, and I quote “born to a loveless Welsh coalmining family…despised by his father”?. The things you learn on the interweb, fair boggle the mind, eh?
Further research indicates that Beachcombers was apparently a comedy. I musta missed that.
Am I boring you yet? Don’t get me started on Degrassi Junior High, or The Littlest Hobo.
Friday 22
ey oop!
I’m off to Sheffield for the weekend, to see my cousins. Should be fun. I believe the beer there is still less than 3 quid a pint.
snowjob
New style, snow. Hard to read, some might say. They’d be right. Also loosely ripped-off from untickalock.
Wednesday 20.02 2002
solutomaattimittaamotulos
Yes, a palindromic (or calendromic) date, and very exciting it is! But as my old school friend Jon points out, it can’t ever hope to match the deep joy we felt at 12:34pm, 5/6/78. I remember it well, I was in Maths class at Hunstanton primary school, quite distracted by this momentous occassion. Disappointingly, the teacher seemed rather blasé about the whole thing.
Oh, and the headline is a Finnish palindrome; no idea what it means. Good name for a band.
news
Another new style added, called news, and inspired by the lovely the morning news. Fun!
validity
Ladeez and gennlemen, we are now running valid XHTML and CSS. Break out the Champers!
Tuesday 19
enter the grauzone
Aaron has an elastic heart.
style, baby
I have reintroduced style-switching. Only one alternate style at the moment, the warm and fuzzy (and Rothko-endebted) firefly. Click on the name in the styler section at the top of the sidebar to switch. Not quite perfect yet, but quite nice. And a welcome return to orange. I knew I couldn’t keep away from orange for long. Also has the sidebar on the left hand side, for those of a *sinister* persuasion.
Mike Wazowski!
Saw Monsters Inc. last night (or Monsters AG as it is known in Germany). What a completely wonderful film! I enjoyed it more than Toy Story 2, I have to say. And I laughed like a fool throughout. Much better than I was expecting, actually. And Boo is just ridiculously cute. Those guys are complete, massive geniuses. I wish I worked at Pixar. Apart from the long hours, natch.
Monday 18
bright idea
This morning the bulb went in the kitchen. I put a new bulb in, and seconds later, while I was pouring milk onto my Sustain® it fell out of the socket and bonked across the floor. Although the bulb didn’t break, the filament did. Which got me to thinking: surely it is time we moved on from fragile, inefficient and shoddy incandescent bulbs? Now I know one can already buy ‘green’ energy efficient bulbs, but as I stood there giggling at my cack-handedness around the house, in the dank gloom of our turgid kitchen, a lovely idea came to me…namely: Light Emitting Polymer rooftiles.
You may or may not know about LEPs, which were discovered by accident by a researcher at the Cavendish lab right here in Cambridge, who discovered that a flask of polymer type stuff fluoresced interestingly when a current was passed through it. Or something. Anyway a company was founded to capitalise on this boffo discovery – Cambridge Display Technology – which will enable us to make display screens which are not only cheap but also floppy and bendy. So we can imagine t-shirts with video playing on them and suchlike.
But also, you could, theoretically, coat your ceiling with LEP tiles, link it up to your iMac, and illuminate your room with an animation of the sky, for example, which would do sunsets at your command. Isn’t that a nice idea? Very sci-fi. If you liked, you could have a martian sky, or indeed just about anything you care to imagine. Maybe a constant, terrifyingly realistic meteor shower if you are entertaining guests who have outstayed their welcome?
I’m almost completely certain somebody had already done this idea in a sci-fi novel, and it is not a million miles from that big animated ceiling in Las Vegas. Nice idea, nonetheless. It would be psychologically interesting to live under an ersatz sky. You could even put cameras on the roof and stream the actual real sky. Man.
Which reminds me of the time that my friends Mike and Chris and myself were tripping out on magic mushrooms at a noisy dance festival in Finsbury Park. We were laying on our backs, trying to chill out, when Mike suddenly announced “The sky, it’s, like, nature’s screensaver, man!” hee hee…
seeds of design
I was talking to my neighbour John, who is a graphic designer, the other night. He told me that he thinks he first got into design during his geography lessons, specifically glaciation, when he had to draw lots of cutaway diagrams of terminal moraines and suchlike. I mention this because it is a spooky coincidence – I traced my interest in the graphic arts back to the very same thing. I used to really love drawing those diagrams. Went out and bought myself a big tin of Caran D’Ache watercolour crayons and laboured over those drawings for hours on end, tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth, no sense of the hours passing.
At around the same time, I would also spend many happy hours drawing different styles of alphabets in graph paper pads [those grids helped keep the letters consistently sized. Does the background pattern make more sense now? I’ve only just consciously realised why I like graph paper patterns so much].This was before I had any inkling of an idea that one could actually pursue a career as a ‘graphic designer’, let alone a ‘typographer’. I just sort of assumed that typefaces had been around forever, you know? They just existed as part of the state of the universe.
I enjoyed graphics classes at school somewhat, but was never particularly into them, as they seemed to consist mainly of laboriously drawing borders and name boxes – I was so slow at this that little time was left for working on the actual drawing, which was invariably a boring isometric view of a house, or something. And I seemed incapable of creating a drawing without smudging the pencil, or making the edges of the page curl up with the sweat from my palms. All very unsatisfactory, really.
So it was Geography classes that really hit the spot for me, graphically speaking. Of course, it was another 14 or so years later before I eventually ended up doing graphical design type work. But better late than never. And my question to all designers reading is:
When did you first realise you wanted to be a designer?
NB: I always feel a frisson of guilt, and a bit of a fraud, when I call myself a ‘web designer’ or simply a ‘designer’, solely because I don’t have a University degree in any design or art-related subject. [Psychology, if you were wondering]. I dunno. Am I a designer? “Wuh-uh”, as they say in Norfolk. I feel like a designer…
fight! fight! fight!
Joshua threatens to beat up Jakob. I wonder if he has ever seen Jakob in shirtsleeves?
Sunday 17
tweaks
A few tweaks have occurred. See if you can spot them.
home alone
Waaaah! So Adrienne has jetted off to Vancouver for 10 days, leaving me to fend for myself. Erk. Expect an upsurge in blogging activity – I’ve got to do something to fill up those long winter evenings. If anybody wants to come round and visit me I’ve got 36 beers in the fridge. Only little Grolsch stubbies, but an impressive quantity nonetheless. Amazingly, I have done the washing up, performed laundry duty, mopped the kitchen floor and scrubbed the toilet bowl, entirely of my own volition. And to think just 1 year ago I was completely feral.
design for life
Imagine, if you can, my delight yesterday when – or even ‘whence’, why not eh? – whence, while perusing the shelves of Cambridge’s stellar remainders book store Galloway & Porter [which has lately been a bit less stellar, frankly, at least as far as design books go] I happened upon a copy of Philip B. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, for only 25 of your earth pounds. Suffice to say I snapped it up so quickly that there was a loud pop caused by the air rushing in to fill the vacuum in the place on the shelf where it used to be. Yes indeedly. And so but now I am going to sit down and start to read it, on the Poäng, with a stubbie of Dutch beer balanced precariously on the arm of said Poäng, while listening to, um, probably Jan Jelinek. And when I have finished it, perhaps I will have become a slightly better and more historically sensitive graphic designer myself, like.
And at some point I will inadvertantly knock the beer onto the floor. Oops. Such a curse it is being able to see into the future, yet being powerless to change it.
Thursday 14
music
I really should get a music section up again. Watch this space…
By jove, new music page is here.
it’s that special day.
Happy Valentine’s Day to anybody currently in love. And to anyone who is currently sad and lonely, hang in there and try to ignore it. Ah, I remember sad and lonely, never ever getting any cards ever, always putting on a brave face and joking about getting my letterbox enlarged to cope with the deluge. I so enjoy being married to the love of my life, excuse the smugness…
I love you, Adrienne.
1969 in the sunshine
So you’ll never guess to what I am currently listening. Grammar nazi. Only the new Boards Of Canada album, Geogaddi. And so but it is very nice, thankyou for asking. I stumbled across a very naughty website yesterday which has the entire album available as MP3s, plus a raft of hard-to-get old classics, from the Hi-Scores EP and suchlike, which I am downloading with a demented glint in my eye, cackling and rubbing my horny hands with glee. Really. I must stress that I have already ordered the CD from Warp Mart, so it is not like I am really an evil music pirating scumbag. Except for those early songs, which, let’s face it, are virtually impossible to come by. And where is this treasure trove of a website? I really couldn’t say, period. Or could I...
[period. geddit?]
idea-changing liquid alchemy
At the risk of banging on like a stuck record, if you like Boards Of Canada, I urge you to check out the excellent Norwegian duo alog, whose duck-rabbit album is a bit of a peach.
crack pringles
Just imagine how more-ish they would be.
fan sonic
Yesterday the air-conditioning unit just outside the kitchen at the office was producing exactly the same rhythm as track 1 on the Osasto EP by Pan Sonic. I commented to a colleague that I had a CD which sounded just like it, and he laughed. He clearly thought I was joking. Poor fool. Mind you, I remember getting really into the resonant frequency creaking of a cablecar gondola when snowboarding in Les Deux Alpes a few years back. Hmmm, I really want to go snowboarding again.
Monday 11
quantized veruca
He shoots, he scores, he googlewhacks! What fun. So much fun I will keep a list. Over there, on the right. Some of the googlewhacks on this page remind of the silly names I came up with for the much-vaunted and stupid jazz band generator from time back way back.
menopausal flibbertigibbet
278,000,000 points. Boo-ya!
gene simmons
Very amusing interview/argument with the ‘epicurian hedonist’ and Kiss guitarist on NPR is downloadable from here. 27MB of hilarity. [via textism]
Friday 08
boc!
Hurry along now and preorder the really, really long-awaited new Boards Of Canada CD, Geodaddi, at warpmart.
podular
I've taken to using my iPod increasingly often as a FireWire hard drive, shuttling files between home and work. It really is a sweet little device. I noticed that Archos have launched a new MP3 player with a 20GB drive, USB 2.0 connectivity (faster than firewire) and a record function. Only problem is that it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Oh, and it's user interface is almost certain to be a terrible nightmare of unusability. And it weighs the same as a house brick. Nice try, guys.
talk talk
I was extremely excited this morning to spot "laughingstock" by Talk Talk on a desk at work. Turns out it belongs to my fine colleague and esteemed musician Peter Chilvers, whose music you can buy from Burning Shed, his very own record label. And good stuff it is, too.
Anyway, back to Talk Talk; if all you know of them is their mid-eighties chart hits such as "life's what you make it" you may not know why I was so energised to find this CD, which I used to own, but lost when we were burgled years ago, and was subsequently impossible to replace due to its being deleted. I'll tell you why: it is a work of minimalist, haunting, lachrymose genius, that's why. With the world's greatest ever one-note guitar solo.
nomenclature
I've always thought the appelation 'web user' was rather lame and unimaginative and have been casting about to find a better alternative. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that the French have a great word for a web user: internaut. Good eh? It has a je ne sais quoi oh so very special...
Tuesday 05
request for links
If anyone has any excellent/favourite art gallery websites, preferably in a clean and minimal stylee, please share them with me. Got a project, see?
gene genie
I am currently taking an extended break from anally fixating upon the tiniest details of style sheets, in an attempt to broaden my interests, get a life, and stop being such a massive geek. To that end, I am reading the deeply fascinating Genome by Matt Ridley. Good stuff. I mean, web design and the internet, all very clever, but not as clever as a digital language which self-replicates and, you know, ends up making all life on earth. Way ta go, DNA. And RNA.
way ta go, fella!
Congratulations to my homie Chris, who is now engaged to the lovely Karen. Huzzah! And also to Matt and Karen, who are getting married in May in darkest Scotchland.
apple returns
Yesterday my powerbook was returned to me, having been repaired. You may remember I fell off my bike and cracked the hinge. I sent it off on December 10. Pretty speedy, eh? heh. Anyway, I'm happy as it has an entirely new screen and looks as good as new. Never again will I take it out on a dark and rainy night while riding my bicycle. I've learned my lesson.
I mean, you would think that a repair centre would actually have the parts in stock to enable it to repair the computers sent in. But no, they have to order the parts, which are then presumably fabricated on demand and then shipped from Taiwan on the back of a hedgehog, or something.
Really, two months to fix a cracked hinge? Grrr. etc.