the alhambra, granada. click image for slideshow.
January 2002
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Thursday 31
two wheels good!
I've really enjoyed getting back to cyling into work this week. I had a perplexing problem whereby I managed to get four punctures in my back wheel in two weeks. I thought it might be a thorn or something in my tire, but minute examination revealed nothing. So then i figured
it must be a combination of broken glass and bad luck (broken glass litters my route to work, for some reason). BUT THEN, I decided to buy brand new tires, and found in the course of taking my back wheel off that it had a broken spoke. Of course! Every time I went for a ride it would poke through the inner tube within minutes. Mystery solved.
Wish I had thought of that earlier. Anyway, I now have some lovely new Panaracer Fire XC pro tires with red sidewalls on my bike, which make it go faster. And I've been checking out the freeride action on the web, in anticipation of doing myself some serious injuries in Canada (the freeride opportunities in Cambridgeshire are paltry to say the least.)
So without further ado, a few linky-poos:
www.nsmb.com - North Shore Mountain Biking. The North Shore in Vancouver is home to probably the world's most insanely difficult and technical rides, and hence the world's finest freeriders, such as Wade Simmons, who is often called the best freerider in the world. However, it seems he was just beaten into second place in the insane red bull ride in Jindabayne, Australia.
pinkbike - another sweet Canadian site, with lots of quicktime videos of extreme fat-tire action.
rocky mountain bikes - Vancouver-based bike company, making way cool bikes, as ridden by the man Wade Simmons himself. One day I will own a Slayer, in the pathetically mistaken
belief that it will enable me to ride like Wade. Me, who can barely pull a wheelie for more than 5 metres. Heh. My good friend Michael probably finds Wade's burgeoning fame quite amusing, as he knows him as that nice guy (and complete stoner) who worked at the Cove bike shop. FWIW.
way to go, us
Just so you know, last Saturday was our first wedding anniversary. Hurrah! Very happy, thankyou very much.
my brilliant wife
Adrienne has been offered a place to study law at both UBC Vancouver and the University of Ottawa, which is nice. So now we get to choose. Which is it to be, eh? What do you think, Rebecca? heh. Congratulations, darling, I never doubted they would both be desparate to have you...
frothy, man
While in hamburg, we bought a milk frothing jug. It has revolutionised our coffee-making, I can tell you. Very exciting!
busy busy busy
No, I am not dead, or trapped under a heavy object, I am merely very busy. I seem to be working all day, every day, which is most out of character, if you ask me. Or any of my friends. Still, it sure makes those days whizz by.
hamburg
Well, we had a smashing weekend in Hamburg, despite the incessant rain and not getting to see Mouse On Mars as they were on much too late (2am). Thanks a lot, Heiko and Lisa! We'll be back!
chunes
Recently acquired a few rather pleasant CDs, such as loop-finding-jazz-records by Jan Jelinek, Endless Summer by Fennesz and Duck-Rabbit by Alog. That's a German, an Austrian and two Norwegians. Isn't is strange how great music is coming from all over the place these days? Even France.
Wednesday 23
solid snake!
I wasn't at all interested in buying a PS2, until this morning. In the course of my work, I decided to make a flash banner for eagerly anticipated new game Metal Gear Solid 2; having looked at some quicktime clips of in-game action, I am stunned and amazed. It really seems to be taking gaming to the next level. The visual style of the game is incredible and innovative, combining motion capture for highly believable character animation with a raft of cinematic techniques such as motion blurring, er, and other stuff. Check out the website and see for yourself.
Tuesday 22
boigled!
So we were burglarized at work on Thursday night, by (discerning) thieves who took only the two Apple Macs. The buggers. Luckily I was pretty well backed up, so I have only lost half a week worth of work. And on the plus side, I am typing this on my new dual processor 800MHz G4, complete with 1.2Gb RAM and a super-lovely Apple 17" display. Yowza is it fast. Fast and bulbous. Bulbous also tapered. Also a tin teardrop. [That's enough, ed.]
I've spent six hours so far reinstalling software, fonts and so on, configuring my system how I like it, doing all my little tricks & tweaks - like for example making an alias of the hard drive and putting it in the Apple Menu Items folder, and creating an 'alii' pop-up folder containing aliases of all my frequently used applications. And now I am just about ready to rock and roll again.
peaky
At the weekend the four of us, that is me, Adrienne, Chris and Karen, jaunted up to the beautiful Derbyshire Peak District to get some fresh air and do some walking. We were blessed with fine, sunny weather on the saturday, but Sunday was even more fun as we went for a walk in a raging gale-force wind. Leaning out over a cliff-edge into an 80 knot wind is a buzz! And I've never had my eyelids turn inside out by wind before. Splendid. Oh, and if the proprietors of the Spread Eagle pub just outside of Mansfield are reading, screw you guys! thenk you. [they wouldn't let us use their toilet]
Monday 14
BOC
Boards of Canada have a new album coming out, entitled geodaddi. About bleeding time. And furthermore, rah! On Warp Records.
X-tastic
Hey gamer kids, you may be interested to learn that play.com are now taking preorders for XBox games. And they are competitively priced, you betcha.
Also please notice we are now officially ‘play.com’ and have a funky new logo (wot I made) to prove it. Go us!
GoatBoy
The first entry into my new design-a-cereal fun and games quasi-competition has come flooding in – Chip from motorzen.com weighs in with the fabulously disgusting Goat-nuts. gag. Thanks, Chip!
Kompakt
I was at a great party on saturday, in Hackney, with a house full of german artists. Splendid. Daniel, one of the artists, played some pretty excellent minimal german techno on the kompakt label. I love the way the german language uses the letter k where we would use a c, it just looks cooler. Most words can be much improved in this way: Kanada is better than Canada, yeah? However, some misguided folks just don't know where to draw the line; I am thinking of world-famous-in-Cambridge local second-hand car dealership Haverhill Kar Khange.
Kar Khange. heh. What were they on when they came up with that one, ketamine?
Wednesday 09
Mother!
Have you seen that new cup-a-soup advert with the marathon runners? Genius! I laughed so much I fell off the Poäng with a loud Bönk! [this joke is stolen from Michael Chabon's fabulous Wonder Boys]
The ad was created by the evil geniuses at Mother [whose website I cannot find], who were also responsible for the psychotic Swedish babes in the Vodka Source commercials and the stunning britart.com “ambient media” campaign in London where various items of street furniture were labelled as works of art. Trust me, it was great.
updates
I've updated the book and music lists to reflect what I am reading and listening to at the moment, rather than two months ago. Suprisingly, the music list is relatively unchanged, apart from the addition of the excellent Happiness by Fridge, which means young Kieran Hebden has two albums in heavy rotation on my iPod. He must be so proud.
The books list reflects my current burgeoning, nay, flowering obsession with getting a job in advertising and becoming world famous and rich enough to buy an Audi A2 [I'm not greedy…] I have taken out every half decent book in the library, but by far the most amusing and interesting read so far is Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! Sullivan subscribes to legendary adman Bill Bernbach's dictum:
However much we would like advertising to be a science—because life would be simpler that way—the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; what was effective one day, for that very reason will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.
Sounds good to me. Anyway, before I moonball you into a narcoleptic coma, I might mention that there is also a very interesting book on drugs in the list as well…plus Áa change…
occlusion prevention initiative
I’ve also shrunk the Alhambra picture to prevent it from occluding the sidebar on rinky-dinky monitors (despite the z-index of the sidebar being higher!? Any ideas, CSS geeks?).
Awards time
All of us at play.com are all jolly proud to have been voted best European DVD site by the insightful and eminently sensible readers of Sex Gore Mutants. Thanks guys!
Tuesday 08
iMac
It was a new iMac after all. Coolio. Flat screen, nice and fast, lovely. they will sell a truckload, of course. And iPhoto looks snazzola. I guess I should buy a digital camera some day.
Anyway...speaking of
new Macs, Martina (new web designer here at play.com) has received her new 867Mhz Quicksilver Powermac, with 1.2 GB of RAM, 60GB HD, SuperDrive, GeForce graphics chip, lovely 17" Apple studio display. Lovely; makes my machine
seem like the slowpoke it now is. But I'm not jealous (not TOO jealous) as:
(a) I should get my powerbook back this week (yay!)
(b) I have a lovely new Wacom Intuos 2 graphics tablet, which is hella rad and should speed up my workflow no end. And no more need to use ludicrous Apple puck mouse!
Pizza Yurt
While pondering the impact of globalism last night, I considered the fact that Pizza Hut outlets look exactly the same wherever you are in the world, at least as far as I have seen from Istanbul. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if when they broke into the nomadic mongolian horseman market they subtly altered the branding to "Pizza Yurt"? Of course it would.
Friday 04
iGull
Seems iWalk is a fake. Gullible old me. Still, props for a good fake, sneaky German guy
eggsplanation
New splash page image up. Titter.
Thursday 03
iWalk
Omigod! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! If the images and movies here are real (and if not they are amazing fakes), Apple will be annoucing a next-gen PDA called the iWalk at macexpo next monday. Ha ha ha ha ha! Wow! etc. Oh, and probably a flat-screen iMac as well. I think it can safely be said that Apple are on a roll...
Wednesday 02
Happy palindromic new year!
2002. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? I am remarkably optimistic about this year, and it has certainly started off well, as I just got a very lovely pay-rise. Woo! And indeed hoo!
crimble
Had just about the best Christmas ever. Went up to Wells-Next-The-Sea on the north norfolk coast, the town from whence I hail. Sufficient years have now passed since I lived there that I can now see it is a very pleasant place indeed, if you are not worried by the lack of cultural diversions. Still, that may change with the rapid influx of loaded London meeja hors buying holiday cottages &c. I nearly passed out when I saw that the grocer's store I used to work in is now a delicatessen, with baby stiltons and italian breads and wotnot. Wow.
Weather was perfect - bright wintrycrisp days - and I didn't go near a computer for the entire holiday period, which was just what the doctor ordered, it seems, as I am filled with renewed vigour and energy. I also had a sort of epiphany...
"i'm a walking advertisement, for a version of myself" - talking heads
I have decided to pursue a career in...drrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...ADVERTISING! Yep. With maybe a bit of web design thrown in, but I intend to become a grotesquely well-remunerated "creative" type. If anyone at PJDDB is reading this, give me a job, please!
Why have I chosen this new career path, I hear you scream in horror? Simple really: I LIKE advertising, I know I would be great at it (I have already filled numerous notebooks with ad campaign ideas over the last few years) and I really don't want to learn how to program databases. The only thing which stopped me in the past was some sort of misguided notion that advertising is, well, evil, an opinion formulated during my self-righteous mid-twenties. But no, advertising, specifically good advertising, can be the most culturally significant medium of all, the most effective way to propagate fun new memes, and can also serve for the forces of goodness. Besides, what is a weblog other than an extended ad for oneself, when you think about it? [yeah, I know some folks actually link to items of interest and stuff, but as you may have noticed the main topic of my weblog is Y.T.)
Moreover, what other career would let me indulge my whimsical nature, skewed outlook, love for popular culture and secret desire to grow a pony tail? And EVERY close friend I have told of my intention has replied that this is of course exactly the career i should have pursued all along. I'm certainly superficial enough. So, a career in advertising, all I have to do is get a job at a good agency. How hard can that be? Wish me luck! Visit the ad graveyard, courtesy of the big Z.
iPod
If you like music and own a mac, you quite literally need to have an iPod. Oh yes indeedy. iPod is amazingly great. Go Apple! Yep, I've got one, and it has changed my musical life. If you can find a very, very generous friend who demands to buy you one, that is even better ;) Thanks again, Chris! Love you man, sob, etc...