April 2009
43 posts
“Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob...”
– From The extreme Google brain ¶ Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto.
Wonderful little essay on Joe Clark’s view of Google design from the outside. It’s harsh, blunt and believable.
This week, I didn’t use Google Docs because it demoralised me to interact with a crass pastiche...
The quest for US residency continues apace:
Strimble: I want to see all of this paperwork. Also, why is it "paperwork"? Why isn't it an online form?
BenWard: It's a Word document.
BenWard: The worst of both worlds.
“Obviously I wont pay, alternative to last.fm?”
– “EU Citizen 2482”
Last.FM have had to start charging to stream music to parts of the globe that can’t be supported through on-site advertising. It hurts and sure, the situation sucks a bit for all involved. But it breaks my heart to see the foaming reactions of these spoiled, freeloading...
Objects
I went to see late screening of Objectified in San Francisco last night. Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica was a hugely enjoyable documentary for me, both in style and content, and Objectified felt like a true sequel.
Like Helvetica, Objectified is full of snapshots. Little moments of insight, truth and thought from the people it features. It doesn’t lead you, it doesn’t really offer an...
Uncertain
Like everyone, I carry a certain amount of uncertainty at all times. Life, love, breakfast: All these things up in the air, apparently constantly. My attempts to ground any of them are either futile, or go unpredictably awry. This morning, for example, I discovered all the yoghurts in my fridge had expired. That’s a breakfast-related uncertainty, by the way, in case you were expecting...
Muttley: A friend of mine has an HR policy that says you can't hold eye contact with another person in the office for more than 20 seconds
Timoni: But what if you're trying to signal that you want to sleep with them?
We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives
In a...
“Script Summary: Changes the label for Twitter’s Remember Me Checkbox to be...”
– Twitter Remember Me Maybe Greasemonkey script by Derek Featherstone.
“So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, [Gary]...”
– David Emery Online: Phil Spector convicted of murder.
On Being Alone
I’ve finally figured out the worst thing about living alone. It’s not the lack of company (I’m pretty great, thus living with me is likewise) but there are certain practical implications to a flat with one occupant. The most critical of which is this:
On a night such as tonight, when my dinner is simmering happily on the stove, I realise that I possess no pasta, or bread. Both...
“If Dave Shea built the CSS Zen Garden, this was going to be the CSS Weed Patch;...”
– Mike Davidson
Since Marco and I are exchanging thoughts on the world of MySpace profile design, thought I’d dig up the origin of the MySpace Profile design ‘challenge’ that was popular in web dev a few years ago. That for me started when Mike Davidson turned his Profile (one-point-oh) into...
“Pretty spiffy, Tom! FaceBook ain’t got shit on what you guys have now. I...”
– Opinionated: FaceBook’s got nothing on this stuff!
So, if we first put aside for a moment Marco’s, erm, ‘opinionated’ view on Facebook’s organisation — doubly so since MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who’s not exactly heaven’s most famous angel. I’m getting...
“At some point in the future, when tinyurl and bit.ly are lost to the annals, you...”
– tinyarchive.org
Along with the recent communal effort to push self-hosted short URLs, Blaine Cook has popped up with Tiny Archive, an attempt to mirror the relationships of short-urls to their real counterparts, and save us all from datapocalypse.
“The cool thing about this is that you can use the Xbox LIVE Amazon Xbox LIVE...”
– Major Nelson in You can now purchase Xbox LIVE Arcade titles from Amazon
Xbox. LIVE. Amazon. Xbox. LIVE. Store. The Xbox LIVE Amazon Xbox LIVE store. Branding? Nailed it. Good work, Microsoft.
“I can use a syringe to remove the filling from a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and...”
– Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw, Zero Punctuation
This week’s Zero Punctuation review of GTA: Chinatown Wars is rather good.
“It is early days and we are still getting used to the milk and the new dairy but...”
– Stichelton Dairy
The description of Stilchelton from its own website. Perhaps the modest understatement of the decade, since Stilchelton is in fact one of the finest cheeses I’ve ever eaten.
Watch… In which Ben discovers a tune
That’s all I’ve got so far. Might start posting to 12 Seconds again.
Pixar vs. Dreamworks →
There are talking animals.
And they all make this face.
“This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a warehouse, assuming your...”
– Michael Barthel’s EMP paper on the cultural journey of Leonard Choden’s “Hallelujah”.
I’m in my 20’s, therefore obviously the Jeff Buckley version built into my foundations. I still remember the bemusement when I heard Cohen’s original for the first time, too. It was...
“The b element represents a span of text to be stylistically offset from the...”
– The b element in HTML 5
File under head-fuck. Depending on the alignment on the planets, this redefinition of b either makes some kind of perfect pragmatic sense to me, or causes my head to explode in a fit of presentation/content separation violation.
The idea of marking terms as ‘highlighted’...
