I’m away from tonight for a long weekend of Stag paintball shenanigans with Rick and the lads. Should have some good stories and photos on Monday 🙂
archive for April, 2005
Kerry and I went to the see TES tonight at the Film House. He was showing a re-editing of the ‘The Warriors‘ with a live hip-hop soundtrack. It was prety damn cool. I’d never seen the film before but Kerry loves it, and now I want to see the full version. He was powering everything off a powerbook aswell, which added to the geek factor 🙂
Lately the boys and I over at Google Sightseeing have been conversing with Brad Stone, a journalist from Newsweek. His article about the whole thing is now up online to read and gives us a nice write-up along with lots of quotes from Alex. Annoyingly, he initially spelt my name as “Ollie” which drives me nuts (I always spell it “Olly”) so I dropped him a polite email and he changed it pronto :). Brad even gets in some cheeky digs at our quaint Brit view of the world and the wacky way we pronounce things (it was a telephone interview).
Unsure of which party has promised what for the upcoming elections? Who Should I Vote For is for you.
According to them I’m a raving Lib Dem, closely followed by the Greens. Sounds about right to me.
The avatar making website Stor Troopers is back after being offline for ages. So, here is me and kerry:
Totally jumping on the bandwagon I’ve coded up a tag cloud.
Wahey, I have a yellow star on ebay:
go me.
Wahey! At last Google have released Google Maps UK. I’m honoured that we’re the first European country to get the maps treatment. Now they just need to integrate the UK satellite data from keyhole 🙂
I think their map rendering algorithm must have struggled a bit with our wacky non-grid like roads. I still like the style of the maps and the interface is just genius. I atttempted to use multimap the other day and was totally stuck when I couldn’t drag the map around. Google must have some mighty clever DOM gurus working for them.
This guy has constructed his own comics using screen shots from Half-Life 2 for all of the artwork. It is very, very well done. This guy has some skills! http://www.phwcomics.com/
Great idea! Creative Commons licensed samples: http://freesound.iua.upf.edu
Amazing “future-Russia” designs for uber communist buildings. A strange look at what could have been had it not all fallen apart: http://www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/.
Neat front onto amazon for charities to generate revenue: http://www.givezilla.com
“Lorem Ipsum” is dummy text that designers use to fill text spaces on a page. It looks like pseudo-latin and allows you to layout a page with instant realistic content. Here’s an example:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum hendrerit, felis nec rhoncus ultrices, velit purus scelerisque ligula, a mattis quam risus eget elit. Proin nec purus sit amet leo fringilla mattis. Nam pede lacus, lacinia et, mollis a, bibendum et, sapien. Mauris sagittis tempus arcu. Nullam cursus metus a sem. Mauris eros nisl, imperdiet eget, nonummy ut, suscipit ut, lectus. Nunc sit amet dolor nec orci volutpat porta. Quisque rutrum lectus at purus. Mauris nulla lacus, imperdiet et, faucibus ut, consectetuer sed, leo.
From lipsum.com. Someone has come up with a few alternatives, including “techno babble” which is just great 🙂
In August the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival has loads of free (I think) screenings of upcoming game footage and talks by industry types. I missed it last year for some reason but heard good things about it. More info here.
James, Alex and I have started up a collaborative blog spotting cool stuff in the satellite photos on google maps. Go take a look.
Update: Well, that was massively more successful than we initially thought. We’ve had over eight hundred submissions and apparently we are using up to much of the server’s resources. We’re currently relocating to a friendlier host.
Update, update: Woo-hoo, we’re back!
Great articles on the New York Times about Japanese convenience stores:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03EAT.html
Reminds of the ‘Lucky Dragon’ chain in William Gibson’s books.
I picked up the latest Banksy book on Saturday and it’s great! It covers all his latest ‘installations’ and his gallery targetting that I blogged about earlier.
Picturesonwalls.com which sells lots of his stuff has unfortunately sold out, but you can still get it on amazon.
I was just cleaning out my camera memory and came across this beauty:
I saw it roughly sprayed on a wall on the promenade down at Portabello in July last year. Someone certainly has a sense of humour.
Amazing story from Moscow News:
Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet army officer monitoring the satellite system for signs of a U.S. attack, the year was 1983, and his instructions, if he detected missiles targeting the Soviet Union, were to push the button and launch a counter-offensive.
He didn’t. Minutes later, no missiles came; months later, the frightening data across his monitor was determined to have been a system glitch. Today, the Association of World Citizens is calling him “the forgotten hero of our time,” a title befitting the man whose responsibility had been to start World War III.
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml
Really, really cute and well designed pixel and tiling pattern website. It even calls the pattern section ‘table cloths’ on the site, very cute.
I’ve been thinking about some adding some kind of background pattern on here and some of those would be ideal.
Some really creepy urban exploration pics of the abandoned Russian embassy in Bangkok.