Kerry and I are off to my parents today for three days of festive cheer and present giving and receiving. Hopefully the fog/leaf/flood bound UK transport system can get us there in one piece, with more luck than Nick & Steinunn.
archive for 2006
This week I received a useful cold call. It started with the usual mobile phone stuff and I was about to hang-up when the dude mentioned that my contract was about to run out, whoah, could actually be a legit call. It was, my contract had run out (I had no idea) and was apparently in “rolling” mode. So they tempted me to stay on with a free upgrade and an attempt at selling me a vastly over-priced plan and some phone insurance. I took the free K800, thank you very much. It’s a very shiny phone with an awesome screen, plus it was in Casino Royale. Check out the evolution with my last three phones:
Left to right: T610, K750 & K800.
Screens are getting bigger (and higher resolution) and keypads are getting more cluttered. The ‘start’ and ‘end’ call buttons on the K800 are pretty tiny, squeezed in at the side like that. The K800 seems a bit more ‘bling’ than the others and more nokia-ish. Other nice improvements are more tactile keys, a better camera, a real flash, autofocus, image stabilisation, an RSS reader and a blogging tool! The latter seems to only support blogger, which is a shame. We’ll see how this new phone lasts.
Via Tech Crunch UK I’ve started using a new web service called Stikkit. It’s basically just online post-it notes, very similar to the Stickies application in OS X. I’ve been wanting something like this for a while, google do calendars and mail very well, there are todo lists from 37signals but no generic note taking application. Stikkit is quite clever, as you’re writing a note it tries to calculate whether it is a todo list or an event, depending on the wording you use. So, writing “Buy beer for party on Friday at 8pm” automatically creates a event with the correct date and time. One immediate use I see for this is to quickly add things to google calendar. Just add your events through Stikkit and then show the event RSS feed on your google calendar. Creating “stikkits” is made super easy with a nifty bookmarklet that opens a wee AJAX powered window on your current webpage for data entry.
There are a lot more nifty feature but John “Markdown” Gruber has a very good review on his blog. I’d agree with him about the icons, I really didn’t know what most were going to do when I pressed them.
Last Friday was the launch of James and Alex’s book Not In the Guide Book, a collection of the best content from Google Sightseeing at the swanky Indigo Yard. For the help I gave them with the site when they first launched I got the first copy signed by them both, cheers guys! The books is surprisingly shiny and is neater and more compact than I was expecting. They’ve licensed all the images from the appropriate data providers and given the blog-style entries more polish to make them “book worthy”. It works well and I hope they sell lots. I think the cover lets it down terribly though and Alex lamented that they’d asked to design it themselves (he is a Graphic Designer) but the publisher wouldn’t budge.
There are some god-awful photos from my phone on a Flickr set.
I watched a very interesting documentary called Shadow Company the other night. It’s all about the rise of Private Military Contractors, or Mercenaries as they’ve been better known throughout history. It loosely follows the story of one young British guy joining a mercenary company and getting shipped out to Iraq. In between the narrative there are interviews with people from all over the mercenary world; active guys, heads of companies and retired guys. The overall design of the film is very slick and all the captions and neat on screen displays are very well designed. It also has some brief forays into animation, being used to humourlessly describe the different types of mercenary and tactical situations.
The core of the film is why do these man do it? and the big question of what drives a man to fight, for money, if not for his own country? Is it even right to fight for money if you don’t have a cause? There is also an underlying issue that mercenaries are not governed by any law except general Human Rights conventions. Under the “new” Iraqi law, no contractor can be charged with any crime. Now that doesn’t seem right…
37signals release their book for free: Getting Real
I’ve just checked out the waterstones website after noticing an ad in todays Metro. This new site is a reversal of their online strategy as previously the site was run as a glorified amazon affiliate. It was basically just a mirror of amazon’s book site with a waterstones logo at the top.
This new site is much nicer. It has a fresh and clean style and even has a few trendy curved boxes. The styled form elements look a little like a flash app but help to tie together the overall style. Doing a quick comparison the pricing seems competitive and the shipping is marginally cheaper. The threshold for free shipping is the same as amazon (£15) but amazon’s free shipping is “Super Saver” i.e. slow. It’s nice to see that they’ve improved the events and local store information (something which amazon did terribly) and that bookseller reviews are intergrated with product descriptions. The much talked about blogs are a little on the shonky side with no RSS and no visible actual blog-like structure.
Overall though, a vast improvement on the previous incarnation.
Disclaimer: I used to work at waterstones
The new Counter-Strike weapons market will change the game dynamic considerably
I keep seeing this on vans around Edinburgh and every time it catches my eye. OK, it’s not creative genius but I like it.
Over on the Creative Review blog they’re discussing the new BBC One idents, those short clips they show between programmes and announce the next one. One thing I didn’t realise is that the font has also changed. They had a bespoke typespace designed by Fontsmith which, I think, is rather nice:
It is neat but not too restrained. Slightly playful, yet still has a corporate edge.
Shawn Brown is a Cartographer. He draws maps, awesome maps. If I could have a vast, dramatic change in career I’d be a cartographer (or maybe a steam train driver). I’ve always been fascinated by maps, their construction and just sitting pouring over one. My Dad made sure I could map read and navigate from an early age and has a rather large collection of Ordnance Survey maps as well as an interest in surveying and drawing plans of abandoned underground workings. OS maps are very, very nice but it is a shame the licensing issues are such a mess in the UK. If map data was licensed like the USA then I’m sure we wouldn’t have the quality of maps that we do, but would the openness overcome that?
Pirate Hip Hop with a stop-motion animated video. Need I say more?
Google Code Search, very nice implementation
Well, this was a total snooze fest. I was expecting another noir-ish cop thriller like L.A. Confidential or maybe The Untouchables. But this is just a very stylish mess. The plot is hardly even attempted to be explained and it just meanders between Scarlett looking teary to Josh looking confused. The first film for a while where I was actually mildly bored.
Jason Statham (The Transporter) is the bus from Speed. He is double-crossed by his gangster boss and injected with a synthetic Chinese drug. If his heart rate slows below a certain rate he dies. Great! As this means the film doesn’t damn stop for the next hour and a bit. Chuck in some hilarious David Fincher style camera zooms and on screen explanation, a pumping sound track and you can’t go wrong.
As reported on the Google Maps API blog they’ve vastly improved the speed of the addOverlay() function. My bbc travel warnings mashup loading time has greatly improved. Nice one google.
So it looks like I’m a bit of a hippy. Take the test yourself.
Kerry and I are off on a wee break to sunny Whitby tomorrow for a couple of days. Expect a slew of piratey/sea-side photos when we get back 🙂
Update: Here are the photos
Just watched Running Scared and I have to say, I was pretty impressed! It’s another of these gritty movies that deals with the low-level mob dudes that do all the real dirty work. Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker, the guy from 2 fast 2 furious) is the mob guy who “disposes” of guns when some shit has gone down. Except he doesn’t dispose of them, he stashes them in his basement… Pretty dumb huh? As you’d expect, this leads to shenanigans and the film follows the next 18 hours of his life as he tries to put everything right. It’s style is very similar to NARC, Training Day and Four Brothers. It is pretty violent and has a particulary twisted moment in the middle which is very un-settling. Has an ace gun fight at the end and even has the bad guy from Hell Boy in it! Oh yeah and there’s a twist…
Very clever rugs that either have tractor tracks across them (the green one) or little animal footprints (the white one). I want one, but I imagine they aren’t cheap!
Interesting article about 37signal’s development process, very similar to a lot of our conversations at work
The (almost) final list of CSS bug fixes in IE 7. Hopefully the take-up of IE7 will be such that we can now just develop for gecko and IE7 based browsers.
Yesterday was the wedding of our friends Ian & Jenn. It was an excellent day, superbly well organised and we can’t thank them enough for inviting Kerry and I. I took lots of pictures and a few are up on Flickr.