smile like you mean it

January 6, 2009

I mean I had forgotten its january until neal reminded me but then if you spend 17 hours in a box with a tripod and a dial-in then there’s every chance you’ll wake up in doctor who like a martin clunes cabbage head and be expected to strategize your way out of a cardboard wiki. there’s been many times when you could have so easily have just slipped out to the decking and given your last crisps to the dalliance in the video conference room but as the cat strings of vicarious premiums get dragged across the floor of fire exit tunnels you creep ever closer to being the last bounty in the box. if there’s only one flavour it means I don’t like it. not like ski yogurts used to be in those little milk churns or your first plate of spaghetti but the consuming arpeggi of doubt that cankers over the frozen ocean and nibbles the life from your broadbanded life support system without that you really don’t exist and its full of antelopes of horses in here. can’t even uncrack the box tops whence I’d supplant nature with a feeble incantation of weekly meetings designed specifically to undermine the public confidence. when you hit the bottom you’ll have a penchant for autobiography but naturally it will be cack-handed diatribes fit for soup but hold fast on that idea if only as a illustration of the possibilities after the death of it all. you’re nearly as old now as I will be at the end. but I’ll have a spreadsheet with my actions in yellow whereas yours are all overdue in red. I might even yank it back on topic but I’ve seen worse things happen in the seafood aisle.

don’t want to be afraid but when its so far away you poke the embers of winter and you’ve only got february to look forward to. you’ll need 60 days before that happens and you nearly had it there. look in the box.

cracked h4x0rs

January 5, 2009

in 1984 I was asleep on the hard cold shoulder of the M25 while a man from the AA was jacking up the 2CV that had finished the ether it was running on and I never even woke up so its a good thing I wasn’t actually the driver but needless to say many things have passed in a blur since. hows things. back to normal. haha, whatever back to normal is. oh, yes, haha. nice break? JUST ASK WHAT YOU WANT TO ASK. sorry? no, I’m sorry.

sometimes little gems turn up form inside your own planet and one such did save me many hours during the last days of december but really it wasn’t very productive anyway its just that it was less productive quicker so I as able to be much more inefficient without even trying just waiting for the paid version to show up whereupon I’ll unleash my fiendish help requests upon the support forum to a deafening silence much like the one I hear right now on the other end of this phone.

if you ever get the urge to download a human league album then don’t resist I did and now my tumble dryer’s lost its grommet just as we’re all at level 5 still at least we’re all still here I forgot that its january already locked in the box like what I am. I can’t decide whether to re-invent everything. it’s tuesday tomorrow. ruby!

the end of JPG

January 5, 2009

bad news for those who like their photo magazines to be creative, undiluted and excellent. JPG magazine has bitten the dust and will no longer be publishing or soliciting submissions for its photo themes. I didn’t get every issue of JPG or submit very much via its web site, but on the occasions when I got the magazine (usually at borders in preparation for a long flight) I was always inspired, or at the very least, engaged. I don’t have a handy list of favourites or archives from the magazine to share, but thankfully, photojojo have put together a nice farewell item on their newsletter. maybe grab the pdf archive while you can. you won’t regret it. mind you, the thing about JPG was that it looked so nice having those great photos in print.

you really should finish that

January 2, 2009

with a free day to yourself and adobe indesign twitching away in the corner you know you should really get to the UI specifications that have been bouncing around like the donkey in shrek trying to get your attention but then you’ve got that whole wiki organization thing to do and you did spend a while on that lovely flow diagram you made for it so how about just getting to grips with those atlassian confluence templates or wait there’s that whole documentation thing you’ve got planned out there in the pile of paper you’re trying to push towards the edge of your desk I mean you said you’d do that in september and that was like a whole different year now right?

better get a cup of tea and one of the christmas biscuits and sit down for a while. look at your desk. there must be a good hour’s worth of tidying to do there. and you haven’t hoovered in here for over a month. you know, actually, that cupboard could do with a bit of arranging I’m sure I could make better use of that space and <SLAP>.

ah. alright. can I just read my email first? I don’t think there’s an thing really important but <SLAP>.

ooh. right. the UI spec thing? now?

serendipitous resolve

January 2, 2009

I had already totally committed to doing at least half of the things from the photo resolutions over at the photojojo blog but now I’ve got at least 8 more that I planned to do. photojojo is a splendid place to get creative ideas just when you thought you’d lost the urge. I mean. there’s loads of places out there to get creative ideas, but they don’t all make you go ‘oh, yeah, I fancy that’, like photojojo does.

I had already started to get organised thing this morning. obviously I got distracted before I’d even opened adobe bridge, but it’s only 9:48, so there’s still hope. today’s goal is RAW filtering. I know I only need less than half the RAW files I have filling up my disk but oh my it’s going to be a long day deciding which ones to keep and which slightly blurred and out of focus ones that really should be thrown away but express some kind of idea or just have something I can’t put my finger on I should really delete. that’s probably 90% of them…

ihavea Player

December 31, 2008

Following the rampant success of the BBC iPlayer, ITV has done what it does best, and nicked it. Ok, so the implementation is different, as are the system requirements, oh, and the reach, ah, and the general niceness of it, but it’s is pretty much the same thingy that allows you to catch up (their call to action) on the fabulous ITV franchise programmes you may have inadvertently decided you didn’t want to watch in the first place.

What I like most of all about this little gem of interactivity, however, is the name. Inoffensive, to the point, and generally following the trend of at least 3 years ago to start everything with an ‘i’. Except this little ‘i’ isn’t the mactard freeform freeload bangwagonesque all-seeing ‘i’, it’s the BBCi. The BBCi brand, label, bucket, whatever, was around for many years as a catch-all bitriquadquin-media expression of anything vaguely digital. Stands to reason that when they finally delivered their TV-ondemandonlineovertheweb player that it would fall under that broad BBCi category of products, even though they don’t really call it that anymore. So, why not just stick the ‘i’ at the front? Viola!. iPlayer. Nothing to do with fruit. So when ITV finally scraped enough funds together to bake a TV-ondemand cake, it’s no wonder they want to leverage a bit of the success that the BBC iPlayer enjoys. So let’s maybe start it with an ‘i’. But wait. We’re ITV. We start with an ‘i’ anyway. Hang on, itvPlayer! Bingo!

Not to suggest that it’s a little like cybersquatting a domain typo, but the similarities are striking. Take a little look at the branding around ITV Player and the BBC iPlayer and you get the picture. Even down to the little pointy triangle video play device in the logo. ‘But everybody uses that’. Oh, ok. Of course, the presentation and user experience for each product are the usual worlds apart, but when it comes down to it, the products are pretty much the same online. What used to be the crucial advantage of what used to be called not the itvPlayer but something else entirely was that you could watch ITV programmes near-live, which I spouted some eulogy about a while back. That was clearly a huge competitive edge, like a virtual sabatier to the heart of copyrighted 7-day backlog of the BBC. Not any more though. I mean, you can’t just watch anything live. And they make you work hard to find it. In fact, all I can watch right now is a live repeat of the UK pre-buget report statement on BBC parliament, but, they do now do live TV online. You still need to pony up for your TV license to actually legally watch it, but I tell you, to get the Scottish Parliament from the 26 November on a programme originally broadcast on 21st December live on my desktop via a repeat on the BBC Parliament channel on 31st December is some thrill indeed. Better than fireworks.

Happy new year.

Listening Post: M83: Graveyard Girl

eye of the beholder

December 31, 2008

how far do I go to get a photo the way I like it? the answer is miles. I was a designer first and a photographer second and so I have the designer habit of fiddling mercilessly until I think its as perfect as I can get it and then deciding I didn’t mean to do it that way and then then having some kind of identity crisis about brand and perception and deciding that I’ve just visually misrepresented myself with the overuse of a high pass filter and I’ll store the photo in a cardboard box until I decide its too late to post it. I mean, that doesn’t happen every time, but it often does.

having said that, I know that there are many times where I’ll see potential in a photo of mine which didn’t really amount to much because I’m not particularly good at using my camera and then set to work on it. in 90% of cases, my aim is to frighten the life out of a perfectly reasonable exposure with the threat of filters, masks and crops until it submits everything it knows. after that, I’ll spend a good few hours getting it to calm down and try to look presentable in the hope that when it gets posted to flickr, I’ll get nice comments somewhere between ‘nice capture!’ and ‘awesome!’ by way of ‘er, what did you do there?’.

a perfectly good example of that process is a photo I recently snapped (and I mean snapped, as in, almost didn’t look at the camera while I waved it in the direction of the subject and hoped I’d not got some mad manual setting going on from when I was trying to take a picture of a dog under a blanket in the dark) of the london eye. after I’d got it home it was one of those RAW files that was just taking up too much space but there was something about it. compositionally, I quite liked it and it had clouds and some metalwork in it so there’s alway potential there. it was a pretty lifeless photo though as the light was rubbish that day and there was hardly any contrast but that’s not going to stop me having a go so rather than finishing off a flow digram for a organisational wiki that I was supposed to be doing I spent about an hour fiddling about in photoshop. the befores and after (we love before and afters) are below:

(actually just the after as I lost the before. kind of defeats the point now)

whether you think they are tweaks too far or if you prefer the results or if you wish I hadn’t told you that I’d actually mucked about with it or if you even prefer the original then that’s up to you do decide and you can let me know if you feel compelled although if you are actually reading this then you’re probably me.

lost last loss leaders

December 31, 2008

ooh. I was just thinking yesterday as I downloaded about 4 mp3 albums from amazon in the uk for 3 quid a piece that it probably wouldn’t last. I didn’t buy everything I wanted and frankly I bought a few things I wouldn’t have bought at 7.99 or 8.99 but when they are so ridiculously cheap and are 320 kbps and are DRM-free then there really isn’t any reason not to. so I thought I’d get some more. I’d had second thoughts about the glasvegas album even though I’d been listening to it on napster but I thought I really couldn’t pass up the 3 quid loss-leader and so I headed back to amazon this morning to shovel a few more bargain-bucketfuls of coinageable purchases only to find that they had as was inevitable raised the prices on everything that wasn’t glen campbell or pendulum both of which I got anyway. I mean, they might have only increased some things by a pound or maybe 2 but in some cases they’d really exposed their primary loss-leaders such as the rihanna album which jumped from 3 quid to 7.30 overnight. I guess they’re pretty confident they can recoup large wads of cash on that one. maybe not so much on the simply red greatest hits which was rightfully stuck at 3 pounds which is in fact 3 pounds too much and does not really qualify for loss-leader status as they should be paying you to take it away and throw it in a virtual skip.

some things never really got the loss-leader treatment, of course. if you didn’t already have the duffy album, you weren’t about to get that cheap. or the coldplay album. or, um, the ocean colour scene album. not sure about that one. I did manage to pick a couple of things of my christmas wishlist at the 3 pound price tag, but, curiously, the 4:13 dream album by the cure remained steadfastly at a think twice price. and amazon don’t even have the late of the pier album so I snuck over to 7 digital for that one and the fabulous m83 saturdays = youth album at a knock-down price.

all-in-all if you were stuck for something to do between christmas and new year and happened to be sat at your computer, there were some fine savings to be had but they’re mostly gone now and mp3 downloads will undoubtedly match or approach regular cd prices on amazon from now on so there’ll be less chance of that girls aloud album finding its way into my library. well, the next one, anyway.

working backwards for christmas

December 23, 2008

if I’m ever asked how I did something, I can never remember. I mean, specifically to techniques used in photo processing, not like how did I end up with a face like that, etc.

I do have a little set of preferences that I’ve built up over the last 10 years or so which are just photoshop basics, like masking, blending and tweaking shadows and highlights, which I tend to use to some degree or other in everything I do. but not usually the same way twice. the post-processing environment is such a huge beast that if I ever understood or had even fiddled with all of it I would probably implode or something. no, I usually do a couple of simple things and move on.

having said that, of course, I can spend about 7 hours blending 2 layers in a way that I didn’t do it yesterday. it depends entirely in the photo I’m working with and my short-term memory being a bit vague and whether I actually wrote down what I did last time. which I didn’t.

so when I do get a specific request of ‘how did you do that’, it’s a question of how long ago I did it, and whether I can work it out by going backwards. to make it a little bit easier, I never flatten photoshop files, which means, of course, that I’ve got about 27 high dynamic range renditions of cathedral ceilings at about 1gb a piece that are really useful as reference items, but really terrible as disk space savers. but, if I do go back to an old photoshop file and look into the layers, I can often work out what I did. meaning, I can work out what I did, like I multiplied layer 3 with layer 2 at 67% opacity and I did something to it that involved a bit if exposure correction and a layer mask but oh dear it looks like I also did some kind of calculation with produced an alpha channel with a pasted into the mix to see what would happen and I’ve forgotten quite what that was. you see, I can work it out up to a point, but…

but back to a request. I’ve been asked if I can’t dissect the shot of a wing I took a while back when landing at Denver airport, which I threw into the post-processing mangle at some point after I got back to the UK and then uploaded to flickr. I think I might be able to work some of it out. the rest I’ll just make up. but we’ll see what comes out…

Finding Storage

December 23, 2008

Sounds like it should be a film with Tom Hanks and an emotionally challenged Tupperware box. It is, in fact, the long-awaited solution to one of our common web problems. Whether you call it filtered searching, directed searching, product finding, trans-navigational learning aid cognitive process map hierarchical cross-sell or something, it’s about trying to find the right product for your business. And we’ve just launched it on sun.com.

The new storage finder is built from the ground up with the intention of enabling customers to find the right products for them, based on their unique requirements. We’ve tried this before, you may have noticed, with mixed results. One of the problems we’ve previously encountered is trying to architect a finding solution that’s based on the interaction model alone, rather than really understanding what is important to our customers and how those key criteria drive the user experience. To avoid repeating those mistakes, for the new storage finder, we took a significant step backwards, to understand the product taxonomy and how it maps to business needs and customer expectations. When reviewing the product data, and testing with business groups and customers, it was clear that what seems like an important attribute of a product or product family is not necessarily what matters to the people who are actually wanting to buy it. Seems obvious, but until you get real people to give you real opinions, then you’re just guessing.

After investing such much effort in evaluating the product data and determining what really turns folk on about storage (it does happen), we were in a much better position to look at the interaction model and the representation of the data on sun.com. I mean, we already knew that driving customers down a one-way street with road signs that only the product marketing team can read is a pretty hopeless exercise, but there was still a lot of decision making and testing to be done around the entry points to the customer journey, the complexity of the options (parabolic vs. optional), and the level of detail required to enable a decision to be made. Oh, and whether the Ajax thing would work.

I won’t bore you with the iterations of prototypes, usability testing, data refining, back-end systems, publishing frameworks and specifications that need to collide gracefully in order to get a project like this out of the door, but, suffice to say, a number of dedicated, hard-working folks from across Sun managed to pull this one out of the bag just in time for Christmas, so enjoy. There’s still a shopping day left, by the way…

We’ve a list of enhancements and future work that we’re already planning, but let us know what you think so that we can involve you in the ongoing development of our finding capability on sun.com

Listening Post: Dananananaykroyd: Pink Sabbath

Things what I writ

smile like you mean it

cracked h4x0rs

the end of JPG

you really should finish that

serendipitous resolve

ihavea Player

eye of the beholder

lost last loss leaders

working backwards for christmas

Finding Storage

Archives

Categories

Things what I writ

Archives

Categories

Tags