crashing down to google earth

March 7, 2008

whew. thank goodness I removed that google pleb geronimator. now I can get on with stuff. just check to see if the computer comes on again this morning aaand…yes, ok. looks good. I realized I haven’t virus checked since 1974, so I do that and everything’s ok. ooh. might just quickly geotag that photo of half a range rover outside a medieval town house. lets get google earth running.

hmm. its a bit slow. um, I’ll just wait a couple of seconds to see if it wakes up a bit. ooh. that’s not supposed to happen, why’s my screen gone blank? oh, hang on, its back again. no, hang on, its gone, oh, no, there it is. oh

as the smashing pumpkins suddenly begin stuttering over the last line of 1979 and the fan goes bonkers I realize that not all is well in just-as-I-thought-it-was-alright computerland and in an unceremonious instant, everything stops and there is that half a second in between you hoping it hasn’t rebooted and the boot screen appearing where you hope it hasn’t just rebooted itself and taken all your InDesign docs with it but of course it has.

yes yes I know its probably not actually google web accellerator or google earth themselves that are forcing my hair from my skull in fist-sized clumps as I try and just get a computer to keep running but its them that are the big boys pushing, on threat of massive chinese burns, the little boys out in front of me to string a string across the 2 lamp posts I’m about to electronically cycle through. can you say uninstall?

very frinteresting

March 4, 2008

as I wallow in the quagmire of superfunextramentalwall posts which are mainly videos of cats falling off bird cages but without harry hill in the background and a million invitations to install applications that tell me how many people think I’m hot when it doesn’t take much for me to know that I’m clearly not, occasionally there is something more interesting to do instead when you are supposed to be doing a presentation on data architecture (me) resolving aesthetic analysis differences from art brains and squashing them into hardbacks (neil) seemingly everything else (christophe). right now that would be the intellectual online its a knockout that is frints which as any self-respecting (contradiction) editor/subeditor will know is the sublime art of pun mashup entities as mirth hooks to articles which probably are not as exciting as the ingeniously crafted teaser would have you believe unless of course its peppered liberally with frint seasoning throughout..

many are the flavours of frints that proposally intricate their way unto the brainways of our daily lives suffice that we all know one when we see one but few few of us can write one when we need one which isn’t often if you’re preparing a design specification for a synchronized feedback system whereupon twould be rather unseemly and postly pointless but were you to be trying to make a story re: miserable pork prices seem that much more tasty then a descent into the world of wordcraft is entirely apropos such that the plight of suffolk farmers at the hands of the insatiable profits of Tesco might lead thusly: Pork Snatching. not even a very good example but that’s because I’m not very good at it but there are lots of bored editors out there who are very good at it and who happen to have all coagulated into the facebook group frints. thus spake latest choice frintmongers in various categories:

Drive-in Horror: Lexus Chainsaw Massacre
Slightly Disappointing Achievements: Nobel Peas Prize
Bored Games: Shrug Ha’penny
Household Names: Forrest Wickerchair

actually that last one was mine. its all very british empirical in nature. radio 4 is clearly playing at all times.

flickr emptiness

March 3, 2008

its the old mother hubbard of this modern age and now my boneless social dog is tripping out the kitchen door and closing the door behind him. all my friends I’ve never met are getting their coats and slinking off to somewhere more interesting instead where there’s fluffy cats and african landscapes and close-ups of moist roses.

this morning I went to the flickr cupboard and the cupboard was bare, not a single post-processed gem of a disused toilet or a murder of emos gathered outside the forum or a perspective-shifted alignment of the steps up to a car park or even a car park. not since june 2005 has there not been something straining to get itself published to the sound of one hand clapping and an uncomfortable silence at the community bar. there is always a stock of recently cropped aligned layered filtered adjusted shifted merged actioned photos gathered neatly filtered by modified date in the adobe bridge folder called’ flickr’. even if there isn’t, there’s 200 subfolders of a folder called ‘sony w1’ each with 200 photos in there that are just dying to be fiddled about with in an ironic post-film post-apocalypse post-lomo post-this-letter-for-me kind of way.

but not today. I’ve posted everything. everything I haven’t posted isn’t worth posting. I haven’t taken any pictures recently that aren’t david bowie’s head on my shoulders or flowers at funerals. it’s flickr emptiness. whaaaaa.

actually, I’ve been too busy to go out and take pictures. I’ve been spending all my time blogging developing product category design frameworks and even though the sun is shining right through the office window and onto my monitor so that I can’t even read what I’m typing which explains a lot I can’t get out to make the best of it. I’ll go out tomorrow. take a picture of my feet or something. I’ll probably run out of anything to say before then at which point I’ll be completely social media bereft. mind you, there’ll alway be someone cycling past on the pavement to give me something to blart about. oi! you! get on the road! you’ve got a whole bloody cycle lane!

dead cars

February 22, 2008

I now have 2 parked on the road outside. 1 requires a cam belt so I’m pushing it into a wheelie bin and hoping they recycle it and the other, which doesn’t belong to me, was trying to get me to the office in camberley today and failed to overtake a p reg ford escort on the A11 as an orange warning light the shape of a car with an enormous spanner on it lit up which must have like a 1000 watt led behind it because at that point all the 13 year old turbo power disappeared and the man in the 325 behind me had to wait for 2 miles as me and the ford escort fronted each other out on the dual carriageway waiting for a mild downward incline to get us to 60 miles an hour so that one of us could either undertake or overtake the other one.

in the end, the ford escort won by a narrow undertake and I crawled round a roundabout outside thetford and then drove back home where I sit typing this before I pick up the phone to talk to the garage about how much its going to cost me to repair 2 cars that nobody wants.

Get Fed

February 20, 2008

Its sometimes the small additions to a web design framework that make a difference. Well, to me they do. As I went through the weekly process of trying out the latest feed readers the other day, just to say that I’d tried out the latest feed readers and decided to stick with google reader after all, again, I took some time to revisit the feeds & subscriptions (yes, they’re the same thing, but it depends who you talk to) that are available across sun.com, blogs.sun.com, developer, bigadmin, java.net and all those lovely places we call home.

Its thanks to folks like Lou and others that we’ve done such a good job of getting our subscriptions embedded all over our web venues – and there are a ton of them to choose from now. Sure, there are the occasional dead ends in the subscription paths, but in general, there’s a whole range of rss/atom/xml links out there for you to pick and choose from, whether you’re a java developer, a press analyst, a system administrator, or even all of those things and more. You might even just want to get a regular feed of the blogs here at Sun, notwithstanding the drivel like this that you might have to wade through to get to the NetBeans or Glassfish entries.

The fact that there are so many can be a challenge, however. From a web experience perspective, we want to be as consistent as possible in terms of the presentation of these available feeds and their context, so that when you’re at the place where it’s relevant, its an obvious and trivial exercise to to move from content consumer to content subscriber. Now, obviously, as web designers, we hate it when we spend 6 months on a design framework and then you just go and suck out all the content and read it in an application something akin to notepad on acid, but, if you’re gonna do that, we want to make even that customer experience a good one. We’re so good to you.

Which leads me on to the teeny tiny feed icon. If you snoop around sun.com or our developer site, you might have already noticed it. Its not big, but it is clever. It’s driven by metadata attached to the content, and the drop-down menu of available feeds is built dynamically as the page is rendered, so its always current and context-driven, rather than a ‘global’ subscription list. I mean, we have one of those, but you’re not targeting anyone by including that on every page. Check it out yourself on the top right area next to the social bookmark icons on the developer site or the sun.com download page. Simple, but nice.

By the way, as Andrew and Greg aren’t around at this time of day, I had to work all that technical stuff out by myself, so I’ll go and lie down now…

Listening Post: Beatles: Hello Goodbye

NME boredom

February 20, 2008

while I was at the NME tour in the Least Commended Room at the UEA the other night it occurred to me that I was a bit bored which I thought I might be but ended up going anyway and in a lull between the lulls of lacklustre new music I took some notes on my mobile phone. I mean. I took notes on my mobile phone. I might have well been in a conference call about product categorization and taking down things like “specifications” and “stakeholders” or “communication plans” but no in fact what I was decanting from my half-asleep brain unto a memory stick spake of the following experience:

Cribalikes, jonglers> strokes maximo 25 year cycle

I know what it means but I was so unmoved by the whole event that I can’t be bothered to expand suffice to say that being on jo whileys playlist do not make certain it might worth trouble be but who I you seemed to like it well at least the cribs the rest was rubbish but reminded me of a night in a hall somewhere watching jamie’s brother’s band in 1981 which was quite exciting but of course I hadn’t paid 15 quid or something and I also made a cover version of things keep on switching off no sorry summer days they were the golden dawn teenage alistair crowleyites or maybe just en homage to an ercol dining table nostalgia yes for a decent night out is that too much empty spaces on the dance floor lets have a fight instead nice hair

things what I writ

crashing down to google earth

very frinteresting

flickr emptiness

dead cars

Get Fed

NME boredom

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things what I writ

crashing down to google earth

very frinteresting

flickr emptiness

dead cars

Get Fed

NME boredom

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