things what I writ

amen to that

February 8, 2008

couldn’t think of a better title although I’ve had 3 weeks to come up with something so it seems appropriate that actually someone else should provide the inspiration when I can’t quite put my finger on it thanks. my dad died.

everything was carefully crafted in the end and none such a production would have done finer gathered in the woodlands to say goodbye just as was planned as there was a long painful time to plan it doesn’t take you slowly. cancer. there was a peculiar grace in which the last breaths of life came from his body and he slept painlessly for the first time in many months and that weight of life lifted from his shoulders just a strange soft shuddering in his veins which I had never seen before shall never see again we just said goodbye. I quietly delivered the last messages I had carried through corridors upon corridors just as the light was fading but barely spoken so that I don’t know that I even heard myself speak and then we were gone just as was he.

there’s no joke in the last paragraph

Where Designers Go

February 6, 2008

As Jen McGinn relates, there’s something going on at the Santa Clara campus, at least, there was, for the last couple of days. I know this, because everyone I work with has disappeared, including my management chain and at least 5 other people I was thinking about working with (well, I say working with, I mean checking their Facebook status). It was the annual Design Summit at Sun and there was a healthy focus on our online presence and a key note from Curtis. I believe there’s another summit going on somewhere, so it’s all pretty summitastic right now.

I’m not there, however, so I’ll miss out on those conversations about design tools, publishing processes, community engagement, calls-to-action, component sets (“no, we use this one, it’s a bit like your one, but it’s not the same, even if it looks like an application, which its not, its a web venue, even if it does do kind of application-like things, yes I know its a thin line”), and suchlike. I find those conversations are usually the most enlightening few hours you can have with people gathered together in a room for once a year. You might even get to see what some people look like, which is often enlightening in its own way (“your org chart picture must be really old” etc.), which, in itself, is a design consideration I agonize for hours over every morning.

I’m hoping Marilyn and Chris come back all enthused with some tangental web design direction and exciting feedback, but there’s always a danger that they’ll simply come back saying “they’re trying to do exactly what we’re trying to do” or something. Perhaps they’ll have seen this, and just decide we should all lie down in a dark room for a while.

Listening Post: Aimee Mann: Goodbye Caroline

jazz mangle

February 5, 2008

following a a referral by company girl to a referral by rolling stone that I came across while browsing a feed in google reader that I was alerted to by the gadget I was looking at in igoogle that is the aggregation of anything I look at these days I signed up to musicovery and let it loose in a kind of ‘slightly positive and quite calm’ kind of way. result: jazz!

now, if you’re just past 40 you probably have some internal switch which goes off inside you. that’s the jazz! switch. I think I’m supposed to get a hankering for art blakey and stan getz all of a sudden, but christ on a bike if it’s not just impossible to know where to start, considering that everything ever recorded ever is probably no more than a reasonably carefully crafted search away. having just ordered up a couple of tickets for supergrass at the uea and holy f**k at the arts centre, I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for too much chin stroking, even if it’s up tempo kid ory or something and god forbid I end up in the back alley of easy swing or suchlike with kenny g robbing me of all my gibbering faculties with his saxophone.

so this is where musicovery comes in. without any warning, it’s recommending I listen to lou donaldson’s ode to billie joe and artie shaw’s moonglow, and they’re just about perfect. I can see from the slippery slidy and slighty odd flash interface that I’ve got a good helping of jelly roll morton coming later but I’ll make do with peter tosh and lalo schifrin until then. and when was the last time you listened to the alan parsons project anyway? even if I change my mood everso slightly to, um, DARK, you get a healthy dose of sarah vaughn, for which I’ll probably need a large gin and tonic in a minute. you only slip out of the jazz! boundaries when your mood is more, well, DARK + CALM, but I did get ornette coleman’s all my life and billie holiday’s gloomy sunday squeezed in there, but by that time I was just lying on the floor with all the lights off murmuring about funerals.

I fiddled about with the mood selector long enough to find the point where your mood approaches null. it was all radiohead.

Social Share and Subscribe Shortcuts

January 18, 2008

I’m sure, as usual, I’m way behind the curve here, if way behind the curve is a valid expression for being slow on the uptake, but I’ve just found the useful social bookmarking widget button things at addthis.com. I’ve opted into our beautifully crafted Sun template on this blog (which you probably don’t see anyway, because you’re using a feed reader), and out of hacking roller templates and html, so I’ve not added them here, but I have added them here.

I had, in a previous bout of template shenanigans, tried to add all the delicious, digg, facebook, etc. links in my permalink and day entries and that worked fine, as long as nothing changed and I didn’t need to add any other web services. But, of course, I do. So when I spotted the addthis link on Martin’s blog, I figured I would get me own. I expect it’ll work perfectly for six months, like Natuba did, and then they’ll try to monetize the service and turn it into some cracked up social information troll device selling wallpapers, but, for now, it does what it does, which is takes all the hard work out of keeping track of all the bookmarking, sharing and feed/subscription services out there. Not that anyone will actually share or bookmark anything where I’ve used it, but that never stopped me spending hours on top-aligning an RSS icon for the same purpose.

Listening Post: Doves: Sky Starts Falling

House of Flying Blades

January 17, 2008

I kind of like this video. I mean, I probably should like it by default or something, but I actually like this one. I particularly like how happy everyone is and how sunny it is. As I look out of the window on a drab January day in the east of England, watching someone put bottles into a wheelie bin, watching this video instead is a much better option. As well as everyone in it being sickeningly healthy and pretty much oozing vitamin supplements, I’m always happy to see those shots where you pull back from a scene as far as you think is possible until the disappearing frames turn into dots on a whiteboard and you overlap into an office scene where people are pointing earnestly at things and you continue to zoom back, right out the window, where you see something relevant on the roof or something and you zoom back, a bit like that movie that zooms into the earth’s core and back to space again, right back, until the earth is a dot on the screen and it morphs into a dot at the end of a sentence that is so rammed with clarity your eyes hurt.

You know what I mean. The best bit, however, is the house of flying blade servers (about a minute in). I used to occasionally go down to the server room in Bagshot to reboot the remote access modem pool, but it was all pretty static. I don’t know how any sysadmin survives in this place though. These guys in yellow shirts must be some kind of ninja sysadmins, or watch the Matrix too much and are able to dodge flying hardware or something.

Listening Post: 808 State: Magical Dream

recursive links for 2008-01-16

January 16, 2008

always happy to be part of a social networking trend just as its gone out of favour with those who started doing it months ago, I thought I’d do a very occasional series of links that caught my eye, even before they were links.

recursive links for 2008-01-16
“always happy to be part of a social networking trend just as its gone out of favour with those who started doing it months ago, I thought I’d do a very occasional series of links that caught my eye, even before they were links.”

comment 1
amusing comment from the blog owner regarding his obvious lack of real work to do.

comment 2
a barbed retort from the same blog owner basically telling himself to get on with some work instead of trying to be so clever

etc.

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