Not So Far Ahead...

Whilst the Indy looks ahead ten years, French website Nowhereelse.fr points us towards the very near future with these clips of what some take to be a glimpse of the forthcoming Apple tablet device (iSlate, iGuide are amongst the names mooted) which is rumoured to be associated with a 'big' media event in late January.
Not sure about this though - something about it is iffy (or a few things are iffy) - not sure I can put my finger on it exactly. But it's a very nice fake nonetheless if it is indeed a fake.

The Indy Looks Ahead. 10 Years Ahead.

UK newspaper, The Independent, stumbles slightly tackily into the next decade with a twee but nonetheless interesting vision of how far things will have changed for us all by 2020...
(Part 2 tomorrow apparently).

What A Fanbloodytastic Day

Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be enough good news around at Christmastimes... Don’t know why - (maybe it's because we tend to try and happy ourselves up for the occasion and the world doesn't stand a chance of living up to that), but there just doesn’t. And that’s broadly been so this year too - ongoing whitewashy shambles of an Iraq inquiry, total cop-out and big finger to the planet from Copenhagen - but at least today has flagged up two stories that have really genuinely made me incredibly happy.

The first is pretty obvious - Rage Against The Machine taking the Xmas number 1 slot from some vanilla X-Factor prettyboy singing some crappy banality at the order of his master.
Thank Fuck, quite frankly. Brilliant news.
The X-Factor may be enjoyed by millions but that doesn’t make it good of course (and it isn't good - it's fucking evil) - and contrary to the bafflingly poor thinking of some absurdly biased BBC newsreader/interviewers over the past days, it does NOT set up winners in long and glittering and important careers; so far they’ve been largely shortlived. For which one can only be thankful given the tripe, pap and worthless formulaic shite they put out. The BBC people actually were pretty annoying - completely glossing over the Rage profits going to homeless charity Shelter, having been corrected on a point about making money from the single, and also accusing the song of not being about Christmas.... er, like the X-Factor song then... Muppets.

Anyway - they did it. WE did it. Brilliant. It’s not a cynical act (as described by the cynical Simon Cowell in an act of breathtaking cynicism even by his own magnificent standards) - it’s a genuine authentic act of championing authenticity over cynicism. And I hope it’s only the beginning.

I also hope it’s only the beginning for more coming out and acceptance of gay sports stars following the announcement by the Welsh rugby star - Cardiff Blues player and the most capped player for Wales and former British and Irish Lions captain, Gareth Thomas. Sport can be a macho and misogynistic animal, and of course homophobic too. Yet statistically, it’s blindingly obvious that there should be quite a few gay sportsmen out there - who knows, maybe great ones - great role models. And that one of them has had the guts to come out is great news...
"It has been really tough for me," he told the papers, "hiding who I really am, and I don't want it to be like that for the next young person who wants to play rugby, or some frightened young kid. I don't know if my life is going to be easier because I'm out, but if it helps someone else, if it makes one young lad pick up the phone to Childline, then it will have been worth it."

Let’s hope this might just be a moment of genuine shift like the Rage Xmas number 1. Today has definitely been a good day. Hopefully the reasons why it’s been a great day can lead to more great days to come.
Good on you Gareth Thomas, good on you Rage Against the machine - and good on you all who bought the single :-)

REFERENCES:
Rage Against The Machine article
Gareth Thomas article

Stuck On Crimbo Gifts? Try Riders For Health

The festive period is just around the corner, and this year you can help save lives in Africa with Riders for Health, the official charity of MotoGP, by sending one of their Christmas gifts to a friend or relative.

With a Christmas gift you can help Riders for Health use reliable motorcycles to get health workers in Africa on the road, so they can deliver regular, lifesaving health care to even the most isolated villages.

Riders for Health also have a catalogue of virtual gifts that you can send this Christmas. By choosing to send a gift donation you can help provide a health worker with protective clothing so that they can ride their motorcycle safely, or a set of tools so they can carry out the daily maintenance which will mean their motorcycle never breaks down and they will never miss an appointment.

Just £10 could provide two weeks fuel for a health worker, which will let them cover 300km and provide health care to hundreds of families. £55 could provide a day’s training in safe riding and maintenance for a health worker, so they can deliver health services on a regular basis to even the most remote communities.

Each gift comes with a card illustrating your purchase and explaining how it is helping to save lives. You will also receive a Riders Christmas card that you can personalise and send to the recipient. You can find out more at www.riders.org.

You can also support Riders’ work in Africa by ordering Riders for Health Christmas cards on their online shop. Click here to see the range. These cards are a great way of raising awareness of how motorcycles are saving lives in Africa. And, importantly, all the money made from these cards will go directly to support Riders for Health’s work in Africa.

Oh, and congrats Leon Camier

And whilst the cars continue to disappoint, the bikes at least do not...
Which reminds me - congrats - BIG congrats - to Leon Camier on taking the BSB title at the weekend.
Awesome job, kong and well-deserved :-)

The Weather Report, Australia. Orange Alert...

(*Nabbed from The Guardian...)


Australia has been engulfed by dust storms as wild winds sweep millions of tonnes of red dust from continent's drought-ravaged interior and dump it on the coast...

Storms of red dust produced a supernaturally orange and glowing sky over much of Australia's east coast as the country experienced a day of freak weather conditions.
At Sydney airport, where visibility was cut to 400 metres, flights were cancelled while several international flights were diverted to Melbourne, where flights were also delayed. Flights were also delayed at Brisbane airport in Queensland.

As dust ravaged the east coast last night, heavy rains lashed Adelaide in the nation's south where streets were flooded.
Then as morning dawned, two tremors shook Melbourne. Later in the day, hail stones as big as cricket balls pelted parts of New South Wales where heavy rainfalls are now expected and flash-flood warnings have been issued.

The Bureau of Meteorology said it was the worst dust storm since the 1940s, with particle pollution up to 10 times worse than the previous record and was predicting another storm would hit in the next day or two.

Vroom Vroom...

I'm setting up my new business at the moment, as I'm currently in the middle of a redundancy process and need to get my head around "Life After Teletext", where I've been for 11 years, busily getting complacent and institutionalised.
Getting a similar job is pretty much out of the question (as in it's both unlikely and to be honest, probably undesirable) so I'm looking at freelancing more than anything - the skills and experience are there; but it's going to take a lot of hard work and persistence too.
There's some interesting projects that I'm aiming to pursue, primarily because they'd be things I'd love to do and would be brilliant if they worked out - but I'm also keeping my feet firmly on the ground and prepping to do my fair share of "grind" work too; the kind of thing of which the best you can say is that it "pays the bills..."

One of the major upsides to what I'm planning is that pretty much everything I can do on my Macs, but there's two things that have sadly meant I need to get Windows up and running...

One is that, as a web designer amongst other things, I really need to ensure that anything I build looks and works fine cross-platform, so I need to check it in PC browsers on a Windows OS. The other is that I bought a special application called "Business in a Box" which is basically an adaptable business and legal document resource. Had I wanted just the English version then there's a Mac one, but as I wanted the English AND Spanish combined edition it's got a bit more complicated, as it's not available for the Mac and requires a PC version that is a bespoke app that allows exports to standard "Office" formats.

So basically I've just had to shell out on the Business in a Box software, plus Office for PC, plus Windows for PC, plus Parallels to run the whole fat lot on top of the Mac OS.

This had better all be bloody worth it!!! It's yet another disappointment to my team too, who've been devastated by the sight of me buying project-planning and accounting software recently. By the way, the best project planning software for Mac is unarguably OmniPlan by the wonderful folks at Omni Group, who also produce OmniGraffle which is pretty much indispensable for things like sitempas and wireframing.

By the way, the new business is called Vroom Media.
There's a main information site here...
And a more detailed portfolio site here at Vroom Vroom...
Plus there's a page on Facebook here...

If you need some nifty design work doing, and you're a nice person and a prompt payer then get in touch ;-)

It Was Forty Years Ago Today...

Yep, forty years ago exactly, that the photos were taken for the iconic and much mimicked album cover of the Beatles' "Abbey Road".

Darth Vader - Luke's Father AND Whistler's Mother

Get yourself over to Worth1000.com to take a look at their challenge to get people to drop Star Wars characters into famous works of art. Some aren't too great, to put it mildly - but some are truly excellent.

Another Good Cause

I can't help it; I'm a sucker for good causes - I've promoted ARK (Animal Rescue Kerala) on here before, and now it's time for another.
Whilst the current good cause in my head is raising money to have Andy Coulson's head on a spike at the Tower of London, there is a genuinely useful one that I'd like to point you at; Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies & Working Dogs Centre - a rescue centre that really needs some funding help right now.
If you can spare a bit or can set up a monthly donation, you'd be doing something extremely useful.

Hopefully we can return to Andy Coulson's head on a spike some other time.... ;-)

W4 5TS :: View From The Deckchair

Managed to get away from the desk early this afternoon for a bit of a chill outside. (Though nothing "chilling" about it at all technically...)
Hot, bright and peaceful by the lake.
The tubes will be hell on toast though...

Cats Outsmart Scientists By Pretending To Be Thick

This piece in the Guardian, reporting on a scientific “test” that proudly puffs out that cats are actually not that bright, is of course entirely wrong.

That a cat will not co-operate with an insultingly banal examination of its behaviour is not in the least bit surprising. Quite frankly I’d give them some misleading results and have a good old snigger about it if I was a cat. In fact I'd probably have a crap in their lunchboxes on the way out too, just for good measure.

Cats know perfectly well about all kinds of behaviour - that of live beings and that of inanimate objects - and they certainly understand cause and effect (mine have learned to open doors, find and conceal escape routes out of the garden, all kinds of smart and sophisticated stuff that requires cause and effect to be understood) and my money here would be on them outsmarting the scientists by refusing to do what’s expected of them and royally fucking with a stupid experiment that they rightly feel to be beneath them.

As one commenter wryly (& correctly) points out; “Dogs have owners, cats have staff”.

Anyway it’s as good an excuse as any to post up Eddie Izzard’s “Pavlov’s Cat” routine...

iPhone App Download Hyperwall

Hyperwall in WWDC 2009, Live from App Store from Imagebakery on Vimeo.

Yes, it's another utterly unfathomable headline...
Geeky but fun - this is a "hyperwall" (apparently) at this week's Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) showcasing the popularity of iPhone apps, with a selection of around 20,000 of them pulsing and sending out ripples across a matrix of twenty 30" Cinema Displays as they are sold in realtime.
Somewhere in the region of 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute incidentally...

Mac Keyboard Skull Shirt

Okay... Weird headline... Sounds a bit random stream of consciousness I know.
Sorry but couldn't think of a better 'short' way of putting it.

Think I may have to treat myself to one of these for the summer...
A funky t-shirt off the Red Bubble website - by a Brighton designer called Roger - featuring a skull made out of two sets of Mac keyboards.
The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac.
To check it out in full, or indeed to go buy it, you should click here...

Okay - since I started writing that, I succumbed to temptation and bought it.
Feel much better for doing so. You probably should too...


Spotted on Cult of Mac

Animals On The Underground

I had one of those random synaptic firings after I posted the piece on TFL's "Departure Boards" web tool - which reminded me of the excellent Animals On The Underground website.

If you've never encountered this, it's a bundle of fun - and something you too can have fun with if you have a copy of the Underground diagram and a pencil...
Basically people have found the shapes of all kinds of animals in the lines of the London Underground as they're displayed on Harry Beck's 'Diagram' - or 'map' as it's lazily referred to.
A few years back there were very few animals - I believe a guy called Paul Middlewick was the initiator of all this, but it seems to have blossomed more recently, and there's a whole page of them here...
And they've also got some cool merchandise, which helps fund IFAW.

Paddington Never Used To Be In Camden....

Cool / weird trick of the day...

Click on this link to go to Google Maps, or alternatively try putting '54 Great Russell St, Camden Town' into the Google Maps page...

Then click on "Street View".

Street View, it would appear, is not only an intrusion into privacy but also some kind of portal into an alternate universe.

Trust In The You Of Now

I've been working on the music again. Sadly not prepped enough to get on with the actual *proper* Smallcreep work, but still just fitting in sessions to better acquaint myself with Logic 8.
And today that's resulted in another piece that I'm happy enough to put out for general consumption. It's a seven minute piano improvisation (with just a couple of overdubs of pre-delayed note washes to fill it out) that's just very very peaceful; very typical of my improv work really; recorded in almost total darkness, just me playing against the silence - and probably something that might appeal to anyone who likes folks such as Lyle Mays, Keith Jarrett or Mark Hollis. As with the previous tune it's been given a name derived from the superb Brian Eno / Phil Schmidt tool "Oblique Strategies", which I've had a history of using on many projects - from design to music to writing.

The piece is called "trust in the you of now" and you can download it here...

Enjoy.

Wooshy-Wooshy-Woo

What is it with pandas? Why are they so unfeasibly adorable? Why do we love them so much, when they seem to be genetically predisposed to their own utter oblivion? (Pandas are all impotent, and they lie on their backs 19 hours a day only to get up, eat bamboo that they can't actually digest, have a fag and go back to sleep... Fact...)
Maybe it's because I was given one on the day I was born - not a real one you understand, that would be absurd even in my family circles - but, because I had one from the start that saw me through my childhood (and even today is stowed away somewhere in a cupboard) that I have a peculiar emotional attachment to the fluffsters and sets of photos like these reduce me to being able to say little other than "Awwwwwwww" for stupid amounts of time. I'm a grown-up for christ's sake...

There was a time when their precarious position in the equation of survival/extinction was symbolic in a very singular way of man's relationship with nature. Sadly now there are hundreds of other species lining up to be the poster-boys of mass extinction. Not only have we largely failed those, like the panda, that needed the most obvious help - but we've managed to needlessly endanger thousands more. Idiots.

May The 4th Be With You

If you didn't know, today is Star Wars Day...

H2G2=10

h2g2 is ten years old...
To go see it and to find out more about Life, The Universe, and Everything, click here - or to find out more about the late great Douglas Adams click here...