September 2009
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“Maurice Short from Brighton is “very annoyed” because he has lost...”
– Complaints over Freeview retune on BBC News.
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Decluttering
For the London Design Festival, Pentagram commissioned 20 designers to “produce an effective poster, celebrating design and the city, in only two colours”. Bibloteque did this by taking the Tube map and removing all but the black and red.
I’ve taken the same method and done something similar with the recently decluttered tube map, just because I thought it would be fairly...
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“my main complaint is that there’s too much walking. We started off by the...”
– Ben Terrett, reviewing The Hidden Park iPhone game.
I hadn’t really thought about it much, but this just shows how much I walk. It was also brought home to me when my parents were in London and we went from the RFH, via Trafalgar Square, to Leicester Square tube, which for me is a short-cut,...
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Still Wireless
A week or so ago Tumblr launched their new Wire feature, which was more like Radar (which old-time (ie six month old) users might remember) than the Popular pages that it replaced. I wrote that I didn’t like it.
Since writing that, I’ve occasionally glanced at the page, but compared to the two or three times a day (at least) that I used to look at it, and the now-gone popular/upcoming...
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“The New York Times recently asked the public for suggestions of things to ban...”
– Hadley Freeman in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on what the US should ban.
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“Earth is a very large place, and no matter where you are located, most of the...”
– Russ Magee, on light-speed lag, in an email to the Django developers group (via)
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“I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend...”
– Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil, quoted in an interview with Salon: Is the Internet melting our brains?
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“21mm is more interesting than 21mp.”
– Matt of 1PT4 (via objectsinspaceandtime)
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Wireless
Going on the reaction to the staff post announcing Tumblr Wire, I’m the only person who took an instant dislike to it. It’s the worst of Radar, back. Where’s Recent / Popular / Upcoming gone? Bah. I demand a refund. (Yes, I know Tumblr’s free. That’s called irony. Or sarcasm. Or something.)
Having spent a little more time with it: I still hate it. That scrolling box...
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“Parts of southeast England, especially parts of Essex, Kent and Sussex, look set...”
– Metcheck.com, making themselves unpopular with people in London.
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Interesting Neighbours
Yesterday was Interesting, in the best sense of the word. I’m not going to post about the talks or upload photos to Flickr because other people are doing that, more quickly and with more skill than I could.
No, I’m going to talk about the sign in the lobby. This isn’t quite as odd as it may seem, since it has turned up on Flickr a fair bit.
The Postal Mechanisation...
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“Why do Star Trek captains have to say the log date themselves, instead of the...”
– Kevin Marks, in a comment on John Scalzi’s Guide to Epic SciFi Design FAILs - Star Trek Edition.
Yes, it’s a terrible pun, but it seemed worth recording.
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Continuous...
These riffs on Linda Stone’s phrase have all been posted to Twitter by people I follow. Since some of them are private, these are presented without attribution.
Continuous Partial Precipitation
Continuous Renal Attrition
Continuous Anal Retention
Continuous Partial Mention
Continuous Complete Distraction
Continuous Partial Irritation
Continuous Partial Tension
Continuous Partial...
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WatchPossibly the nicest introduction to a machine tagging namespace I’ve ever seen; this is lovely.
It also reminds me I need to work out how to convert ra/dec to alt/az for London, but never mind.
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“Music is healing. The best example of that is Michael Jackson, the late great....”
– Speech Debelle, in an interview for Metro: ‘I’m going to win the Mercury Music Prize’ (via)
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Thoughts On Short Location References
Yesterday, I posted Tom Taylor’s pithy comment:
Postcodes are short URLs for space
Tristan Ferne replied on Twitter:
in Japan the phone number is code for physical location and contact link
I’d already started pondering the nation-specific nature of such short identifiers for place. The UK is actually fairly well blessed in this respect: as well as postcodes, there are OS grid...
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“Postcodes are short URLs for space.”
– Tom Taylor, responding to this photo.
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“Now, far be it from me to argue against any kind of full employment program for...”
– Michael Bierut, When Design Gets in the Way in Design Observer. Someone should be asking this of the London rebrand: given the brief, is design really the answer?
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“Sam’s account gives us a better picture of the fire than if we handed him one of...”
– Larry Bunce, in a comment on the Pepy’s Diary entry for Sunday 2 September 1666: the first day of the Great Fire of London, 343 years ago yesterday. (See also: Samuel Pepys on Twitter.)