04.20.08
Posted in ideas at 3:43 pm by coldclimate
TV has lots of good stuff on it, but it has huge amounts of trash too. Virtually everything comes down to the lowest common denominator, which given some of the truely horrific thing syou here people coming out with, is pretty low.
Now, if I made TV, things would be very different, oh yes…
Firstly these giant adverts for Andrew Lloyd Webbers latest production, also known as I’d Do Anything and it’s ilk. A bunch of fairy pretty, fairy talented ladies singing and being set “challenges”, the public then vote or something, and some judges make some comments. Eventually one of them is chosen, and ALW and co go on to have a west end hit with the audience being one third old ladies, old third over excited children and one third horny father stating at the pretty that got voted in (and taking along their children). One giant adverts.
Now if I ran this thing, it would be different. Firstly, they’re have to do everything that actors have to put up with. They’re have to live in shit cheap accommodation, and eat at antisocial hours. They’re have to do several performances with raging hangovers, and paint the set themselves.
And the judges, they’re be history, or rather they would be very different. Gone would be that bloke form Torchwood, Denise van Whatsit and the bloke who play Dame Edna. In their place would be the top selection of Jeromy Clarkson (the voice of reason for such matters), Clare Balding from the racing, John McCririck and in place of lloyd webber i’d have Jack Dee. That would just about sort it. Oh - and the telephone voting would be gone, you’d only be allowed to vote if you were a registered voter for the General Elections (and you’d have to go to go to a polling station just like the GE too). Much better.
Next up - Shipwrecked. 40 teenagers on an island, full of booze and makeup and being set “tasks” and having to “survive on their own” etc etc. More fake that Jordons tits or the super cheap choclate you get in Christmas decorations.
My Shipwrecked, that would be another matter. I’d load up the place with the 40 brats, all excited that they get to become stars on TV etc etc, and I’d ditch it at sea half a mile off the island. When they swam ashore they’d find some tarpaulins, boxes of matches, machettes, rope and maybe their first night’s meal. Then we’d watch them all from a distance through long lenses as they waited for rescue and had to survive. Lord of the Flies all over again. Chloe, Harry and Antwon wouldn’t have a clue what had hit them, it would be ace.
Big Brother - so many improvements could be made. Every little turd who goes on it now wants to launch their career, become a super star, be famous etc etc etc, but when questioned they will say it’s all about expressing themselves, an interesting experiment in learning to live with others etc etc etc. blah blah blah.
So, my big brother, they’d all troup into the house, and get locked in. Every week one would be removed at random, and when they walked out of the door expecting baying crowds and Devina meeting them there would be… fuck all! No cameras would have been watching them, no crowds following them on telly, nothing. As the door closed behind them there’s be a taxi to the nearest tube stop and a cheque for the minimum wage for 8 hours every day they were in there. They’d had an interesting experiment, learned a lot about themsleves, and we’d had plenty of time to watch something worth while.
I could go on, but I guess you get the idea. Now vote for me.
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04.03.08
Posted in ideas at 5:08 pm by coldclimate
I’m having a slow day, lacking motivation or energy, and my eyelids feel heavy, so the only answer so coffee. Black Crack in liquid form, possibly only trumped by redbul rip offs from Tescos in potency.
As I made the coffee I notice quite how perfect the small milk containers all. These teeny tiny pots (they must have a name), fit into the palm of your hand and hold a tablespoon full of milk, you’ve probably used them a hundred times and never looked. I certainly hadn’t. They are masterpieces of design.
The plastic body must be made out of a piece of thin plastic that starts life as an oddly shaped circle (a circle with a child circle tagged on the side I guess), probably about the size of a 2p coin. This is then extruded to form incredibly thin walls, which despite being thin enough to see the shadow of your finger inside, hold in the pressure of me squeezing the little pot in an ill-advised mid-office experiment.
The walls are also ridged, a tiny detail but which means the pots and so much more easily gripped. They don’t rotate in your fingers, and if they are cold and have condensation on (which they will because you wave them above our cup of hot water) they remain very grippable. I doubt the fins add enough surface area to radiate heat more easily, but it’s not impossible.
Where the body of the pot joining the tab which you will hold to open it, it flairs out, forming a teeny tiny spout. This makes pouring far more easy, and means that the shape of the foil lid can’t be circular but instead has a natural “tab”. This means that you automatically grab the tab to open it, and pour it using the spout, completely without noticing .
The foil lid is equally clever. To start with it’s not foil, it’s very thin plastic. Thus it won’t degrade like foil, or be as easily dented or damaged. It is however silver coloured on the underside, to remind you of the foil that was and convey a sense of normality. It’s glued to the top (I think), thought it might have been sealed in place with a quick blast of heat to melt it to the plastic pot. It remains however very easy to pull off, and another benefit of not being foil - it doesn’t tear and splinter like metal yoghurt port lids. The tip of the lid which protrudes out of the circular top and onto the tab of the tub is however not glued down, in fact it’s curving very slightly up because of the tension. You can’t help but use this bit to open it. Amazing!
So this little pot of milk has so clearly been designed (and redesigned) so as to be instantly usable. The amount of airline pots I’ve struggled to get into (and ended up stabbing at ineffectually with the plastic knife) is unreal, but with a few simple changed, this pot just works.
If only software was the same, so intuitive.
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Posted in ideas, technology at 2:15 pm by coldclimate
So today another good idea got made into something. With everything ever for sale being available on the web, the price wars were always going to happen, and in some ways we’ve moved past them (I’ll buy from Amazon because it’s easy even if Jeff’s Mega Book World is a pound cheaper). Once you go beyond the rock bottom prices, the more interesting things include sales, and offers. I linked to a paper which found bargins on Amazon a while ago and today (via the magic of Twitter’s public timeline) I found Buy it Later, a Firefox plugin which lets you maintain a hotlist of stuff you’re interested in, and then messages you (emails or tweets) when they drop in price, or come back into stock.
I might sign up. I should sign up. I should get out of the habbit of buying books one at a time as I hear abuot them, and wang them all on a list like this instead.
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03.21.08
Posted in ideas at 10:29 pm by coldclimate
I spent a lot of time (at the moment) thinking about how I think, and how I work, and how I can lear to think and work more efficiently. I really liked the advice on this list, called appropriately, how to think.
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02.15.08
Posted in business, ideas at 5:20 pm by coldclimate
If you’re having trouble fitting the diagram onto a page, or to not let Visio mess up your alignments, then the solution you’re trying to design is too complex.
Paraphrased: If it wouldn’t fit on the back of a fag packet, you shouldn’t even think about it.
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02.06.08
Posted in ideas, randomosity at 6:09 pm by coldclimate
From my minds eye
High in the sky
I see a house
I knew so well
And where I will
Trend never again
I’m sorry
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12.06.07
Posted in ideas, music at 11:58 am by coldclimate
I’m a big fan of last.fm, party because I’m a data whore (it must be useful for something! Must keep all of it!) , and mostly because I can use it to draw pretty pictures. Last.fm will recommend other music to you based on the theorythat if you like Song X, and A.N.Other (and crowd) like Song X and also Song Y, you might well like Song Y. Mostly it hold true, though it can be self re-inforcing, because you listen to what it recommends, and because so many people do, it keeps recommending that combo.
Pandora is different. Each track on Pandora has been “graded” in over 40 catagories by a musical expoer, thus creating a musical genome for that track. It can then create you a custom radio station based on a track you give it. Eg. You liked Song A, and it’s drum heavy and really long and has a pixel female vocal, and so do Songs B, C and D.
I have no idea how, and no time to, start comparing the data that the two systems hold about artists relationships. I would expext that the two are roughly in sync, with people listening to lots of things that sound sort of simalar. I like The Decemberists and The Shins, and they certainly play the same sort of festivals, and sound a bit simalar, so I imagine most people who like one probably quite like the other. The interesting data would be where two tracks, or artists, are completely different, but often listened to by the same people. Do Leonard Cohen fans listen to lots of Lisa Lashes hardcore mixes? Do fans of The Boredoms love a bit of Lancashire folk music
Somebody else harvest the data and show me the answers, I’ve just not the bandwidth!
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10.23.07
Posted in ideas, music at 8:13 pm by coldclimate
Being away from my beloved ibook and synology cube for a few weeks, I have imported my entire music collecdtion into windows media player on a portal harddrive. I’d like a nice way to visualise the information about how many tracks by each artist I have.
WMP has one interesting feature (and many many wank ones), but listing songs by artist means that you get a nice easy to read list which says how many songs you have by a given artist. This throws up some interesting thigns about both my music collection and my mp3 tags.
Firstly - I have a shed load of tagging to do. 2166 songs by “unknown”
Secondly - mp3 tagging needs to find a new mechanism. ID3 tags don’t give you the flexibility needed, because I have 593 songs with Various as the artist. If you could “tag” mp3s with multiple artists, you could create album “clouds” and show collaborations in neater ways than “various” or the even worse “him, and such and such, and her” artist, which is normally followed by “Him and her” etc etc.
270 songs are labelled as “John Peel” whom has never recorded a song in his life as far as I know. ONly a certain number of these can be recordings of his radio program.
I have 168 tracks by Moby, whom I love dearly. I have 168 tracks by The Fall, who I occationally lisen to. This would seem unusually high.
I have 136 Eminem tracks. This is either a)wrong (please god) or b)because I nabbed someboddies entire music collection years ago when I had a harddrive crash and I’ve not edited them out (NB: WMP hangs when you try to delete tracks in this view, which is very annoying).
I have 114 A Guy Called Gerald tracks, which must e virtually his entire output thats avalable on CD. I own 28 Gun Bad Boy (a real copy! real!)
I have 101 songs by both Radiohead and Johny Cash. I don’t thing wither of them would mind the company they are keeping.
I have as many Cat Power tracks as Rolling Stones. I can’t explain this at all. I’ve loved the stones all of my life, and I only heard of Cat Power 2 years ago (maximum)
I have more Linkin Park songs that Massive Attack. This is wrong on many levels, though Metiora is still actually pretty good.
I have 80 tracks by blues legend John Mayall. I also have 80 audio tracks by insparational speaker Tony Robbins. I don’t think Mr Mayall would approve.
I have 72 tracks by Coldplay and only 68 by the Pixies.
I have one more track (64) by DJ Yoda who was very dissapointing live, than I do by Chris Murray, whom I would kill to see live.
I have only 56 Portishead tracks. I would have trought I had more, but aparently not.
I have 51 tracks who claim to be recorded by “Original Soundtrack”. More tagging required.
I have 44 tracks by The Decemberists, Green Day and Xen Cuts (poor tagging again!). I have 45 podcasts from radio4. I suspect The Decemberists would really like Radio4.
I have 40 tracks by Method Man. These can all be deleted.
I have 39 tracks by Bjork and Sufjan Stevens, they make for good company in my book, and a collaboration album would be great.
I have as many 10cc tracks, whom I have grown up listening to for many years, as I do tracks by The Bottle Rockets, whom I have only ever seen once, and never run across again.
32 tracks, I wonder what ever happened to My Virtiol, India Arie and who are Sevendust???
I have only 22 tracks by DJ Format and BT, both of whom I thing are geniuses (NB:should the word Genii exist. I believe so)
I have as many tracks by JOhn Egdell as I do The Fugees, Gorse, Ian Dury, Tracy Chapman and Teenage Fanclub. odd.
14 and 12 tracks seem to be the biggest groups. This would seem odd as both a little too large for a single album, and not quite enough for 2.
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09.26.07
Posted in ideas, randomosity at 10:09 pm by coldclimate
I was about to write a huge ranting post about shit awful design of modern day products after my evening of fighting with a flimsy and knackered dishwasher, but instead here is a link to a website about living in domed houses. They look wonderful, truly wonderful.
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08.31.07
Posted in business, ideas, technology at 9:42 am by coldclimate
I’m reading a really interesting article from changeThis and the following paragraph struck a note.
“Ever wonder why some solutions lack inspiration, imagination, and originality? It’s because we don’t think as deeply or as broadly as we must to solve the problem. We tell ourselves the optimal solution is a luxury. We throw some resources at the problem and move on. Or tweak a previous solution and fit it to the current situation. We favor implementation over incubation. Then we wonder why the reaction to our idea is ho-hum.”
Is this why big IT firms who rely on reuse (not good code reuse - total wholesale reuse of documentation, design, code, testing methods and financial agreements) end up building semi-customised systems where they have to bodge togehter a final solution that is not fit for purpose, elegent or (by the end) cheap? I suspect so.
Another interesting point it makes is “We’ll take whatever seems to meet the bare minimum requirement to achieve the goal. Then we stop looking for the best way to solve the problem. Essentially we say: “good enough.” ”
You could have lifted this from a course I was on a few years ago. Descoping, requirements filtering and catogorisation are some of the methods of cutting down the amount you have to do, and if you follow that up with tight deadlines and budgets what you’ll end up with is a solution which is “good enough”. eg. legally it does what you agreed (which is vastly reduced on the inital contract because of some excellent descoping and budget-linked change requests). What you don’t end up with is something which is “good”.
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07.19.07
Posted in ideas, interweb, technology at 2:15 pm by coldclimate
This is a great article about handelling personal names from around the world. It is easy to forget that most people’s names are not Firstname Surname, let alone ChristianName Familyname.
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07.18.07
Posted in food, ideas at 12:25 pm by coldclimate
I think this little article about having an hour in the evening to decompress and shoot the breeze (a horrible American phrase which I’ve always liked because it sounds like sitting outside in the summer and chatting until it goes cold) is spot on. We rush our food, we rush our drinking, and all so we can watch TV and numb our minds.
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07.12.07
Posted in business, ideas, interweb at 12:44 pm by coldclimate
Costco is not a big thing in the UK (in fact, it’s unheard of I imagine) but I think theres lots of good stuff to be learned from How Costco Became The Anti_Walmart and the summery 5 business lessons from Costco over on Signal V’s Noise is a nice quicky read.
Its interesting to read it after having just finished Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent, to see looking after staff as being a big thing. Companies are all too quick to shit on staff, and in the end, it’s completely counter productive.
This passage “But not everyone is happy with Costco’s business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco’s customers but to its workers as well.” seems to say it all about modern businesses. They serve the shareholder, not the customer or the employee. In Bo Burlinghams book Small Giants there was a real feeling that as a cpmpany grows its focus changes from those who worked there and the people they sold to, to those who own the company via shares. I wonder if Costco might be different. It certainly seems to have a sense of fun about how it approaches business.
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06.21.07
Posted in ideas at 8:31 pm by coldclimate
Having watched Grand Designs (thanks to lovefilm - my first batch arrived today) - I ran across Emmaus which seems to be doing some wonderful work. I love the photos too - they are master pieces.
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06.18.07
Posted in ideas, nyc at 3:29 pm by coldclimate
Always refreshing to hear an American with the exact oposite views to most - the freakonomics blog points out that the low prices for fuel in the US are responcible for many bad things.
Whilst I was in NYC there was outrage that fuel had hit $3 a gallon (£1.50 for 5 litres) and people were furious. The girl and I were laughing at the poor deluded fools, paying nearly £ a litre. There was also a brilliant advert for an SUV (fat bastard 4×4) that proud claimed “Nearly 25 miles per gallon”. Fuck me kids - 25! I think lawnmovers get that in the uk.
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05.17.07
Posted in ideas at 8:27 pm by coldclimate
the song is rubbish, but I love…
* Tube mice
* cornish pasties
* burnt lasagne
* ginger
* cold beds
* tonic water
* bugger 5 of my list are food
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05.10.07
Posted in ideas at 12:38 pm by coldclimate
Joel on software has a brilliant article about how you pay people affects how they work and how they are motivated. Brilliant stuff, well worth reading. You have to get over the hump of “if I pay you for something that will make you do it better”, but once you do, its an excellent primer on management. It ties nicely with Freakonomics too.
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04.18.07
Posted in ideas at 9:04 pm by coldclimate
…theres a big bunch of right wing militant christian neocons about.
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03.30.07
Posted in ideas, interweb at 6:14 pm by coldclimate
I love the idea of Bathroom Bookshelf partyly because it introduced me to this. Animated folk-poptasticness.
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03.06.07
Posted in ideas, interweb, technology at 2:40 pm by coldclimate
What a good idea this is
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