Listening to: Thing - Amerie

For my own notes: Use
Quicksilver to look up words

UPDATE: It works really well! The last reason to use the Dashboard has gone

Listening to: Thing - Amerie

Found this over
at Boing Boing:

The Beastie Boys are posting acapella tracks — just the vocals, in other words,
along with BPM info — from their songs and encouraging their fans to make noncommercial
remixes of them. A new track goes live every Friday.

… excellent! Beasty Boys remix goodness! If I’m lucky… Beasty Boys mash ups…
sweet mash ups.

Listening to: What is Sound? - The Blyz

Salon have got a pretty
full on set of photos taken in Iraq…

Listening to: Fix You - Coldplay

Nothing makes a functional spec wizz by faster than a couple of great documentaries:

• Radio
  Anyone
  Radio 1’s Edith Bowman looks at the ways people exploit technology to broadcast
  their voices to the world. From the illegal hijacking of the airwaves in a tower-block
  in East London, to the latest digital technology - podcasting.

• Time
  For Heroes: New Order
  
  Mylo presents the definitive history of one of the most important and influential
  bands of the past 25 years, New Order.

Listening to: Time for Heros: New Order

I have just had the pleasure of sitting down with Rod
Drury to have a chat (mp3)
about AfterMail, his ‘corporate flight recorder’
email product. His team is doing some seriously interesting things with Outlook and
email in general.

Our first podcast, not bad for a first try.

I’ll try to work out how to get RSS enclosures working properly after tomorrow

UPDATE: Hmmm, well 1.8.5 supports enclosures, but it doesn’t render the URL for the
enclosure properly (it has a random ‘~’ character)…

Listening to: BBC Radio 1

Found this over
at Wired… very cool:

The 3-D gaming platform was developed at the University of Southern California’s
School of Cinema-Television, and for now is aimed at re-creating popular schoolyard
games such as red light, green light; dodge ball; and capture the flag.

In Red Light, Green Light, one player assumes the role of the traffic cop, and
calls out stop and go commands that are interpreted using voice-recognition software.
Virtual pedestrians close in from all sides. In a twist worthy of Bladerunner, the
object is to determine which of the walkers is the single human opponent, and blast
the target into oblivion. A side arm of sufficient caliber to engulf suspects in a
satisfying spray of pyrotechnics is provided.

Thanks to the novel 3-D feature, the cop player must stand and physically spin
around to view the field.

UPDATE: http://www.visavisgames.com

Listening to: A Decade in Ibiza, The Story

BBC has a great
doco on the decade of BBC Radio 1 doing broadcasts from Ibiza. While I was never
fully into the dance scene (more my brother’s thing)… still I can’t help but get
little chills of nostalgia.

Listening to: Give it Away - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Wired has an article on
the work being done by t\Space and how it sits with emerging NASA policy.

Listening to: Give it Away - Red Hot Chili Peppers

If you’re after something read over lunch you could do a lot worse than The
Profits of Fear by Charles Platt. It is both a fascinating story about Sam Cohen,
the inventor of the neutron bomb, and a shockingly relevant insight into the nature
of power and people who wield it.

George Orwell suggested in his novel _1984_ that a totalitarian state would benefit
most from a war which seems threatening yet is never sufficiently dangerous to defeat
the nation and can be prolonged almost indefinitely. An ongoing conflict of this type
provides an outlet for destructive energy and justifies material sacrifices while
discouraging dissent. Whether this scenario is applicable to American government may
be debatable, but certainly the Cold War satisfied all of these criteria.

Orwell imagined a regime that stopped “the pendulum of history,” but in reality
any status-quo becomes unstable with time, and the threat of communism turned out
to be emptier than anyone had realized. I remember a TV interview with George Bush
Senior, who was slumped in his chair with his chin in his hand, not saying much, as
an interviewer asked why he didn’t have a more emotional reaction to the wonderful
news about the Berlin wall coming down. “I guess I’m just not an emotional kind of
guy,” Bush responded.

Yet he was reacting with obvious emotion. He was visibly depressed, with good
reason, since the self-destruction of the Soviet Union caused a massive reduction
in his own importance. After being empowered by nuclear weapons like his predecessors,
he suddenly found himself as a Commander in Chief with no enemy to fight. No one cared
anymore that his finger was on The Button, because he had lost any excuse to use it.

I think Bush understood very clearly a fundamental fact of politics: Our leaders
are less valuable to us at times when we feel more secure. When a president has no
foreign threat from which he can claim to protect the nation, his remaining primary
task is simply to create national prosperity. Sure enough, as the economy tanked near
the end of Bush’s first term, there was no further use for him at all. He was terminated
by uppitty voters who were annoyed by the rise in unemployment and weren’t afraid
anymore.

Listening to: Civil Sin - Boy Kill Boy

On Wednesday I packed up my stuff early, jumped on a bus and went over to Mirimar.
After getting momentarily lost and spending a little time pondering the fresh cut
grass smell of suburbia I stumbled into the reception of Weta.
What followed was one of the most interesting afternoons I have experienced in a very
long while.

The afternoon was split into two sections. The first hour was spent listening
to Richard
Taylor and the second was spent wandering around the workshops (we didn’t get
into the Weta Digital areas unfortunately).

The talk by Richard was much like one on the previous
The New Cool seminars. For me it was the most useful and inspirational part of
the whole experience. Richard spoke at length about how the company came about, how
it has stumbled and succeed, and how they are positioning it for the future. He was
very candid about failures and openly proud of the successes of his team. Some of
the key insights for me were:

• Weta babies
  He mentioned that the 149th (I think) child had been born to a Weta employee. The
  importance of this to him was that it marked the 149th person who had been able to
  make a life secure enough to make a family while working at Weta. A very simple, utterly
  compelling and holistic measure of success.
• Movies aren’t the be all and end all - Creativity is
  Movies are just an outlet for their creativity… creative output is the primary goal
  of Weta and movies are a way of getting the money for it.
• Selling hours is a blue collar job
  I have always known the limitations of service based companies… but I have never
  had it painted so starkly. He’s right… you only ever make as much as you care to
  give time wise and that’s your limit. Doesn’t matter what your service is.

Richard talked and talked and talked and talked and it was all good. He, like every
person we met at Weta, was passionate, intelligent and incredibly articulate. I enjoy
listening to smart people talk.

We spent the second half of the trip being guided around the workshops but one of
the head costumers (whose name I can’t remember (much to my shame)) and being subtly
watched over by the giant Weta Attorney Michael
McNeil (who was a bloody nice guy… but if I pulled out a camera I suspect he
would’ve picked me up by the scruff and politely asked me “to not do that sir
or I will rip your arm off and beat you ’round the head with the soggy end“).
The workshops are breath taking both because of the scale (I really have seen shops
like that since being an air force brat) and the collection of talented people…
you get a palpable feeling that they could make anything happen on film.

The other thing that struck me was that it is an intrinsically international company. Groupings
of clocks were ever present… four faces telling the times for Wellington, LA, New
York and London.

I always find these experiences are real catalysts for reflection (especially when
I hear some one describe an animation system I was working on two years ago and then
canned because a) I didn’t want it enough and b) I believed the people who told me
I couldn’t do it). All in all the old clichés apply:

• do what you love
• follow your gut
• get advice, but you need to balance it
• you competitors are always gaining on you
• you’re partners a probably more interesting in making cool cash than they are in making
  cool things
• ideas are cheap, the thing that seperates goats from sheep is execution

I also realised that a lot of my failure in starting something in the past was that
I never really had something that showed off the idea… and that it made it very
easy for people to dismiss it or say that it couldn’t be done. If some one described
the things that I have described I would do the same thing. Hence play’n’see.

The Dowse and the various city councils have
done a phenomenal job with this series of seminars and visits… it has been a very
fruitful experience. Thank you.