Sunset I

Sunset I

Told you there were a lot of sunsets coming. Hope you’re not too bored.

I’m about to wrench my arm patting myself on the back with this one. You see, the way I know that this is good shot is that I’ve just been through a massive variety of settings and balance tweaks to produce different versions, and aside from the obviously fucked options where I crank one slider up all the way and destroy the shot, there’s not one of them I don’t like – the shot shines through in all of them. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a highly original shot, but today, I care less about that than I do about having taken a really nice photo that brings me immense pleasure. I hope you like it, too.

This version’s my favourite, but I’m going to upload the unaltered original, too, so you can see what choices I’ve made in developing this. You can see the original here, if you’re curious.

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Links For Monday 20th September 2010

  • Make Games – Finishing a Game
    Applicable to just about any creative endeavour, and there are a number of things in here I could do with remembering more often.
    (tags: design productivity games)
  • Looxcie Wearable Camcorder: Capture Unexpected Moments
    Mildly tempted by this, if they produce an iphone version. It's a bit deep geek, but that's never stopped me from doing anything before. (Not so much interested in it from a sharing-with-the-world POV, more as a personal outboard memory tool – the ability to clip the last 30 secs of my life is potentially useful in a number of contexts.)
    (tags: video gadgets)
  • How to get search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN) referal keywords using PHP, php, Steven York.com
    Reasonably trivial task, but once I'm going to have to do at work soon, I imagine. No sense re-inventing the wheel, and this looks like some decent code snippets to build into what we'll need.
    (tags: php seo reporting)
  • DarkPatterns.org
    A listing of intentionally bad design patterns – tricks websites use to get you to do things that they want, or that cost you money. I'm happy to say that most of our clients don't ask us to do these, and those that do are usually dissuaded by us. But still, this is a good list of tricks to learn, so you can be aware when various sites might be trying to use them on you.
    (tags: usability psychology design)
  • A working hypothesis – Charlie's Diary
    I had been blaming the decade long rise of extremism and authoritarian clampdowns on some kind of post-millennial fallout – the calendar ticks over, and nothing changes, and all that pent up stress has to go somewhere – but the idea that a significant chunk of the population of the planet might actually be suffering from future shock hadn't occurred to me, but it's an idea worth acknowledging, I think. (And playing connect the dots with – qv. Clay Shirky's Gin and Sitcoms ideas about cognitive surplus as an exacerbating factor.)
    (tags: future culture religion tolerance)
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Links For Sunday 19th September 2010

  • Coderspiel — Exchange “remote wipe” is a terrible, terrible bug
    Do you use your personal smartphone to get work email on, via Exchange? Here's an article that explains why you might want to stop doing this, and then confirm in person with your IT department that they can no long access your phone. However much I might trust my employers, there's no way I'd hand them the ability to do a remote wipe of my phone. After all, one day, I might want to leave, and they'd be justified in wiping my phone for security reasons. And bang would go my friends contact info, my photos, my SMS conversations, etc etc. (Absent a back up, of course. How often do you plug your personal phone into your home PC, and sync? I'm quite back-up conscious, and I still only do it once a fortnight or so, because 90% of the time, the data I need to have synced is already synced over the air.)
    (tags: iphone security mobile)
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Home

Home

Back from a week’s Holiday in Woolacombe, down on the North coast of Devon. A week of basically, doing bugger-all. Picnics, playing in the surf, and just chilling out – we deliberately didn’t avail ourselves of a car, so that we couldn’t go and Do Things – we were basically restricted to what was available within walking distance, which was a few places to eat, and some surf shops, and that was the lot. I have decided that as much as I like city breaks, where I have plenty to do, there really is a lot to be said for getting away from it all for a week.

We got a lot of really good sunsets, too, so expect a few more beach-at-sunset photos in the next while.

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Out

Heading away for a much-needed break – spending a week by the sea, with very little internet at best, quite possibly none. (If I really am internet-free, this will be the longest period I’ve been without the intertubes in about ten years.) In any even, I wouldn’t expect any blogging, or anything much in the way of email responses. I might manage the odd twitter. Look after yourselves, and I’ll see you all in a week.

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Links For Thursday 9th September 2010

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Links For Wednesday 8th September 2010

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Links For Tuesday 7th September 2010

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Links For Monday 6th September 2010

  • Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world's throats – Boing Boing
    This makes my blood boil. What kind of shitehawk can think that is is a fair or reasonable way to do business? The level of contempt that US business interests, and worse, politicians are showing for consumers around the world is staggering. Large chunks of the world are about to be shafted by people who they cannot hold accountable. US-resident chums, I would take it as a great kindness if you would write and call your representatives, on the issue of ACTA, and make their responses as public as possible.
    (tags: politics copyright acta)
  • B.A.S.A.A.P. – Blog – BERG
    Mr Jones is at the clever again. Good metaphor for designing better human computer interaction.
    (tags: interface design)
  • Health Month
    I've just signed up to beta-test this, turning better habits into a game, although I just missed the deadline for the September game. So, for the month of October, I must: go to the gym twice a week. Do productive work (outside of the dayjob) on three days each week. Drink only one alcohlic drink per week. If do this, I will buy myself an ipod shuffle. If not, I'll donate price of the same to charity. (And if I find it helpful, I'll up the requirements in November.)
    (tags: gaming health)
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