Square Smileys on Google Reader?

oh the extravaganza :) - also nice how the star icon looks soo distinctly 90s compared with the happy face

Poetic Failure

i'm a sucker for random poetic breakdown like this (can't render uncertainty in wikipedia's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" :)

- btw this has been fixed now -

Smile by Design

i have been mulling about the question what makes us laugh in design, where we accept obvious failings with a smile and where we just get frustrated.

i've learned quite a lot about our instinct to smile from 2d/character design. full-on posters of grinning disney figures always make us smile back, but how does this instinct work in a functional design context (and by functional i mean, electronically enhanced and interactive)? when have i last smiled back at a piece of grinning technology?

doesn't happen often with (perceived) multi function products. i don't say good morning to my nokia, and i don't accept it's oddities or failures with some form of character recognition and/or sympathy for the poor thing. (ok, if i had an iphone. but no, don't think so either).

could happen rather often with (perceived) single function products. i can imagine an alarm clock that i say good morning to as well as good night, and i would know exactly when to slap it and when to leave it alone in case of a malfunction. (no, i don't have a million tamagotchis at home, and i don't intend to get a tama-farm started soon).

the less perceived functionality, the more room for bonding, dialogue and character design in digital devices?

Ghost doors @ the Barbican

everybody is familiar with the strange atmospheric feeling that goes by the name of 'Barbican'. i have a couple of routines there (going to the cinema on level 4, going to the curve gallery on level 0). without the Barbican branded mini moments of oddness, i doubt i'd be enjoying the movies and art as much as i do.

my favorite one is the ghost door on level 4 (right), a lonely door in an absurd desolate corridor leading to cinema 2 that just can't get it's motion sensor right - the way the door automatically opens and closes for any visitor approaching is calibrated slightly wrong, it makes you want to stop in your tracks, it makes you feel like a ghost just walked through and you don't know whether it's coming right at you or whether you'll be safe. just a tiny tick, but it makes me nervous every time. (i don't think i'm the only one - building management put up a sticker pointing out that this is an 'automatic door' - see bottom sticker on door).

another can-i-trust-my-eyes moment usually grabs me when i enter the ladies room on the ground floor (left). the passage way through to more toilets is so oddly designed that i usually mistake it for a mirror from which my own image is miraculously absent. just a little shock, but it works every time. (i don't think i'm the only one - building management put up a 'more toilets this way' notice, pointing out that this is a way through, not an ending - see sign next to frame).

Magic Button

this could have been good, but... (image shows wordpress ui promising click-of-a-magic-button blogger import)...


having been distracted by the FeeBies and tweeties of this world for, um, a few long years of noisy social networking, i've recently come to miss the 'talking to myself' quiet quality of my old little blog. strange to see how little things have changed at this end of the spectrum - blogger has become even more closed off (host it here! use our templates only! upgrade!), and wordpress.org now has a commercial little sister (host it here! use our templates only! upgrade!), but in essence both products still work & feel the same. which is rather less fluid and more time-consuming than i expected.

i was pondering playing around with something more advanced like apture for richer data but that'll have to wait til rather more basic problems such as displaying tags in blogger have been tried and tested...

Honest Complication

last night i found a mobile phone. it's very filthy, you can see (and feel) someone's been fiddling around with it for a long time. i want to give it back. unfortunately i've used up all its charge to browse through txts, pics, movs on it instead of putting down one or two contact numbers. now i'm locked out by pin, and i don't even have the right charger!

Cable Freestyle

i've often marveled at english cable freestyle. marveled at the way the english leave so many cables out in the open. if you pass one of these electricity boxes on the street, wide open, exposing lots and lots and lots of wires and cables - it's scary, it's tempting: i want to pull them all out and see whether the lights go down in my whole area.

Phone Phobia

when talking on Skype, i don't know where to put myself. staring on screen seems absurd stupid and distracting, so the only comfortable way to talk for me is with my eyes closed. eyes closed, i can't imagine any distance, i feel as if in the same room with the person i'm talking to. i start complaining. "why are we talking like this? why aren't we sitting at a table, having dinner together right now?"

i like the cable-y way of old landline phones. phone line coming out of the wall, receiver dangling from its cord: everything visibly connects up right unto my ear. in my imagination, i follow the phone line behind my wall, get a feel for the distance my conversation travels.

Offline

dear diary - im going mental. im offline for the second day in a row. i travel with laptop, laptop power supply, mouse, mobile phone, mobile phone charger, digital camera, digital camera charger, digital camera connector cable, a german a swiss and an english modem cable, and still, all the wireless networks around me with their fancy neukölln-kreuzbergian names refuse me connection, and a cheap service provider has blocked the telephone line.

Democratic Internet

Could we have the Internet for 1 week in German, please?

We would all have long conversations with the native english speakers on the effects of living abroad when going online. Reading - Thinking - Writing in foreign terms, mingling your background culture with online culture with local culture, expressing yourself in your own pidgin english.

After that 1 week, a lot of stupid english words should have disappeared from the www. Such as "Yahooligans" (please, yahoo Germany: In Germany, a hooligan isn't only a footballfan - it's a young violent drunk nazi).

Logo sieht das nicht gut aus...

Not so fun Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Validator

Pub Sky

"More customers are men than women, and they want their football so we need it." (Landlady on licensing Sky Sports Channel for commercial use.)

Right. I'm watching Sky in the Pubs. My eyes start to wander, are drawn to the bottom right hand corner of the screen. A little icon in the shape of a pint-glass appears. What does it mean? 'Last orders'? 'This pub is still serving drinks but not food'? - 'Drink, this is Sports' seems to be the most likely interpretation.

A few more pints, a few more pint icons, and I ask a barlady. "What does it mean?" (Several heads on the bar turning, staring at the screen, wondering) - She: "That's something you can move things with a remote control but I really don't know".

I'm getting more and more confused. Interactive TV? Where nobody's got a remote? Internet, help!

This bug was incredibly hard to find out. Nobody loves this icon, nobody sees this except me and the Sky controllers who rumble through the pubs all over UK to 'fight theft'. From the Sky Website: "What is this pint glass symbol on my screen?" - "Sky Business commercial subscribers will see a pint glass 'bug' appear on their screen from time to time and this bug instantly reveals who is - and most importantly, who is not - showing Sky with the correct commercial subscription agreement."

Bug the ones that pay to id the ones that don't?

Does Google make me dyslexic?

How unfair a question. There's the keyboard, in the first place.

I:
- type the right number of letters
- dont type them in the right roder
- type the right number of spaces
- dont type them in the righ tplace

but:
- type all this into Google!
And Google guesses: "Did you mean..."?, and I'm binary:
"Yes" (klick), or, "No"!

Upgrade to Walmart

It's sad, I missed yesterday's Cuong Vu concert. To make up for it, I searched celebrity playlists of artists I had seen live in the past for new music pre-streams. Interface: iTunes Music Store. iForgot, and iRemembered: Apple is American! Their visual 'explicit' vs 'clean' music tagging made this abundantly clear. Upgrade their Software (my Software?), install a bit more of Walmart thinking on my machine (their machine?).

Walmart? I think it was Naomi Klein who told the story of how even the old Nirvana's changed their lyrics so that their CD's would be stocked in Walmarts throughout the US...

* the pics: Nils Petter Molvaer likes it explicit, while Helmet buy clean music! (ok, Helmet are actually much less boybandish than it looks like on the pic (though there's pretty daft lyrics as well, 'I know that you're clever you've mentioned that before', genius), but the pic itself: hilarious, I like it, guy rocking to a palm tree drum jungle or something)

Action or Script

FRI: I've got a code hangover. Nights before coding - cant sleep, wont hear my mobile in the mornings. SAT: I've got a code withdrawal. Days w/o coding - will wake up at six.

Keeping Comments Clean

Blogger helps to write clean content. Automated, partly, fully. Well, well. Why would I expect a Google-owned something to write clean code, the least: as well? Sorry, big b, I'm such a stranger, and I do have friends who speak in ä-ö-ü tongues...

No, I'm not a notorious moaner, and yes, I've asked their tech support what I could do to improve my little template for their big machine. dear b - "i've spent some time building a validating XHTML template for my blog - however, i recently had trouble with validation when there were comments being added to a post (the </br> (linebreak) tags generated by blogger weren't accepted; also, special characters like &uuml; (ü) etc. were not properly encoded when input through the comment interface, so i had to go over the pages manually to fix them). is this an issue i could solve on my side (i.e. in my template or css)?" - thanks, a.

Since it's comments I'm having problems with, I'll post their replies to the comments! Wait and see...

Note to self (Blogpolizei)

-> would it work without this [[repulsive]] sense of mission? --- " 't was written because... 't is for [[ ]] and for everybody else interested..." --- OF COURSE it is, this is the world wide web!!! -> would blogging work without the rants, then?

Blogspeak is boring but fascinating.

People are mesmerized by their tech. They feel that by simply typing away on their keyboards and storing the results in public, their whole being would change. ups, I've become an online publisher over night! Projection Space. That's lovely. But: stop justifying (that's wasting time), stop 'publishing', sense of mission doesn't work (and isn't fun). It's the www! Scrap. Trash. Work. Not built to last. Built to change.

Or, maybe:

Do project! But a little bit further. 50 years ahead. Still a www, still blogs around. Probably it will be against social etiquette to look at other people's private blogs. Like you don't look at bank statements, like you don't leave the bathroom door open. or or or... Some tech else will have run off with your public privacy by then, like the TESCO clubcard. Or the Migros Cumulus Karte.

(ps the images: Neat! Little Tesco stars on the new Hamburg Police Uniform.)

Photoshop how's and wow's

How did this happen? Photoshop got rid of its eye icon about two years ago, and I still have trouble navigating the cs suite via tab or dock. Feathers? Flowers? Butterflies? hmmm. Led a design software brainstorming the other day; when trying to describe photoshop as a person, we ended up with the illustration of a mid-30s quite quiet man with a preference to wear suits. Despite being quiet, he wouldn't be shy, rather arrogant, constantly staring at you. I doubt the feather look will make this feel any lighter?

The mad dog, that's not Gromit but the Gimp (a not-too-easy-to-use GNU image manipulation program. But the dog makes up for it).

(through this very nice site I was able to find the photoshop 1.0 icon. thank you)

Working on the wow...

Ultimate Privacy with Dackelblut

Finally I've managed to listen to legendary German band DACKELBLUT, and I didn't even notice... (sausage dog, sausage dog, sausage dog...)

When you listen to music on last.fm, your listening will make public history by default. Who cares? Set aside what the machines do - from a human point of view, you've got ultimate privacy. None of the people important to you will ID your bad taste. In fact, they really DON'T want to know what's going on in your ears, it's all been too much: Music/Audioscrobbler, Pictures/Flickr, Words/Blogger... (hi Flickr - some hassling advice over there?)

How about you? Are your ears growing bigger? Do you find new and exciting ways to navigate your tastes? Will you give in to taste information overload in the end, just liking it all?

iChat Accident

A car I passed on the street was opening/closing its doors; it sounded exactly like the little sound iChat makes when some buddy logs on/off. Fell almost off my bike, so spooked was I by my instinctive reaction to try and find my buddy list in the sky.

Magic Numbers

01010101    It's over with the 0's and 1's. I'd suggest 0's and 5's as the new magic numbers in technology. "None of your contacts have uploaded any photos that you can see. Perhaps you need to hassle them to get to it!" cries my Flickr contact page. Here's the 0-users.

Please, Flickr, be honest! The need to hassle won't stop once somebody has switched their state to being a 1 (exemplary excitement - hey, I've started blogging! This day must be very special indeed...). So - is the hassling part of the 'social' or part of the 'software' component of (potentially) social software tools like Flickr, Blogger, Delicious? Do I have to bully all of my friends?

It's such a huge number of people that doesn't make it over the first three thresholds of 1. generating an account (works! enthusiasm...), 2. testing how to contribute (wow! that was work for me! and it worked! more enthusiasm...) and 3. contributing (what? now I have to work? enthusiasm buggers off to more fun spaces). They end up not using these tools for more than magical 5 times (ok, that might be 3 or 7, but that would be all too old school magic, so let's average).

Designer Kino

My first Designer Kino happened in Zürich. One of the Tomatoes gave a talk, hadn't prepared, had to reboot the system. Ping. Pong? (sorry, cheap bootleg, startup sound, then Mac Os9). An auditorium full of students sat mesmerized, watching smiley boy coming up. We watched John mousing til he got the right content off the right ZIP disk. Nobody chattet. Nobody laughed. But it was absurd!

Last week, a student was playing GTA to entertain us while waiting for the latecomers to arrive (London Metropolitan). Designer Kino had changed it's focus from staring to discussing 'what's the PC version for shoot him'? At least, people were chatting and laughing!

It's done it again...

Flickr's become a scary tool to visit all alone on a Saturday night: was browsing randomly along my interest tags, and what did I find? Picture of someone I used to fancy (and YES, of course I'm not cured yet at all), together with partner whom I hadn't seen the face of before. It took me the longest time to find out who actually posted that image. What a fortuneteller.

Too close, too fast

This is not about a relationship. This is about a gallery piece I went to see and blog about. The piece was great, the private people featuring were great, I went online to hunt for some image material. I ended up in the private Flickr Homes of these people featuring. Confronted with partly appalling views, my Art Experience collapsed in itself, vanished. Lose a gallery piece, gain a conflict.

11:32. FreeHand MX.

Best Software Reading

"I want software developers to learn how to write things that people want to read, because communicating is one of the most overlooked skills in software development." (Blurb, Joel Spolsky, 'The Best of Software Writing 1'). "Great", I thought, "finally they will talk to ME!"

Would I be a Programmer? the guy at Foyles asked me when I was buying the book and I said No! I Am Not! I'm a Designer, interested in software, interested in the ways we can communicate about this most challenging design product ever. Now I want to figure out why I feel a bit disappointed.

The book has 29 articles (absurdities/comics/rants/real life dramas), the writing (laughing/drawing/shouting/crying) is great. It's '...write things that people WANT to read...' that has been bugging me. Who's this people, if not software developers? Hiring Hackers? I don't care! Incredibly exploitative working conditions? True, I can empathize, but please, would you talk to me now?

Adam Bosworth and Clay Shirky did. Their texts stand out to me as they are talking about Users, about tools and technologies that will revolutionize user behaviour. Nil article talks about the problems in workflow, the problems in communication between software developers and the people developing guidelines re product behaviour and face... Vers.2?

PS. Lovely: "Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search"