A Donkey on the Edge

1. Go here

2. Check the box marked “click to vote for this vision” next to “muf architecture/art with Rosetta Life”

3. Scroll down, fill in the text boxes and click on “SUBMIT YOUR VOTE”

Of course, if you’re not in a rubber-stamping frame of mind, you should read the proposal, and view the very cool film (and its transcript) before you vote.

I’ve loved Photoshop since I first played with version 2.5—it did stuff you could only do at expensive post-production facilities on an old all-in-one Performa. Version three came along and wow, layers. Before you know it everyone had two gig of ram installed as every layer contained all the file’s data so we were routinely working with 100meg+ files (on an already rusty 8200 tower in my case).

So anyway, I’ve watched Photoshop grow up and my hard drive has kept up as best it could. I’ve queued at the door to buy every upgrade or new version, but to be honest, once you’ve got alpha channel manipulation and layer compositing along with a reliable and easy to use selection tool, what else do you want? I’ve been living happily with version 7 and no doubt only using a tiny fragment of the app’s awesome functionality set for a while now…

It seems to me a lot of the OSX ports have been excuses for major version upgrades. I mean Suitcase X11 (or whatever it’s called) is a rough and ropey fix of bugs that shouldn’t have been in version 10 in the first place. Illustrator stopped being stable after version 5 and to be honest, the version currently on my machine is labeled version 10 but should probably be more like 7.8 and now Adobe wants me to buy CS versions of all my software.

This is really getting silly, Adobe InDesign 2 is a barely acceptable bug-fix from 1.0 that just about does what Quark can do on a bad day and I’m supposed to pay full whack for it? I vote we cool it on the version numbers, try and stabilise the software and develop some sensible upgrade pricing policies.

So in the end, just for fun, I’ve put a copy of Photoshop CS on an iBook. The main difference with v.7 as far as i can tell, is that I can no longer find the Photoshop icon in the dock or on the desktop as the bold and colourful graphic has been replaced by an empty white box with a dirty feather in it. This is no doubt some clever in-crowd reference to the fact that all releases of photoshop have had cat code names and the feathers must be the remains of the big cat’s dinner…

I guess I won’t be upgrading anymore for a while :-)

Displacement activities…

Actually, I’m writing an affidavit to take to the courthouse for fact-checking which is almost as absurd an activity as taking silly on-line quizzes.

Those of you who might of had the pleasure of attending a new-business pitch with me might think the text from the above sounds a bit familiar

Prototype Item: Dancing Janet Reno action figure

previous item: cup of tea
next item: deep-fried apple
Description: This is sold somewhere in Soso. This is bought somewhere in Soso.
Dancing Janet Reno action figure is the kind of thing you can nebulate.
Weight: 200
Base Value: 170 shekels

A Dancing Janet Reno action figure is the kind of thing you can nebulate: effect on subject: energy -200 “The figure glows with mystical energy and slowly morphs into a space man robot!”

(results in: space man robot)

A related post (poor blog form but heh…) which struck me as I have the same problem explaining what exactly I do for a living.

…so you design logos yeah?

In particular, I like the interesting way of describing the ‘thing’ that one designs as existing only in the presence of those who use it.

Thanks anti-meta

My struggle with France-Telecom continues apace. A couple of people expressed an interest in seeing the whole correspondence. I’ll post links to the files here once the dust has settled and we have some sort of result.

In the meantime, I am without mobile phone, which is quite enjoyable really…

Don’t know if this was always the case and I just missed it, but the new version of photoshop has a nice refinement to the “Hue/Saturation” dialogue. When you click on “colorize”, the hue you start with is based on the foreground colour. This means if you’re making a bunch of tinted background graphics to match a site’s colourways, you don’t have to fiddle with the “hue” slider anymore (much).

Which is nice:-)

Cool, well written and very useful. If you’re as in the dark as I am with RegEx patterns, this will help:

regular-expressions.info

Am sitting here of a Thursday afternoon listening to the conversation at the Scarlet tea party happening in the adjoining desk-space. I don’t know when people stopped talking about sex, real-estate or even the weather, but the conversation has centred almost exclusively on eBay for the last hour.

One of the things you get used to when you become a parent is having dribble down the front of all your clothes.

Later on, as you become more experienced, you can spot the age of a person’s child by the type and position of the stain.

As Clementine drifts towards the big tee double-u o, she is leaving very characteristic marks just below my left knee. All my trousers now look like I spend my time trailing my left leg in a bucket full of slugs…

James just handed me an FT article about the nursery chain industry.

Turns out the company that employs teen-agers with no formal state qualification on minimum wage to look after my daughter three days a week made 33 million pounds in sales last fiscal year. On those sales they secured a profit of 5.5 Million pounds.

Not sure how I feel about furthering the wage-slave industry :-(

I suppose at least we have a minimum wage, some of you/05/remember the last Tory government’s position on it—that minimum wage would cripple business and sink the economy—nice one, Margaret.

Now might be a good time for Bliar to re-introduce free milk in schools.

OK, I’ll stop now.

Just one more thing…

The thing about eating home-made chocolate brownies is that when you drop a crumb in your lap and can’t find it, you know—no matter how carefully you try and wipe off all the bits and pieces around your chair—that you’re going home with an embarrassing stain on your trousers.

(gets up, starts brushing furiously…)

Nick and I took Clem to see the Turner Prize show at the Tate yesterday. Much fun was had all around, in particular by winding up guards by pulling on exhibit ropes and by attempting to eat the Chapmans’ worms (which were v. securely fastened, thankfully).

Discovered that the central banister up to the first floor makes v. exciting slide :-)

“Sola” is 12 minutes long. It’s the last fragment of Pucinni’s Manon and I still find myself crying at the end of it. I’m not normally partial to romantic nonsense, but Callas—in mono—in mp3—on shitty computer speakers—wow.