A Donkey on the Edge

An old chestnut found while digging around my bookmark file--Edward Tufte's analysis of the Columbia Shuttle report. He looks in detail at the meaning conveyed (or hidden) by the Boeing engineer's powerpoint presentation. Worth a read, not only if you're a Tufte fan--chilling stuff...

• Stanley Kubrik's Napoleon (pdf file)
• The first Creative Commons video that explains the point of a 'commons' and why protecting everything forever might not be a good idea
• An update from the Creative commons team on where they are so far

See this comment for a weird and wonderful machine-generated phrase.

I suppose I could leave comments open to unregistered commenters, and in the process, collect ever weirder and wonderfuller (a new word!) texts? Or maybe I should just close the comments thing...

Clemmie has been sick all week. This has been a little tricky to handle, as Nicki has been sick all week as well (really bad ear infection) and when sick, Clemmie definitely wants her mommy. A lot.

Nicki took her to the doc's yesterday morning and watched her go through a fairly comprehensive exam which resulted in the doc stating that there was nothing wrong with her and that she could go to school.

That said, we're pretty sure there is something along the lines of an ear infection going on as Clem hasn't made it through the night without waking up screaming her little head off. I've always had a bad time with my ENT. I had chronic headaches when I was very young until one day when I was maybe twelve, on a long car journey on a very hot day, I felt a minor explosion under my right eye and a bunch of ickey fluid when down my throat. From that point on, the headaches were a whole lot less frequent.

My Dad has always had similar or related problems. While we both check out fine at the ear doctor's, we both have dodgy hearing and drive our wives mad with the volume control. This is the kind of thing that worries me because I can see Clemmie going through the whole Falby ear, nose and throat thing, and no amount of visits to the doctor is going to do anything about it. Where are the tame consultants when you need 'em? Maybe if we win the lottery I'll take her down to Harley Street...

Having a 13.4 kilo little girl sound asleep on your left shoulder from 17:30 to 18:30 while trying to not wake her up and pick up her medicine from the pharmacy at the same time does wonders for your muscle tissue;-)

Clem now has eardrops to add to the fun--she is OK and currently asleep. This could go on another couple of days according to the doc.

OK, so this post is going up courtesy of a fresh instal of MT3.1

Sure, MT3.0D was stable. Not only that, it was friendly, and Robbie and Billy had started to use it ok, so why go and make a mess of things by 'upgrading' (particularly since I killed the Pumpernickle scheduler and contacts app by 'upgrading' the mumbox to OS X Server 10.3.5--thankyou-thankyou-thankyou Chris for mending it!)

This is a bit nuts, I've now started installing drivers and modules using CPAN, and compilling apps from source using gcc. The Good Lord definitely didn't have this kind of activity in mind for me at birth, but it sort of happened by necessity. The crazy thing is, you're sitting in front of your iBook at 04:30 in your pants, sipping on a cup of coffee that went cold hours ago and has started developing dark brown rings on the edge and you're uploading scripts, restarting Apache, getting scary error messages and whacking them into Google—hey presto! instant community: there are at least 350 other people out there (as of 17:33 and whether or not they are also in their pants has to do with their timezone) who are also digging around the innards of MT perl code and talking about it on the MT Support forum.

Anyway, I've just finished patching the code in one Library and two scrips (using vi) and have restarted Apache and lo, have been presented with this interface and lo, is now about to either work (by uploading this post) or generate further agro messages…

So here goes, clicking on "save" </Boring MTGeek>

Always on the look-out for French-language resources on the net. This one is most definitely not for Clemmie, at least not while she's still living under my roof;-)

RELOO: G UN GROS ZIZI TOUT DUR DANS MA POCHE HAHAHHAAHHAHA
Mastouil: Žckoute io jtenfouis mes testicules man tellement jtencule jtempale man jte le ressort apr la bouche check jte fais un mŽchoui et tu tourne sur mon zizi

From g‰te-g‰te at http://www.nouchi.com—I'm still working on the translation, but I'm pretty sure this is a ‘fair and frank' exchange…

So last night I was in my bath listening to a scratchy 78 of a bluegrass artist whose name I never quite managed to catch.

The record was being played by Laura Cantrell —part of her Radio Thrift Shop programme on wfmu (no longer out of East Orange NJ but still on 91.1 on your FM dial).

Saturday afternoon's show was streamed from Jersey City to Parsippany NJ, then under the Hudson River into 25 Broadway in Manhattan and then under the Atlantic Ocean to Telehouse in London's Docklands-North facility. From there, the bluegrass ukulele was only a few short hops to BT's ukcore.bt.net network, over to Ealing and then up to a window ledge in West Hampstead (where Dug lives, in North London). From the window-ledge, it went through the ADSL router, into Nicki's G4, where the iTunes application sent the signal down the cat-5 cable to the Airport base station connected to the ethernet network, through the bedroom wall and the bookcase in the sitting room to the AirTunes-enabled Airport Express base station under our ratty old couch covered in destructor-baby residue and into the Rotel amplifier powering the Snell speakers which sent the sound to my ears in the tub.

Listening to my favourite New York FM radio station on my stereo in London! I just can't get over what it must have cost to develop the infrastructure to enable this. I'm young enough to expect it to work but old enough to still think it looks a lot like science fiction.

So why take all this wonderment and then say I can't listen to the BBC on the same system? Damn, the signal is encrypted and the object that distributes the little “choose speakers” menu is only visible to iTunes. Come on Steve, I bought the damn CD and you didn't build the Great Eastern, let alone pay for the bloody Trans-Atlantic cable (which comes on-shore into a groovy little shack above a Welsh cove).

Cue Jon Lech Johansen from nanocrew. He's written some libraries and a set of command-line-interfaces to stream other media to one's AirTunes (hubmed.org). Hopefully the guys at unsanity will have a haxie out soon:-)

Well, not knowing who that bluegrassy artist was made me want to look him up. Turns out it wasn't a ukelele, and it was none other than the great Woodie Guthrie himself in 1944:

We were so afraid you would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,

Carried our young ones and pregnant women

Down inside the cave to sleep.

Been listening to a lot of Tiga recently. Following a link got me to these sensational puppet shows over iChat:-)

The Lord explains:

Of late, I've teamed up with a talented Canadian puppeteer named Chris Godziak to do avant garde puppet shows over ichat to complete strangers. There's something strangely satisfying about the whole thing… I plan on documenting it all, so it will hopefully flower into a finished piece before too long.

A post about Melina's baby Alexander, except that the only visual record is the snap she took of Clem and me in the playground at Turnham Green. Mister clever digital camera-phone-man was too busy chasing his little girl around the playground he didn't get a single solitary snap off in the direction of the little guy.

Alex is a cutie:-) He's seven weeks old and fits on my forearm (you forget how small they are when they first get here). He needed some ventouse help at the last minute, but it was just a bit, so his head wasn't oblong and he doesn't have the great big red bump on his scalp that Clementine had.

I had him napping on my arm for a while in the park. When you pick him up, you brace yourself for the weight and then almost bounce him off the ceiling when you hold him. He curled up on my chest and took his bottle for a while, OK, it's not like I'm broody or anything…

So welcome to Planet Earth little guy:-)

You may remember, a wee while ago I did the CSS implementation of the online media shop for the twocultureclash.com website (click on “download 2cc ringtones” to see the shop). At the time, I commented on the strangeness of hacking CSS for a site designed with no concern whatsoever with usability or web standards—the point of the site is to play music and get you hooked so you see the band and buy their stuff. Well, it looks like I'm going to have another go, this time for mia records

Their site is not only all Futuresplash, it insists on having the latest bleeding edge version. I'm so excited, this must mean they have truly unique, mind-blowing content, I'm orff to fetch the plugin…

(five minutes later)

Well, I can't see why the need for the latest plugin (big surprise there) but cool music:-) Also, as far as my non-cool self can tell, M.I.A. is a woman called Maya, short for Mathangi Arulpragasam. Her dad was a bonna-fide Tamil Tiger (or at least was very active in support of their battle for an independent homeland) and she wants to tell the world about her family and the struggle itself.

Pretty cool stuff and I want to know more. Maya, why not start a blog, or a community website, somewhere to tell us more, tell us about growing up in two worlds with all the tensions and pain that must have caused. Please please please break out of your little .swf file and get active online:-)

Anyway, and so to work—how am I going to make the yrmedia shop thingy work on Maya's site…

Could a Japanese speaker please let me know what this is all about?

I drop into AJ's english-language website once or twice a week. Interesting piece on Arun Gandhi's visit to Palestine and his take on non-violent resistance (Throwing a brick at a Merkava tank is just a waste of time and energy)

Alexander, Michael, George, Goodbody
Born on 27th July 2004

Weighing at birth a mighty 6llb precisely.

(those were the missing details)

Having the stereo in my flat hooked up with AirTunes is beginning to change the way I think of albums. I've always struggled with playlists—the amount of time you need to spend on them to get something that isn't full of bits you need to skip over really precludes doing anything else with your life.

So I've started listening to these large (70meg+) mp3 downloads. One guy in particular has spent a lot of time on air recently. I'm just begining to burn out on his “Slugs and snails” and am just getting into “Steal this music”…

Nine minutes ago, I'd never heard of Ben Shahn. Now I have. Thanks Robbie.

Well, until I get the scrapbook up and running I need an excuse to get some pics of Clem up for Mum:-)

So ever since seeing Silent Running when I was a teenager, I've had a strange attraction to gardening, not that I ever did anything about it. Nicki getting the garden organised kind of gave me a boost—I've started weeding and dead-heading, I'm growing a herb garden and have been buying seeds and germinating them in a tray in the kitchen.

I still don't know exactly where this is going but I'm going to try and keep some notes as I find stuff out…

Just when you thought you were safe from bouncing Clemmies, these three little films come along:-)

(Mom, alt-click to download the movie, then open it with “Quicktime Player”)

Given that I have no prior knowledge of gardening beyond the long list of pot plants which I have killed over the years, I thought I'd pay attention and try and observer what is happening out there…

1. If you cut the woody stem of French Taragon artemisia dracunculus it grows a fork (like a tuning fork).
2. While growing Common Basil ocimum basilicum outside in a London garden seems largely pointless, some plants do seem to soldier on towards winter, getting thicker-skinned and darker as the season progresses. Even in this ‘hardened' state, the leaves still make a mean salad (see previous post).
3. I still don't know how to appropriately describe the soil in my herb garden (shitty, urban, doesn't seem very helpful) but the Prezzemolo Gigante di Napoli that Clem and I sowed outside at the beginning of August is going strong.
4. The RHS Plant Finder (surprisingly) isn't very good if you're looking for a predictable, uniform listing of varieties for the purposes of keeping a gardening diary…
5. Aloe Vera is a cactus (ok, you can stop laughing now, but I really didn't know that). You can actually break a ‘leaf' off and crack it open to get the goo out, just like the cosmetic stuff—I'm amazed by the simplest things:-)

(I never, ever, read my sister's comics when I was wee.)

Still thinking about what to put in my cv, portfolio etc. and never being able to settle on what's really important. More precisely, why would someone want to work with me? So I'm heading towards values—I'm guessing I need to try and find a company that shares the values I've always put into my work.

Andy once said the nicest thing about working with me. I think it went along these lines:

You know Dug, I've worked all over town and nobody ever explained to me why we were doing what we were doing before.

For me, a team can't work in a historical vacuum, and all creative needs a context. It got me thinking how lucky I was to have been trained by Michel Delacroix (I can't find a link to him—he ran Pamplemousse, one of France's hottest groups and produced many, many iconic ads. There's got to be a page about his work somewhere…). Michel gave me my first job after college, I think he took me in because I was a biker and spoke fluent French—he figured my book was crap but I could be taught. He showed me grids and why to use them. He sent me off to art direct a Guy Laroche photoshoot with Jasmine (later Le Bon) with strict instructions to keep my trap shut and let the photographer work. I left there completely drained and ten feet taller. I guess Michel had really mastered the balance of inspiration, enthusiam and instruction. I've taken his teaching with me, sometimes not even realising where it cam from…

While Michel knew how to break a grid to best effet (generally to produce something very sexy for a fashion client), my next boss, Gene Federico at Lord Geller Federico Einstein worked with opposites. He juxtaposed elegant and funny like no one before him had done. His work was light, effortless, subtle, powerful and funny. I only got to work with him when he was arguing with my Creative Director. We'd stand around his corner office on 655 Madison and argue the finer points of layouts and what they were trying to achieve and I'd follow my guy out the door wishing I could spend a bit more time arguing but being shunted off with a list of things to assemble.

So what is it, a bigger picture, a purpose? I'll leave it there for now…

Dug started life working in old-school advertising agencies (L'Entente Delacroix, Ted Bates and Lord Geller Federico Einstein in New York, GGK in London) where he worked on big, prestigious clients like The Wall Street Journal, Cognac Hennessy, IBM and New York Stock Exchange. Here is some work he has done recently.

For the last eight years he has worked in the interactive area, initially in an agency and then as a freelance consultant. During that time, Dug has worked on a wide range of projects and companies including Budweiser, British Energy, AMP, James Bond, GE, Standard Chartered Bank, TNT, Universal Studios, BA, Showstudio and The Guardian.

So Dug has a good understanding of conceptual communications and interactive media as well as the technology that powers it, but how does his head work?

This portfolio is a blog—this means two things: it is almost continually changing, and visitors are free to leave comments. Dug rekons he wants to work with people out there who share his beliefs and values, and to date he knows of no better interactive tool than the blog to find out about what goes on in someone's head.

As well as the Portfolio categories in the left-hand menu (Recent, Brand, Web), the site has more general categories which may be of interest to the design comunity. These links take you out of the portfolio and into the main blog site:

• Advertising and marketing communications issues
• Design and usability commentary
• Internet culture politics and advocacy

From georgetown.edu

Afrikaans

hie-hô

Albanian

i-a i-a

Arabic (Algeria)

hiihan hiihan

Bengali

chuuchuu

Catalan

i-haa

Croatian

i-ja, i-ja

Danish

Æslet skryder

Dutch

ie-ah

English

hee-haw

Esperanto

ia

French

hihan

German

iaah, iaah

Hebrew

iya

Hindi

si:po:-si:po:

Italian

i-oo, i-oo

Norwegian

Eselet skryter

Polish

iha, iha

Russian

ia-ia

Spanish (Costa Rica)

iii-aah, iii-aah

Swedish

Åsnan skriar

Turkish

a-iiii, a-iiii

Ukrainian

ii-aa, ii-aa

The expression ‘hoist on his own petard' comes from the frequent and generally grisly end of His Majesty's Petardier—from the French, “person who has to light a very large fire-cracker at point-blank range while standing under boiling oil in a haze of arrows and musket balls”. The purpose of the petard was—at least in theory—to blow a bloody great hole in a castle door (6-inch-thick, two-hundred-year-old-oak beams held together with cast iron straps etc. you know, that sort of thing) and it was ignited like a cannon (ie by standing next to it and lighting a fuse).

I'm happy to say, I haven't seen bona-fide mystery-meat navigation in years, but strangely, as I've been reviewing what other designers have been doing about their online portfolios, I'm finding it more and more. This example was so bad I just had to post it. Not only is the navigation device out of focus (making it hard to read), but it's vertical. In other words, even after the ‘reveal' (when you mouseover the mystery meat) the navigation is still hard to decode. Sheesh!

Came across this icon I made of myself when digging around for portfolio stuff. For starters, what's with the front pony tail;-) That said, it is kinda cute (the icon, not the goat)…

Damn, this thing went from Mena's intermediate template to the completely new float design in about 18 hours. I was at the perifferal templates until 2 am this morning trying to get the category-based tags to work as expected (had to upgrade to 3.11 in the process—must learn how to psync…).

I'm off to a small job this morning, but should be able to be back on the case some time early afternoon. The plan is to have the whole thing finished for Monday morning.

I hope this hasn't been too disruptive. The biggest change is that the home page (where you go by typing http://donkeyontheedge.com) is no longer the standard blog page. The usual stream-of-consciousness posts will now live in The Bray (you can bookmark this page of course).

If any of this isn't working as expected, feel free to let me know:-)

Just so I know, exactly what hapened to make the amount of comment spam I'm getting shoot up overnight?

I've just had three days of pain and suffering trying to get a bunch of category-related MT plugins to work and failing:-( So the thought of struggling with MTBlacklist is looking pretty unhappy right now…

For the record, MTNextInCategory and MTNextCategory (two separate plugins would you beleive — can we not just have category handling built in please Ben?) failed the same way. For some reason, MT didn't parse their close tags (ie it output the tags as is).

Strange, no?

One in a series of auto-spams—a gratuitous link to The Lecture List. Fabrica just posted Representing Islam: Empires, Ideologies and Rhetorics

Tom Hickey will discuss representations of Islam in response to ‘Retake', a video installation by Egyptian artist Maha Maamoun Tom Hickey discusses representation and misrepresentation.

Right. So find yourself a lecture and go:-)

I've just realised something which I had kind of been keeping my head in the sand about: Movable Type 3.11 is buggy as all hell. Once you start getting anywhere near the red-line, its behaviour silently switches from “when” to “if”. This is bloody frightening as I've now invested weeks worth of all-nighters getting everything configured properly and now have a number of blogs running on it…

Planted Greek oregano (Oreganum vulgare L.), mixed Italian lettuce leaves ¹, rocket (Diplotaxis erucoides) and a lemon variety of sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum var citriodorum) in a seed tray in the kitchen two Saturdays ago (18 September 2004).

Of course, continuing my gardener ingenu thing, I planted four rows of seed and forgot to mark which is which;-) Anyway, one row now looks like a bushy lawn and the other three are satisfyingly sprouty. My guess is that it's way too late in the year to be planting soft fleshy things, but I'll see how far I get with pots on the windowsill…

¹ Mixed Italian (the packet is in Italian)

cicoria a foglie
grumolo verde
cicoria a foglie mantovana
pan di zucchero
cicoria a foglie rossa di verona
cicoria a foglie zuccherna di Trieste
crescione dei jardini
indivia riccia pancalieri a costa bianca
lattuga bionda a foglia lisca
lattuga bionda ricciolina
lattuga verde ricciolina da taglia
lattuga quattro stagioni
lattuga bionda degli ortolani
indivia scalia cornetto di Bordeaux
minutina herba stella

The corn salad (Valerianella P. Mill.) has been sitting in a seed tray for ages. I can't seem to get the darn things to move beyond this stage so potted them up in a bigger pot this morning.

I've been waiting for the lollo rosso letuce to get a move on as well—I think they're not getting enough sunlight, might plant them outside under a dome (a pyrex salad bowl actually)

Modern Jazz and Booze

Just a quick post to apologise for all the portfolio stuff going through this part of the site these past few weeks. I decided to use a part of Donkey as my online portfolio (a necessary evil in my quest for employment)—As this page is an index of all posts to Donkey, these more specialist posts end up here. I've still got a few to do, but hopefully, the mad rush of last week is now over.

Of course, if you need help with standards-compliant web design or accessibility and art direction you could actually visit the portfolio page.

But on a more personal, Donkey-esque note, one side-effect of trawling through your pure-play digital (actually saw this phrase today) life is coming across really old stuff that you'd forgotten ever doing.

This isn't going to mean a lot to non-webby or hci people, but I found an old concept I did for a UK diamond dealer called Celsteel. The big idea was this—as all around us were trying to figure out how to hide frame borders in all browsers (ah, those bad old days…) I presented a layout that was ‘tabbed' by having a nice thick frame border that was draggable cutting the page into a one-third / two-thirds grid. There were arrows and dotted lines (a bit like the arrows and tabs you have on a cut-out-and-assemble paper Lancaster bomber) on the background graphic which showed where to drag the divider to reveal the other page.

Anyway, the guy freaked and went with another designer. He's still in business and is currently modelling the lens-flare 2004 look, so it's probably not a bad thing he sacked me:-)

I love this calendar Nicki brought back from Cuba.

1. 2 cubes = 6 × 2 digits
2. days 1 to 31 = 1,2 and 3 with 6,7 and 8 plus 0,1,2,3,4 and 5
3. 5 bricks = 4 × 5 faces
4. 20 faces = 12 months + 7 days + 1 title

Part of what makes it so interesting is how inapropriate a device it is for a first-worlder's desk. Keeping the right faces in the right places is ludicrously expensive if you look at the man hours required…

Saw this gorgeous early-70's coffee machine in use near the studio. This is being posted via kablog on the 6600.

Demo KABLOG photo / moblogging software for Nokia / Series 60 phones.

Dug adds:
This was posted by Mike, the guy who wrote Kablog (I think). It's still a beta, but very promising, and gives your thumb a whole new set of activities. Still much harder to use and a lot more complex than the Cognima Snap application I've been testing, but the xmlrpc hook into Movable type is very, very powerful, so expect a host of how-did-they-do-that apps in the moblogging category:-)