A Donkey on the Edge

Have just spent three hours inputting all manner of stuff into the Aquent website.

They’re one of the biggest recruiters out there so I was amazed to find their site is really poor. It’s full of glitches like clicking on the “apply” button and getting routed to the wrong job or missing navigation. For example, once you’ve spent ten hours uploading your eighteen graphics (because the site is just too crap to produc thumbnails automatically) and completing your profile, your given a “logout” link, but no way to go find jobs! To get job hunting, you have to go back to the location bar and enter the site’s url which takes you back to the home page.

Another crazy thing about the site is the job search engine (not exactly an un-important part of a job-hunting website) which makes it seem like there are no jobs in London. I started searching for “art director” or “information architect” and got very few results. I tried to really broaden the search and entered “creative”, “usability” and “accessible”. Creative only returned 20 results. Strange…

And while I’m on the subject, the search on Monster is fairly pitiful as well. I’m going to be discontinuing their notification service as the logic behind it is just not working.

OK everybody, today’s the day. Time to head for a polling station.

I’ve been struggling with what to do—I’ve always thought Tony Blair was slimey, but having to ditch Glenda Jackson (my MP) to get to get rid Tony seemed harsh and strangely pointless.

I had just about primed myself for getting the tories back in when our local LibDem candidate helped me out. The guy has posted a note stating that he is standing down and we should all vote for Glenda. Talk about a sense of relief. Polls open in Nine minutes, must get shoes on…

What is it with account execs? They can’t help themselves from poking the screen. One in particular had the endearing habit of using a biro which left little blue smudges…

(Thank you thank you thank you Ivan from creativebits for reminding me exactly how anoying that is!)

I was beginning to think the good works of the Asquith Eight were going to go unnoticed forever.

But no! We’ve finally been indexed by Google…

If you or someone you know has a toddler in the care of an Asquith Court nursery you should absolutely be reading about the West Hampstead horror stories. The fight is currently still going on, but I’m guessing that Mum’s united shall never be undone;-)

And just to make this absolutely clear in a linky kind of way, this link is the start page of the Asquith Court Parents Association website.

Doing some background reading for a big IA project and came across this classic from Edward Tufte

Information itself cannot inherently be misleading or difficult to understand, but its visual representation or interpretation can be.

I forget if I’ve mentioned this before, but we’re all carrying all manner of legacy decisions about producing web pages. We’ve got the web-safe colour thing, the acessible Javascript thing, the quirks or no quirks thing and so on. I’m currently working for a company that is stuck deep in some of the darker areas of these debates and it’s a pretty grim thing to experience.

Anyways, I thought this piece on writing javascript in 2005 is a wonderful breath of fresh air and should be read by any team still arguing about how menus ought to be built, or forms improved or…

I’m not sure whether I prefer the Flickr ‘most recent’ or ‘random’ badges, but one of the nice features of the random badge (which grabs pics at ‘random’ from your photosets) is that is reminds you of days past.

This wonderful, snowy day just got selected:-)

Sitting here in MUF where I work on personal projects thinking about the structure of a huge, museum website and have just noticed that Technorati’s tags page is almost 50% non-roman.

Aside from the huge kick I get out of modern operating systems’ ability to seamlessly display non-roman characters, I’m getting into enjoying a Chinese world. Clemmie will no doubt live in a Mandarin data-universe, and by the time she’s ten I’m guessing not learning a Chinese language in school will seem absurd.

Just been contacted by Francis Poku at specialopsmedia.com re featuring the new ER game on Donkey.

The bumpf reads:

As the new intern in the ER, you’ve got your work cut out for you. No sleep in 36 hours and you lay down for a well-deserved rest. Then the call comes in; there’s been a freeway pile-up with multiple victims.

To be honest, I can’t imagine how the gameplay can work. I mean I’m a huge fan of ER the television series but this looks like it uses the same engine as the Sims. Not sure how all that lovely tension, pain, suffering and redemption are supposed to emanate from those goofy pattern-mapped stick-figures. Anyways, if Francis gets it together to send me a copy, I’ll let you know…

Oh, and the other thing is that Donkey likes freebies, so keep ‘em coming. I will happily review your luxury spa holiday, just get those tickets down here pronto—‘comp’ is my middle name.

And speaking of freebies, if Francis plays ball, I may have a bunch of junk on hand to give away:

In anticipation of this release, Special Ops is offering copies of the game for writing reviews as well as “Doctor Bags� for giveaway on Donkey on the Edge. These doctor bags include a copy of the game, chocolate band aids and stress cards. This sure beats the standard giveaways we usually run.

Ah marketers, dontcha just love ‘em…

So I’m sitting here at my desk, it’s 5am and I’m trying to get some writing done, but my eyes are killing me.

Clementine got herself a case of conjunctivitis on Tuesday and I gave her a goodnight kiss that evening. I can’t believe this stuff could be so contagious that a single peck on the cheek would be enough to transmit the bacteria…

I woke up Wednesday morning with my eyes all puffy and I’m pretty sure they smelt funny as well. Which was great, because I had finally managed to get a meeting with a key, senior relationship marketing expert at a big fmcg company and I was due to do my spiel about brands reaching out to the digital consumer at 10:30 that morning.

In the end, the meeting went well. This company isn’t going to start a revolution tomorrow, but they’re very smart and understand the earth beneath their feet is starting to move. Turns out they’re keen to listen and keen to learn, so hopefully we’ll be able to do a bit of work together.

This is great news for the internet, as big brands have traditionally been the biggest wasters of bandwidth. If they start to engage and participate in internet culture, that should benefit us all.

It all started with Snow White.

It seemed harmless enough—a beautiful family favourite for generations—wholesome family entertainment, what could go wrong? Nicki sent me this shot of little Clemmie yesterday. She’s decked out in Disney merchandise from head to toe.

Normally, I would never recommend building a composite brand, but Disney has taken three, totally unrelated cartoon characters (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) and merged them into a composite brand known as “Three Princesses”.

In most cases, this kind of ‘bolting together’ never goes as far as the real thing, but in this instance, Disney has hit on something that resonates with little girls. Girls can now buy everything from buckets and spades to plasters via the ubiquitous diamond tiaras in between—all marked with the innocent, smiling faces of the Three Princesses.

This stuff resonates with Clemmie so much I can see her head vibrate…

Sunday afternoon and my eyes are still going mental. This is beginning to worry me slightly, after all I rely quite heavily on my eyes to do my job. If things haven’t improved by tomorrow morning, I think I’ll go see the it’ll be better in a day or two doc again.

Funny thinking about eyesight—I spend a lot of time at work explaining (cajoling, beating, schmoozing, bribing…) to corporates why they need to support blind and partially-sighted customers. If I was to lose my sight, could I still consult on accessibility issues? I guess my deliverable would change somewhat, currently I focus on the delivery end of things, that is, how do you have to structure and train your delivery teams to make sure your groovy design work stays as accessible as possible without loosing the graphic ‘edge’.

I’m guessing I could retrain and spend time doing research for the RNIB or similar. Anyhow, it’s comforting to know that the mad mad world of bloggers is actually quite easy for a blind person to participate in :-)

Well, I’ve been on the verge of buying Tiger and going through the upgrade thing with the five-odd machines I’m responsible for. It looks like I’ll loose key functionality if I do (virtual switch networking) and I don’t like the look of this vulnerability

So guys, how about you call me when Dashboard requires explicit, dashboard-specific authorisation before it gets handed root privileges, ok?

I’m on a couple of usability lists and one of them sparked a slightly strange exchange of messages a few minutes ago:

> 8:00:01 (in fact 8:00:00 + 1/infinity seconds)

That would be 8:00:00 + (the smallest increment that the clock measures).

You can’t divide an integer by infinity. (Nor a rational number, nor an irrational number, nor a complex number, etc. — for those who would quibble that I have limited it to integers :-)

So what did we talk about before we had the internet?

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time looking at the British Museum website these past couple of months. I’ve nicked this graphic from Compass, their editor-selected presentation of 5000 significant pieces from the main collection.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2001

I love this thing, it’s called Throne of weapons and it’s made by “Transforming Arms into Tools”, an artists collective from Mozambique. In particular, I love this quite voyeuristic drawing created by the Museum to support the presentation of the artwork. By labelling each item of millitary hardware, this presentation graphic adds an extra dimension to the original. Apologies for gilding this particular lily (as the original is very sensible black and white)…

From the Compass TAE page

The throne is a product of the TAE project - Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) - whereby weapons previously used by combatants on both sides are voluntarily exchanged for agricultural, domestic and construction tools. The project was established in 1995 in Maputo by Bishop Dinis Sengulane of the Christian Council of Mozambique with the support of Christian Aid.

The British Museum website
The Compass section
The Throne of Weapons page