Monthly Archive for April, 2007

The iPhone is going to suck

Published on 23/04/2007 in everything. 3 Comments

Probably…

I was walking home today from some after-work shopping, laden with bags and using my phone to IM and listen to music. That’s when it hit me. Everything you do with a mobile phone you generally do with one hand. And if you don’t, then you certainly can, if needed. Same with an iPod, I can operate it completely one-handed.

With the iPhone, however… well, we’ve all seen the video and the interface demos. It’s just too big to hold and operate with a single limb.

Try it! grab an iPod or something of a similar size and then try and hold it in such a way that you could comfortably touch the whole face-area with your thumb. I’ve got big hands and I can just about manage it on my iPod if I shuffle the device around uncomfortably in my palm. And of course… the iPhone is bigger than that.

Now, clearly they’re going after the smart-phone market with this thing, which are traditionally used with two hands, so that’s no big deal. But for the rest of us? That 99% of the population that’s content to use a good old-fashioned dumbphone with one arm tied behind our back?

It’s not like a smaller version could even be made, since the human finger is the input device and they can’t get any smaller. I sincerely doubt you’d be able to scale the device much smaller than it is and still have the interface widgets big enough to use comfortably.

iPhone nano? Yes please, but I have no idea how you’d pull it off.

spare some change? [updated]

Published on 12/04/2007 in everything and web design. 2 Comments

I’m fucking sick of this site, aren’t you?

I’ve started working on a new one, here’s what I’ve got so far. I still need to mock-up the picture-gallery page, and the splash/portal/whatever that will sit at the root of the domain. I’m thinking something like this guy’s? Latest blog post, latest picture upload, that kind of thing. Straight to the content, this is what it’s all about.

It’s going to be JS-heavy, content-light and oat-so-simple. I’m picturing the site navigation sliding in off the top, pushing the current page off the bottom. How hard is that to actually do? I have no idea.

Indeed, chances are I will never, ever be able to implement half the shit I’m thinking of, but it’s going to be fun trying…

[update]

I made the previews prettier, and added a mockup for the pictures page. I also found an interesting function of adobe’s Spry JS framework that allow a div to slide in and out of the page. I think I will use that for the site’s navigation menu.

More sexy Spry effects can be previewed here. Is anyone else hard after looking at that? Just the web designers?

Lame, but not forgotten

Published on 10/04/2007 in everything. 3 Comments

I got a big-ass email from a relative yesterday. It was CC’ed to pretty much the entire family, actually. It was about her tattoos and their significance to her. Anyway, this bit here caught my eye:

I thought that Wonder Woman was a forgotten hero and I wanted to have the symbol tattooed on my lower stomach.

Not quite forgotten just yet, but it’s certainly possible, what with Heinberg’s dodgy writing and the recent slip to one issue every two months.

What is forgotten is that her creator, William Moulton Marston, was kind of a weirdo. Early Wonder Woman comics weren’t so much littered as packed with bondage themes: her one weakness is that she loses all her power if she’s tied or bound in some way, so that would happen pretty much every issue, plus her main weapon is a lasso which she’d use to tie other folks up with. And just in case anyone thought that was simply a product of more innocent times he’s got a whole mess of quotes like this one:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element”

So yeah, world peace through bondage and submission. He’s been accused of trying to influence the sexual development of young, impressionable comic-reading kids, or maybe just using the book as an outlet for his own fantasies. Either way, the comics code? Largely down to Marston, I’d say.

Also, did I mention he lived with his wife and his mistress? He had two kids with each of them, and they all lived together as one big, happy, polyamorous family.

Freaky~

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a strong yet forgotten female hero you could go further wrong than Spoiler. A teenage single mother who shopped her retarded super-villain father and put on a cape of her own. She even became Batman’s fourth Robin for a while, but she ended up dying, another victim of girlfriend-in-refridgerator-syndrome.

El Pollo Diablo

Published on 03/04/2007 in everything. 2 Comments

I’m cooking right now.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect that that phrase totally carries no weight any more. The fact that I have a laptop in my kitchen with a wireless net connection is completely unremarkable. Shit, I could be writing this from a mobile phone on a bus to fucking Inverness or somewhere, complete with attached photo of the back of the driver’s head, and nobody would bat an eyelid.

We truly live in the future, and that’s pretty fucking awesome.

Anyway, I’m cooking and I would like to share this with you. Not the meal itself, you understand, since
a) It’d be cold by the time it got to you
b) I’m totally not making enough for anyone else, and I want this for myself. My food. Back off. Grrr.

The recipe I am going to share with you all now is for a dish I melodramatically named “Devil Chicken”. Now I’m sure there are spicier meals, but I’m a real wuss about that shit. I’m also sure that there’s a dish or two called Devil Chicken before now, but that doesn’t seem to stop people when they’re making super-heroes so it’s not going to stop me. This here is [i]modern age[/i] Devil Chicken. It’s edgy, gritty, and covers mature themes; it’s most definitely not your father’s Devil Chicken. If it were he’d probably let you have a piece, but it’s not, so keep your filthy paws to yourself.

Ingredients

red curry paste
rice milk
chicken (maybe diced, whatever)
sweet chilli sauce
chinese five spices (can you even get another kind of five spices?)
some rice
mushrooms
carrots, if you want

Method

So, the key bit is the sauce. Grab some red curry paste. A teaspoon if you’re feeling a bit wussy, perhaps three big ones if you’re feeling proper fucking hard or whatever. Add to that a bit of five spices. I don’t know how much, maybe half a teaspoon? Don’t go overboard, that shit’s strong. Also, some of the sweet chilli sauce, pour that in until you think there’s probably enough and you’re bored waiting for it to drip out the bottle. Now, stick that all in one of those little Ikea glasses with the really narrow rings all around it and fill it up with rice milk and stir it. Stick it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so, so that it’s all hot and miscible, then stir again.

Dude, you totally should have put the rice on by now. Fucking put the rice on.

Right, so the veggies. Really, you can probably do whatever veggies you want with this, just remember that the meat’s the main show, it’s not like we live in some third world country where nobody can afford meat. I just did mushrooms with it before, but I’m doing some carrots with it tonight too, we’ll see how that goes. Just cut those fuckers up small, so they don’t overshadow the chicken.

Yeah, the chicken. Dice the chicken, but not so small that you can’t cut it in half again while you’re eating it (in case you’re like “whoa, this shit is spicy, I need to eat less with each mouthful”). I bought some diced chicken today to make it easier, it looks about the right size, but maybe squarer than I’d like. I like my chicken in kind of strips, you know?

Now, slap the chicken and the sauce in a big fucking wok on moderate heat – ideally, not so much that it sizzles right away, you want this to be tender. When the chicken seems pretty cooked then slap in the veggies and whack the heat up so it sizzles now. Don’t cook the veggies too long. If you’re doing carrots they should still have some crunch to them. Just to be on the safe-side, cut the biggest bit of chicken in half and make sure it’s white all the way through. Nobody wants to dies from bad chicken, it’s pretty much the lamest way to go.

And voilá, as they say in France. Serve the stuff up on a bed of that rice (which you totally put in at the right time and didn’t forget about) and if you’re a real pussy, have a glass of that rice-milk handy to cool your baby-pink tongue.

In the year 2525~

Published on 02/04/2007 in CW and everything. 1 Comment

Actually, maybe more like 2025? I will leave that to the futurists.

I stayed at home today to look after Helen, she’s really sick. She seems chirpier, however, if not any healthier. Anyway, in lieu of anything interesting happening, I shall copy/paste something I wrote last night instead of doing any reading for marketing.

———————————

I like watching people.

No, not in a creepy way, in an ethnographical kind of way (I’d cool, I’ll wait if you need to look that up) – you can tell a lot about someone from just watching them walk by.

Like, you might see someone keep glancing at something that’s not there. You know nothing’s there because they always look in the same direction, regardless of where they’re facing. It’s not a whole-head-moving thing, just an eyeball glance, and they always seem kind of anxious. They’ll be checking their email for a delivery confirmation, eager to know if you got that thing they sent you. Maybe they sent a message they shouldn’t have, or perhaps it’s the new proposal to Steve to present to the board tomorrow. Sure, there are extensions to make sure you’re alerted to them the same way you are to actual mail, but even then it’s hard to un-learn the behaviour when you’re anxious. Like glancing deliberately at the icon can make it update differently somehow (which it could, actually, until a couple of years ago under Windows anyway).

These last couple of months Windows users have been sticking out like a sore thumb. Everyone who dutifully grabbed last month’s crucial updates (and let’s face it, who’d dare not to?) twitches slightly every seven steps. Something to do with the new, more secure garbage collection routines, I don’t know. They’re working on it, of course, but honestly? I’m not sure anyone minds too much. Windows users are a hardy sort, they’ve been putting up with stuff like this for years now and it’s nothing compared to some of the more news-worthy bugs. Hell, last year there was a solid week in which none of them could jump. Thankfully jumping is a little-used skill in the modern world, but there were a couple of high-profile accidents before a patch surfaced.

Linux users are more subtle. The dead give-away is when you actually try and talk to one, of course. Vocal communication’s not really been worth bothering with since kernel 12.4, when the community embraced a set of extensions from an enterprising young Thai kid. Effectively, they’re all telepathic, every man jack one of them. Other systems are more or less interoperable now, though not so polished, so the Linux kids only really have to engage their mouths when speaking to someone like me, without anything running on top of their brain (or under it, whatever – a precise metaphor eludes me). As such, there’s this kind of pause, as they remember what the muscles are for. In the worst cases, the early adopters who haven’t spoken for upwards of two years, it can be like conversing with a deaf person. What with that, and the now-traditional smell, I don’t talk to Linux folks unless I have to.

Sometimes you’ll see someone walking in some bizarre counter-intuitive fashion. They’re those early-adopters again (which at least makes them easy to avoid), beta-testing new locomotion algorithms or something. Efficiency nuts, always striving to shave that last extra watt/meter off their walk to the coffee place. Which, if it’s Starbucks, will be totally mac-user free. Something about the new payment system requires some Windows-only security protocols. The linux kids have reverse-engineered it, of course, but the mac guys are stuck drinking in Cafe Nero, at least for the time being. They’re really cashing in on it there: iCoffee is now their best-selling blend. It’s French.

Speaking of mac users, they’re pretty easy to spot too – it’s in the walk. They’re not like the early adopters mind you, the mac walk is one of elegance, and just a little bit of “I’m better than you”. At first it doesn’t look too different to any other walk, but then you look closer. Every tiny movement is governed by Apple’s new “core-motion” engine. There was a big noise when it was announced – apparently hand-coded under the supervision of Italian choreographers – and while I doubt it’s as efficient as whatever the beta-testers propel themselves with it sure is elegant; I gather it’s nigh-on impossible to get acting work without it.

what’s your favourite colour?

Published on 01/04/2007 in everything and pictures. 1 Comment

I helped Helen dye her hair yesterday. It was pretty fun, but hair dye smells awful.

Anyway, I’m dating a redhead right now, which is a particular weakness of mine. Personally, I blame the media.

It wasn’t a one-step process though, since Helen’s naturally a pretty dark brown. So we had to make her blonde first! Or, as it turned out, a kind of washed-out ginger.

Now while I’m sure before and after photos will be easy to acquire from Helen herself, I doubt she’ll be too keen to see the “during” spread about.

Eeeeeyes right~

Also: while the management feel I perhaps have more useful things to do with my time, a Core 2 Duo machine doesn’t fucking break a sweat running those animations. It uses about 4% of one core, according to the activity monitor. God dammit I want a new mac!