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A lot of excitement in the Meat Bracket. When I voted burgers and lamb were 50/50. Blimey. Also interesting to see, as Beeker's pointed out, that Vizu doesn't show a lot of intelligence in pointing you at other polls, assuming that since you've just voted on meat v meat you're now interesting in global affairs. Strange since, let's face it, they're currently hosting a lot of meat-based polls.
but it's so much nicer to come home.
Jonathan's raised the bar. I'm not sure I can compete with this. I'll have to have a go at the weekend but this seems too fast for me.
I'm representing bacon in Jared's Carnivore Project Meat Bracket, taking on the mighty Marcus and 'sasuage' so I thought I'd better make an effort and do a video. If you want to vote, go here and do so. I bet Tim Berners-Lee is dead proud of what we're doing with his internet.
UPDATE: This is the state of play with a few hours to go and 476 votes cast. If you've not voted, you should, the blogosphere is clearly poised on a knife edge.
I've been in Mallorca for a couple of days doing some stuff with Camper. This isn't a bad location for an offsite is it? And nice to find offsite catering featuring a real fire and waiters in white gloves. These Mallorcans know how to live.
The island is not over-endowed with wifi though. Hence spotty updates recently. Apologies for that. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, and I think I've carved out some time at the weekend to do all the School Of The Web stuff.
All this talk about buttons and simplicity reminded me of my favourite defunct brand of all time - My First Sony - a brilliant brand idea, but also a fantastic range of products. I have a number of bookmarked searches on ebay but this is the one that always cheers me up the quickest. These things are masterpieces, they're designed to be used by kids so they actually thought about how stuff should be used, they didn't just throw it all together and try to make it as small and black as possible. Many of them are genius, but my favourite is the alarm clock.
That entire big blue ring clicks round to move the alarm hand. Dead easy to use. The numbers are huge and legible. That big yellow button on top is the off thing. Easy to find. The radio tuning is simple analogue up and down. (Though it's broken, so I'm going to have to open it up some time.)
The best bit is that you can select how you'd like the alarm to sound; digital dog, digital chicken, digital train or digital er, digital thing. All of which are loud, grating and very en-wakening. Exactly what you want. (Actually they've got that same grainy, sampled, 80s crunch you get with an early Akai). Sometimes you want real buttons you can actually press. And you want them to do something silly. That makes for a great product.
Going to Kinetica (picture above is from kinetica) the other week reminded me about the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, specifically the work of Tim Hunkin, who will be a fondly remembered hero to many (which makes it sound like he's dead, he's not). He used to do a brilliant cartoon in The Observer called The Rudiments Of Wisdom, and that's now collected here. He made a fantastically quirky series called The Secret Life Of Machines - a lot of which has made it to YouTube. The piece where he demonstrates how video tape works with sticky tape and rust is typically, quietly brilliant. (And you can see almost every thing from the series here on google video.)
But the moment that caused my biggest grin while re-discovering Hunkin was finding that he's installed loads of his arcade machines on Southwold Pier. I'm especially excited about The Quantum Tunnelling Telescope.
I'm thinking this makes Southwold Pier the perfect winter weekend day-out destination. Anyone fancy coming along?
I was a little overwhelmed this morning. In a good way. I made 20 new badges for this week and they were all gone by 11.15. A bunch of new people. Too many for the table and too many for my pathetic note-taking to cope with. What nice people though, every one of them. Trying to guess everyone's name is just going to land me in trouble. So I won't. Here are some pictures.
It was excellent to see everyone, including some regulars like Henry and the entire Staufenberger organisation (which I think is a first). And now there's two highly collectible 'coffee morning' badges that Ben will never get his hands on, and you know how he likes to collect stuff.
Also exciting - a splendid turnout at the planning meeting in Bucharest, a mooted coffee morning in Edinburgh and ongoing coffee-based activity in Portland, Kansas City and places I've probably missed. Hurrah.
It didn't really occur to me to blog about iPhone, not because I wasn't interested, because I was, but because I assumed everyone else would blog about it and what could I possibly add?
But what if everyone thought that? then it wouldn't get blogged at all.
So I wonder if there could be an event so big that no-one would write about it.
There's a similar logic in there to that Yogi Berra saying "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.". My only iPhone thought; what will go in that space on the bottom right? Or are they leaving it empty because of, you know, design.