sleepinginmyhead

google doodle = firefox

Google like to mess with their logo, which is cute. Every year they hold a competition for 5-16 year old kids to redraw their famous masthead on a theme of their choice. This year Sophie Redford won with her impressive version entitled 'Planet Earth', but I'm struck by how much the front end of her piece looks like the logo for Mozilla Firefox, one of Google's main competitors in the browser wars. Conspiracy alert!......or something.

Ted's half titles

I'm not about to speak ill of the wonderful TED, but I visited their site today and was struck by the problems encountered when shortening content titles. Let me explain: the TED homepage has small images showing the most recent or popular talks which enlarge when rolled over. As a result, the titles of the talks are often truncated. I saw one titled 'Sunitha Krishnan's fight against sex', which seemed a little unsporting. It's only when you roll over the image that the full title of 'Sunitha Krishnan's fight against sex slavery' is revealed, which now makes her talk understandable. Other titles on the homepage today are: 

"Gordon Brown on global ethics vs"

"Andrea Ghez: The hunt for a"

"Cameron Carpenter's dizzying improv on the"

"Mallika Sarabhai: Dance to change the"

"Shashi Tharoor: Why nations should pursue"

etymology wednesday : party

Simple one today, but it's my office christmas party tonight, so 'party' seems an obvious choice. 'Party' comes from the feminine past participle of 'partir' meaning 'to divide' (as in parting your hair, pulling apart etc.) Around the eighteenth century, the word became used to denote a group of people pulled to one side for some specific purpose, such as hunting, or in tonight's case: drinking.

How things move, how people move

This is Ella, the three year old child of my good friend Warren. Recently, whilst at a meal, she entertained herself with his iphone. The app was a simple 'trace the letter' affair, and she happily used her finger to draw the letters on the screen. This comes as something of a stark reminder to those of us involved in the design of consumer electronics, that children are growing up expecting things to be like this. It's all very well sitting around in meetings discussing how your company is going to incrementally change, but we must remember that the assumptions and attitudes of the population are changing faster than we can ever imagine. The iphone has only been available for a little over 120 weeks, yet touch screens are now an expected norm. More importantly though, the gestural interface memes that are associated with the iphone interface are even more prevalent. Many times I've put a touch screen device in front of someone, and watched them try to pinch zoom, or swipe for the next picture. It's exciting to be involved in the world of technology, but remember that the kids starting university next September were born in 1992, they don't care how we used to live, they care about how we're going to live.

the olympic flame

You go your whole life thinking one thing, then you suddenly found out it's not what you'd expected. The Winter Olympics starts in Vancouver in 67 days, but I hadn't realised until today that the olympic flame was actually carried from Greece for each games. I assumed that the torch relay was something of a press piece, but it turns out that the flame never goes out from Athens to it's destination. The team seems to spend a great deal of effort to get the flame there without it going out too. Just look at the fancy setup for the flight, with the flame being split across multiple miners lamps in a swanky safety rig. 

I bet it's been extinguished at least once though, not that they'd tell you. The fantastic 'Big Picture' blog has a nice roundup of the torch relay images if you're interested.

Hertzian space, round my place

This is highly aligned to a recent post by Timo on the nearfield blog, but it's something I've been thinking about for quite some time now, pertaining to our notion of 'home' and personal space. My Nokia N97 is set up to automatically connect to my home Wi-Fi when in range. As I'm walking up my street in the evening, I get about 100 yards from my door and my phone chirps a 'connected to Wi-Fi' message at me. My notion of being 'home' has slightly changed because of this. A cute invisible boundary has been set up based around the transmitter radius of my Wi-Fi antenna. I plan to plot this at some point and draw a chalk marker in the road.

Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby wrote very eloquently on this 'hertzian space', particularly related to baby monitors. What's particularly interesting is that due to the intangible nature of these boundaries, our 'personal' spaces overlap. I'd love to plot the entire street if possible, but that would require an uncomfortable level of interaction with my neighbours. These overlapping spaces are super clear when I try to look for my wifi from a laptop. People give all sorts of data away simply in the name of their network. Whilst none of these has been particularly interesting in my experience, this one made me smile:

 

etymology wednesday: canary

Many people know that the Canary Islands and the canary (bird) are linked, but often the link is made incorrectly. The Canary Islands were the first to bear the name not vice versa, due to the large dogs which lived there. The islands were named the Insula Canaria, from the latin 'canis' meaning 'dog' (see 'canine' teeth also). The little yellow birds also inhabited the islands, so became known as canaries from around 1655.

a nice approach from the sun

The Sun is a terrible UK tabloid, described by Russell Brand as "like a good friend, a good friend that you can't fucking stand". We have all read about how newspapers are dying, and circulations are dropping in favour of an online subscription model, so the new TV spot from the Sun is a smart choice. Now if they could only do something about the content, we might be interested...

what's pharrell up to?

 

I'm all for folks embracing the term 'artist' in all it's forms, but seriously Pharrell, what's with the chairs?

the mobile studio

I forgot to mention, when I was on my way to Tokyo I shared a flight with Franz Ferdinand (the band, not the deceased Archduke). They were in the lounge when I arrived, and I thought that was my brush with fame for the day, but when I piled onto the plane they sat all around me, with Alex Kapranos in front. He was making music on the flight which was interesting. Just for the stat fans (hello Jase): He uses Spotify, and listened over and over to 'Previous Condition' by Lung Leg (spotify link). He then used a Korg Nano Key USB keyboard to create his composition in Logic Pro 9.

Sorry if I sound like a stalker, but it's a 12 hour flight, you notice things.

Etymology wednesday: Milliner

A milliner is the fancy name for a hat maker, but it's true origin means 'a vendor of fancy wares, especially those made in Milan' (it could well have been 'Milaner'). In the 1450's the Italian city was famous for straw works, fancy goods, ribbons, bonnets and cutlery, but by 1530 the word simply meant 'one who sells women's hats'.

new feature! S.I.S.

I work in London's Soho, a bustling cauldron of advertising, prostitution, TV and retail. As such it is frequented by a great deal of people who could be considered 'famous'. These famous types tend to come into town in the week, as they either a) have business or b) want to avoid being spotted by visitors at the weekend. That can't stop me though, so I've decided to keep a record of the famous types I see when popping out for my lunch. I've also decided to keep score too, here's how it works: 

10/10 would be a Barack Obama, 1/10 would be the guy who played Beppe in Eastenders. 

I'll try to give context wherever possible too, and perhaps a photo, although don't hold your breath, I'm not the 'photo a celebrity' type. So without further explaination, I'll begin.

SIS: Suggs from Madness, having a pint outside a pub on Berwick street. 4/10

etymology wednesday

WIG: Today's etymological endeavour is a long tale for a short word, the origins of 'wig' are tortured indeed. To begin, we need to start with the word 'peruke' meaning a 'natural head of hair', which finds it's own origins from the Latin 'pilus' or 'hair'. Over time, this word became corrupted through 'perruck' and 'perwyke' to become 'periwig', meaning 'one who wears a wig professionally', such as a lawyer. This was later shortened to 'wig' in around 1675. The Irish colloquial phrase 'wigs on the green' means a fight or a rumble, as wigs are likely to become detached during a fight, which leads to the contemporary phrase 'to flip one's wig', meaning 'behave hysterically'.

the quest for Nikka Pokka

I've just arrived back from Tokyo a little jetlagged but OK. I'll be posting a few more pictures and text over the coming days, but I thought I'd start with this. Whilst there, our research clients asked us to undertake a personal quest and document it, in order to begin our immersion into a different culture. I shot a small video documenting mine, which is above, and yes 'Nikka Pokka' does come from the english 'Knickerbocker', etymology fans...

now that's a promotion

Somewhere in Redmond, there was a meeting to discuss how to promote the launch of Windows 7:

"OK Tom, but we're known around the world as this big evil american corporation, and I think it harms our reputation, so we should try something different"

"How about a tie-in with Burger King? They did that for the Transformers movie?"

"Hmm I don't think so Tom, not sure it sends out the right signals, plus all that stuff about obesity might not reflect well on our brand"

"Stop being a pussy Brad, Oh oh oh oh! We could put seven burgers in it! for Windows 7! Best idea ever!"

"Errr, I'm not sure Tom..."

"Nah, that's what we're doing, I'm going on break....."