Rik Abel

With Gliding Action...

Oh, and I also picked up a Jesus Action Figure from the lovely Zeitgeist shop in Clapham. He has poseable arms and gliding action. Excellent. Will make a great 'Secret Santa' gift for my work colleague. Although I may keep it for myself...

More fun/ridiculous stuff, including Pig Catapaults, over at www.mcphee.com.

Technical Glass

Speaking of web design, the other day I uploaded the freshly redesigned website for The Technical Glass Company, redesigned according to web standards, natch. Sorting out the last few buglets at the moment, but any comments would be very useful. For reference, here is the previous version, replete with nested tables, font tags galore and a dodgy colour scheme, designed by yours truly back in a previous life. In fact, it was my first professional website design project, not included some interface designs for Anglian Water's intranet site which were never seen by the world at large, thank goodness (think bevelled buttons frenzy). Hopefully it shows some degree of improvement in my design skillz. heh.

I've not had much opportunity to work on freelance projects, what with being highly busy in my day job at Firebox.com (which I love, if I haven't mentioned that before), but I am happy to see almost daily innovations in CSS-based design, such as robust ways of doing rounded corners which can get us away from the overly boxy look of early all-CSS sites. I look forward to trying out some of these new techniques on projects in the new year, including the massively exciting standards-based redesign of Firebox.com itself (currently an ugly mess of nested tables under the hood). That is, if I'm not already know as the "Steering Wheel Bongoes Billionaire" by then... Wish me luck!

Black + Blum

So, after going home to search for said ring, to no avail, I took the afternoon off and went to Oxo Tower to do some Christmas Shopping and research. I dropped in on Black + Blum, who make some rather marvellous, ingenious and inexpensive things and got myself a "Jimmy" Magnetic Keyring Bottle Opener and "Seed" light shade, and I'm sorely tempted to go back to get a "Time Square" magnetic blackboard/clock thing.

Whenever I wander around Oxo Tower I find myself overwhelmed by the urge to be a product designer when I grow up. I love designing websites, don't get me wrong, but there must be something more rewarding in seeing your imaginings take on corporeal form and exist out in the real world, rather than being a glowing bunch of pixels on a screen. I used to enjoy getting brochures etc back from the printers back in the day, and imagine the joy of seeing the first prototypes of your designs must be the same, only more so.

I hope to continue making websites and doing web design, but hope that I can make a move towards inventing and creating real-world artifacts in future as well. How hard can it be? Clearly a world that doesn't already have "Steering Wheel Bongoes" needs me!

Ring disaster

Yesterday I lost my wedding ring. It appears to have just fallen off my finger, somehow. I never take it off and it has never shown any signs of falling off before. Hmph. I am, as you might imagine, rather miffed. I am hoping it will turn up in the office at some point - the only time I can think it might have come off is when I took my gloves off yesterday morning after skating to work. Extensive searching of the area around my desk has failed to turn anything up. I am really quite distraught - I seem to have a habit of losing rings, having lost my engagement ring. Twice. But I used to take them off all the time.

So, if you find a gold wedding band with a crescent moon and sun stamped into it, you know what to do...

: (

USB Xmas Tree

Bit of a work plug this...if your desk is lacking a little in festive spirit and you have a spare USB port, why not get yourself a geeky-but-cool USB Xmas Tree? It's the Ultimate Seasonal Bauble. Heh.

Platform

I've just finished reading Platform by Michel Houllebecq, which was excellent. Maybe not quite as good as Atomised (which I haven't actually finished yet) but still very thought provoking, provocative and full of sex scenes which are actually well-written and 'erotic'. I was reading it on the tube the other day and saw that a girl in the same carriage was also reading it - we gave one another a kind of sly, knowing look. It's that kind of book. Destined to become a cult classic, I think.

Redeye

Wow, they have remade, sorry 'reimagined' Battlestar Galactica. The wife will be pleased. Let's hope they don't show the same scene of the fighters launching down the tunnel five times every show, like in the original.

I didn't actually see many episodes of the original, but I did read the novelisation while living in Brancaster, Norfolk. Such was the dearth of reading matter. I think I also read the screenplay to "The Exorcist" in the same period. I was eight, if you were wondering. No wonder I'm so twisted now…

Fabric of Reality

Ah, Fabric was excellent on Saturday - Ricardo Villalobos and Richie Hawtin playing back-to-back for seven hours in Room 1 - paradise on earth. Except it was very rammed and one could only dance in a crabby fashion with arms pressed to one's side. Unless one was on the guest list and had access to the VIP bar, where things were a bit more roomy. Thanks Nick! Myself, Adrienne and Pier had a lovely time (the Stropharia Cubensis we munched earlier were not unrelated to this), and we left around 2.30am after a good boogie. The sound system at Fabric is just excellent - loud and punchy but somehow you can still talk to the person dancing next to you and be heard. Must be magic.

Villalobos' debut album, Alcachofa, is magnificent and is already probably my album of the year. He is Chilean-German and infuses his beautifully organic, curly, sad, dark, lovely minimal house with a latin inflection, constantly twisting the time signature like a Rubik's Cube. Read the review at Pitchfork and then buy it from Boomkat, because they are nice.

Psychedelicatessen

I was quite surprised upon reading the Guardian last saturday to see a big front-page article on the booming trade in selling Magic Mushrooms, which is perfectly legal if said mushrooms are fresh. Once dried, they somehow magically become a Class A drug, with all that entails. Law = Ass. The article went into some detail on where you can buy them, the different strains available, and so on, and mentioned that Lawyers, Architects and Policemen were customers. Yes, middle-class people, it's okay to munch on mushrooms! I expect the loophole will be closed sharpish, but how they can do that when magic mushrooms grown in abundance in the wild is anyone's guess.

FWIW, I'm a mycophile.

PixelBlocks

PixelBlocks are very cool indeed. Like Lego crossed with LiteBrite. I want!