Mobile phones playing music on public transport. People answering phone calls in the cinema. Is common courtesy an outmoded concept, superceded by technology?

We’ve all sat there, angered and galled by arrogant, solipsist twats, playing tinny music from their phones.

There’s never a handy baseball bat when you need one, is there
Now it seems there may be salvation on the horizon - DMP or ‘Digital Manners Policy’.

Microsoft has recently filed a patent for DMP, which is intended to work similarly to the RFID (proximity activated) chips that we see in shop alarm systems, etc.. The idea being that public areas like hospitals, cinemas, aeroplanes and (i pray) public transport can automatically switch mobile devices into standby, flight or silent mode. Thereby avoiding the need for public beatings, ABH and destruction of personal property

http://arstechnica.com/…/manners-into-the-digital-age.html

Took a trip down to the Gloucester Cheese Rolling event near Cheltenham yesterday. Drenched, muddied and exhausted from half-running up the hill, we managed to squeeze through the crowd to catch the last official race.
There we a couple of unofficial (sans fromage) runs after that, so our voyeurism was sated and I got some great snaps

…or so says the New York Times.

An old friend of mine that i basically learned flash with - who had given up the coding life - recently emailed me to let me know that he was getting back into Flash (and AS3).
We were hacking code out back in the days when the flash world was rejoicing at being able to enter free-text code into the actions panel for the first time and emulating the new-fangled ‘event-driven’ stuff was the latest thing . He ‘got out’ just before AS2 really kicked in, so essentially he now has to make the leap from AS1 all the way to AS3. That’s gotta be more than just a minor shock to the system!

Anyway, good to have you back, fella! Look forward to seeing what you get up to

Well I suppose it had to happen. Guitar Hero came out and - although I truly believed I wouldn’t think much of it - I loved it.
GH 2 and now 3 - fully wireless on the 360, foot up on the coffee table, throwing horns at the end of every ‘performance’.

Quick glances between songs at the dusty guitar case in the corner and memories trickling back of past on-stage glories.
Before I know it I’m searching for drummers, basists and vocalists

Been playing with a couple of friends for a while now, writing new stuff and rehearsing - damn this is fun! Wish I knew why I left it so long before starting again!
Still - been learning some of the new stuff I’ve been listening to these days and it seems as though shit got turned up a notch with some of the riffs that bands are writing these days..

I totally remember a time when 90% of riffs I heard weren’t more than a couple of practices away from me nailing them. Now, I’m trying to learn some Lamb Of God tunes and damn, it’s hard stuff! No more getting away without using my pinky.. it’s full on, four finger, single note runs right in the middle of riffs!! That and the speed of the single and triplet/tremolo chugging is fucking insane.

Well hopefully I’ll get to play live again - nerve-racking the first few times, I remember, but ultimately fun. Keep an eye out for the flyers

Have had a recipe for Anzac biscuits sitting on the side in the kitchen form over a year now and I’ve been repeating the “I really must get around to that” mantra every time I see it.

Well, with a little help from a friend, I finally got some made.

First batch wasn’t too bad - a little greasy, but still quite tasty. Second batch was made in paper cupcake holders and ended up fused together.
Third batch was just an experiment really. Had some bananas that I hadn’t touched and were starting to go off, so I got mushing and off they went, into the mix

House ended up smelling of warm banana. Someone should really invent some air fresheners that smell of banana and bread and stuff like that!!

Was lucky this year
Come November 30th, I left work for the last time in 2007!!
Not back until the 2nd Jan and I’ve just had a great 3 weeks in Cape Town, South Africa with my good friend Mike.

We nipped out to see an old friend of ours, Andy and his wife Alex and along the way had some chilled times by the beach and ended up hiking up table mountain twice!

Anyway great trip, got to come back with a bit of colour to my usual pallid programmer skin and some fond memories.

Pics, as usual, on Flickr

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/0340229

Found this today.. Some super clever people with far too much time on their hands (and no doubt a whopping budget courtesy of the military) have been studying the sensations and brain activity attributed to feeling “close to God”.

Basically the idea is that their device stimulates the brain to induce the feeling that there’s an unseen ‘presence’ in the room. Wonder if they could modify it for use in cinemas with horror films.. Now that would be scary!

Was having a geek moment last night, musing on words and some of their design/use in language…

In particular, the word ‘exsanguinated‘ (drained of blood) - a nice happy thought for the evening, I know.
I suppose it must’ve come from a new US series I’d been watching, Dexter. It has cropped up there, so that hopefully assuages any suspicion of me having murderous tendencies - I don’t even own a blue suit… lucky or otherwise.

What I was thinking, however, is that people may argue: “Why bother learning that long word when you can just say ‘drained of blood’“.

Well, that’s where laziness kicks in and I draw a parallel to programming; When coding anything, similar tasks will appear in your code and it is good practice to avoid typing the same code again and again and instead use functions, procedures or subroutines to perform the common task. In the same way, in language we have some words that can simply condense several words or even a sentence into a single word. (hence the laziness)

‘Exsanguinated’ is perfect example of this, meaning that either spoken or written, both time and effort can be saved.

I suppose that once you get above the basic nouns and verbs, most words act as a kind of token/placeholder for more verbose definitions..

*Edit: 05-01-08*
Actually just realised that there’s more syllables in the single word than in the sentence, so it would be more effort when speaking.

Sometimes you climb a mountain and, weary from the effort, you stand up and take a good long look around. You soak up the view and, feeling exhausted but re-invigorated, you stand back and really appreciate your achievement.

I’d like to echo the sentiments above, but I’d just really like a few days to get to know my duvet again – possibly with some pottering around the house, catching up on some lapsed TV series, maybe even deflowering the copy of God Of War II that still remains untouched next to my dusty PS2. You never know, I may even go outside… drink alcohol… see this summer thing that everyone’s on about…

Bit of a monumental project, this one; the microsite for the new Jaguar XF - no less for the fact that three generations of the Global Beach Flash team were involved in the project.

In fact this project saw the majority of our senior agency staff pull together to bring this beast to life.
And quite a beautiful beast it is:

http://www.jaguarxf.com/