Researchers at MIT are developing a search engine for people using the web on slower net connections. The software will e-mail queries to a central server and receive the most relevant web pages from the search results by e-mail in a compressed form
Quentin Tarantino has persuaded his producers to release his latest movie, Kill Bill, in two instalments after finding it impossible to cut it down to less than three hours
Allegations are flying around the world as consumer groups battle printer makers over claims that some inkjets tell porkies about how much ink is really left in a cartridge
DSL Reports are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area and have been quite successful. More interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in the thread
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America is going for several notorious anti-abortionists necks and a famous cybersquatter in a case it has brought over nine domains it claims infringe its trademarks
Scientists hoping to clone prehistoric mammoths are preparing their first frozen DNA samples in a bid to revive the species
Remember those hours you wasted playing Star Control 2? Waste them again on *nix, OSX or Windows for free here.
A true story…
I went downstairs just now for my morning coffee, and encountered my colleague Lynn by the sugar bowl and cup of wooden sticks. She caught me yawning and asked if I had gotten enough sleep. I replied that I’d had plenty, as I’d forgotten to set my alarm and only awoken at 7.50 when the starlings in my ceiling began their morning peckings. (I imagine them with hardhats on jackerhammering through the roof in order to visit me and gain access to my morning weetbix. Anyway…)
Lynn told me that she had a similar thing happening at her house, but rather than helpful alarm starlings in the morning she had annoying rats in her roof, partying through to the wee hours.
‘That sucks’, I said.
‘Yes’, she replied, ‘But it’s only for the winter.’
‘Why do the rats only bother you in winter?’
‘That’s when my python hibernates.’
Like I said, a true tale of organic pest control…
Sigh! I’m currently working on a site redesign for company that shall remain nameless. A hand-full of people who are representing said company from the UK are over in our offices working with
me / us on the redesign. We’d previously set up an area where the client could view mockups on the web, but the distance and time difference was proving to be a hassle. They find it far more convienient to sit with me / over my shoulder, watching me change colours in photoshop while they um and ah over differing shades of blue, aqua and orange. I pushed for purple but apparently purple has expensive
connotations — or so I’m told.
I don’t think I need to explain how annoying and constrictive I find working in this way — I’ve done it before but only for say about ten minutes and with one other person, and once I’ve had to code html with the client and their programmers watching me. However these experiences failed to prepare me for about 4-5 hours straight of this without my morning coffee and in the presence of three other people, with another manager dropping in and out from time to time. The only coping strategy I could muster up was going into auto pilot mode, not caring about the stupid colour ideas being thrown around, you know like ones I know won’t work at all without going through the pain of mocking it up, or ones I had already come up with but were never shown to the client beacuse the project manager on my end decided that’s not what client-x wants
.
This project seems to be developing into a series of battles, I know that as this coporate design there are going to be comprimises — but this one seems to be a series of battles. So far I’ve won the icon battle with very little comprimise. All I had to do was knock back some shading and draw a bed. Done all happy now. But everything else seems up for grabs, (see colour scheme saga in previous paragraphs).
Of course all of the subsequent changes being made this week are subject to opinions of other stake holders back in the UK. Fucking brilliant isn’t it.
The colour battle continues tomorrow, and if I’m not as jaded as I am now about my job / chosen profession of the moment, I’ll right a funny entry for you all as a treat.
For the first time in three years something has happened in browser land. In fact, major events have started happening at a breathtaking pace
A young, female red wolf that scientists had hoped would pair with an older male on Bull Island was struck and killed by a car on in rural Awendaw earlier this week. The female, a 2-year-old named Echo, had been rejected by her intended mate, an 8-year-old male who has lived in the wild the past three years
Harvard has revoked its admission of Blair Hornstine, the prospective member of the Class of 2007 who made national headlines when she sued her school system to ensure she would be her high school’s sole valedictorian, following a widely-publicised report that Hornstine had plagiarised material in articles she wrote for her local paper
Russia’s only sniffer cat, hailed for its successes in the campaign against the bloody and lucrative world of caviar smuggling, has been run over and killed in a suspected contract killing
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Western Australia have created a robot that uses the neural impulses of rat brain cells to draw pictures
Daring Fireball is running an interesting article linking men’s wigs and web design, the problem being that the client can’t understand the concept of less is more
Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that’s who. And not just Zip disks, this guy ships entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks
A flotilla of rubber ducks about to beach on the shores of Nova Scotia after travelling the world for more than a decade is being hailed as more than just flotsam and jetsam by oceanographers
Finally remembered to bring a camera when taking the beasties for a run in the local off-leash area.
After several rainy weekends, last Sunday dawned very bright, but still bloody cold. The pods are far more interested in their Buster Cube than in the camera. The malamute, as usual, commandeers the Cube and noses it about the leave a trail of dog food — that the husky happily devours.
The run is a fair sized area and gives the dogs a lot of room to run about like mad creatures.
One of the problems with photographing dogs — either they won’t look at the camera or they get so close you have to clean dog saliva off the lens. Fun was had by all.
The last production line for the original Volkswagen Beetle is to close in Puebla, Mexico
If you thought mobiles couldn’t get more annoying, think again. Ringback tones personalise the ring, ring
sound that traditionally has covered the silence between the time that people enter digits and when the call is answered. I have to wonder at the thought that’s gone into this idea, because people have come to associate music with being put on hold and are likely to hang up on you
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