New G5 Ad

Power Mac G5 ad.

I saw this ad on tv last night for the first time. It’s very very slick, and like all the other Apple ads, makes you salivate in/on your seats.

Australia Lags in Tech Commercialisation

Australian companies have long prided themselves on their highly inventive nature and global reputation as early adopters of new technology. But Australia’s track record in commercialising technical know-how on the global stage is lamentable. Australia is yet to produce a globally significant technology company, and risks falling behind rivals in Europe and Asia as a centre of technical development

Lazy Monday Links

It’s a lazy monday, the best way to start a lazy 4 day week. My reasons for laziness are:

a) Both our project managers are away for a week! (They are a couple, it has pros and cons…)

b) I’ve finished some major-ish work 1 week ahead of schedule!

c) I have Friday off as a personal day! (Personal day = a day off every month, with pay given to every employee at my work in lieu of pay rise they can’t afford.)

Links are of pretty visual stuff, illustrations and design and the like. Oh and one design conference:

Insect: requires a Flash Player
Kurt Halsey Frederiksen: gorgeous toony style paintings
Craig Phillips: Sydney based sometimes comic artist
James Jean: gorgeous paintings
Repless Abandon: Canadian illustration collective
Lounge72: design portal
DiGiT Expo 2003: design conference in Sydney 18th Sep – 20th Sep
Art | Eye 2003: nice design and illustration portfolio

It’s GIF You Fuck-Tard!

Here’s a guy (or juy?) with his priorities straight. He’s arguing that the GIF file extension is pronounced with a soft g like giraffe, not the hard g as in great loon or go fuck yourself, or get over it! What the hell do geeks know about the english language anyway!

Gerk!

RSS to E-Mail

You can never have too much e-mail of the news variety and, as I’m very slack about checking my favourite sites for updates, I’ve found BlogStreet‘s Info Aggregator to be quite the nifty tool.

It’s an RSS-to-IMAP service that lets you receive and read RSS feeds in your favourite mail client, delivering all the latest news and blog posts directly to your mailbox.

There’s also a handy RSS Generator for those sites that don’t have an RSS feed available.

eBay Blacks Out

A power outage struck a Qwest Communications facility that hosts many of eBay’s servers, rendering its services inaccessible for far longer than the reported three hours

Gender Genie

This amusing chunk of software claims to be able to pick the gender of an author of a piece of text with an accuracy of 80%. However, the stats for the site reveal an accuracy of only 50% and my tests on the system found that it got it wrong more often than not. It kept dithering on my gender, so I think it just takes a pot shot rather than using any real science

Nokia To Acquire Sega Online Unit

Nokia has manoeuvred to the cutting edge of the video-game industry by agreeing to acquire Japanese gamemaker Sega’s online gaming subsidiary, Sega.com. Nokia plans to integrate Sega’s technology, enabling groups of gamers to compete against one another, into its N-Gage gaming phone

Worm Relations

The Xenoturbella, an enigmatic worm that resides in the mud at the bottom of a Swedish fjord, is identified as mankind’s long-lost relative, after being written off for years as an obscure mollusc

Thinking Outside the Square

Railway officials in Wakayama, a largely rural prefecture in western Japan, racked their brains for months for a way to keep wild deer from running onto train tracks and getting killed. Finally, inspiration struck: scare them off by spreading lion dung along the tracks