Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Ban cluster bombs

Friday, May 23, 2008

Number crunching

It cost me more to buy a bunch of flowers than to get my bike serviced.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

NVCF 2008

This was good fun (as much fun as you can have in a barn full of decaying electronics, to say nothing of the punters); I think Keith P and myself have become part of the supporting cast as we have now attended most of the fairs since about 2001. I particularly enjoyed a chat with a man who services record-cutting lathes (as you can imagine, he is one of the very, very few people who do). Also
talked to a bloke who reckons he’s listened to more than 1,000 pairs of the iconic BBC LS3/5A loudspeaker. Not all at once mind you.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

HTML, over in a Flash

Should the newly-opened Flash format take over mainstream web development, forcing HTML into decline, then presumably the semantic web will be dead. There will end a notable experiment in creating a coherent system that ties the visual world of graphic design and typography with their fascinating subtlety of inflection to the editorial and data-centric, largely systematic world of structure; structured formats will simply become a gothic addendum to electronic data interchange as real users simply download endless binary files. Rather a pity.

At the same time I struggle to imagine how Flash usage can proceed without acquiring some notion that structure and visual form can align. Something, perhaps, driven by a markup language:

Dynamic text also has many formatting capabilities that static text does not have. These rich formatting capabilities are expressed as a subset of HTML text-markup tags.
(Source: Shockwave file format v.9 specifications)

But I don’t know much about Flash: the last time I looked it was for making little animations with.

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Shipleys’ advertise Seeking Inspiration conference at St Bride Library

I was pleased to see Shipleys’ in Charing Cross Road have the conference poster designed by Agata Wycichowska in pride of place on their front door; last weekend I was able to get a picture taken for the record, thanks to Toby. It’s a rather nice speciment of screenprinting with metallic ink (the poster, that is).

Friday, May 02, 2008

Reading Beer Festival 2008

Went along last night to this convivial event. The following were very nice:
Dr Hexter’s Healer, West Berkshire. Straightforward and accomplished bitter
Hoppit, Loddon. Bit like Lapsang Souchong crossed with stout
Doom Bar, Sharps. A tangy bitter for old time’s sake really
Medium Dry perry, Gwynt Y Ddraig. Very polished perry; rounded things off as far as I was concerned.