dullneon : “evidence of things not seen” – the cautiously written, occasionally pointless & templated monthly archives

We’re too young to fall asleep
Too cynical to speak
We are losing it
Can’t you tell?

My Iron Lung from the exhiliratingly unpredictable Radiohead album, The Bends.

Some might like it, but I find this USB memory stick designed by Guido Ooms rather repulsive. It has a corny humour value to it but after the ha-ha dies down, there’s really nothing beautiful about it.

It’s really not something I’d stick into any of my computers.

Also called panphobia, it refers to the fear of everything. This site has everything that refers to a fear word, though some, like Sovietophobia, sound quite bizarre.

Robert Hunt’s Teralab is a documentation of his science experiments which he conducts/conducted in his lab at home. His X-Ray gallery of (mostly electronic) objects is simply fascinating!

Edward Sudentas also has a fascinating collection of X-Ray pictures.

The new Renault Mégane has a viral piece that revolves around an insulting donkey.

I am not the biggest fan of wooden things, but the Legna Pendant Lamp is one sweetly designed piece of minimalist lighting that would look great in almost any living space.

Google’s auction of advertising space in select magazines is reportedly a dismal failure.

Build your own VW and then give it a virtual spin with Helga in your passenger seat. A nicely executed site, though the video gets a little choppy.

Before becoming a designer and all, in a previous life I was kind of involved in IT (in a very loose sense). Reading a Joyent tech guy’s experiences about buying severs & storage almost exactly mirrors whatever experiences I had with purchasing equipment back then. Going direct than through VARs (who sometimes forget to bring the V) always seemed to bring more joy to the projects at hand, as well as to bank balances.

Spike Lee has lots of fun poking racial stereotypes while crafting an excellent old fashioned bank heist movie with a twist, Inside Man, aided in no small part by a stellar cast.

You’ll find it hiding in shadows
You’ll find it hiding in cupboards
It will walk you home safe every night
It will help you remember

From Blue Light, on Bloc Party’s outstanding debut album Silent Alarm.

When Bloc Party dropped the ‘k’ in ‘Block’ to derive their name, it acquired an aesthetically pleasing quality to it when you saw it and lost nothing when you pronounced it. When the local rock band, The UnXpected, dropped an ‘e’ and stepped up the ‘x’ from what was originally a proper English word, it just looks inarticulate. But their music is a different story.

Their music, my friends, is just excellent. When they get in gear, they completely rock the roof off the joint. Their gig is a tight set of rock music covers and original tracks on Thursdays at Wala-Wala. The very hot & feisty frontwoman, Shirlyn Tan, is a fabulous performer & instantly makes me forget the disappointment of seeing the band name in pseudo-StudlyCaps.

[ Update: And I get mocked quite comprehensively for my spelling deficiency. And thanks to me messing up the drummer’s real indentity, Brennen is rather upset. ]

ASCII-O-Matic is one sweet program made in Flash (and some server-side program) that converts pixels in a 60px × 50px JPG file and spits out its ASCII equivalent. Nice!

As part of Creativity Magazine’s 20th anniversary thing, they did a video of Lee Clow & Alex Bogusky kind of interviewing each other.

The introductory video clip opens with Lee Clow saying “We’re in one of the ugliest, most offensive, most intrusive businesses on the planet”. It is at that point I somehow realised the page I was on had 4 similar banner ads from the same organization in differing sizes, shouting at me from three sides of the browser window. How’s that for being ugly and intrusive?

I watched V for Vendetta without any prior knowledge of the comic’s storyline and thought it was great. The moment I got near a computer, I read about the actual plot in the graphic novels, and could almost hear faint groans from the legion of dedicated fans. As vastly different as the movie is from the comic (though some excellent lines were used verbatim), the greatest achievement of the screenplay probably is that it preserved the power of the idea of the comic itself - that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

Watch the whale of an explosion, which the news reporter describes as “the blast [that] blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds”. You don’t get alliteration like that nowadays on TV, do you.

“But design is about everything” is the conclusion of an excellent write-up on ‘being a designer’ by Michael Bierut on the Design Observer.

The curious properties of the number 153.

Confusion sprung up from devotion
A halo that covers my eyes
It sprung from this first estrangement
No one have I ever despised

Everything’s Gone Green, available on New Order’s pre-1987 collection of singles, Substance.

Almost everybody has seen the Microsoft iPod packaging parody. But not everybody knows that the author(s) of this video were staff from Microsoft itself. Apparently the marketing people wanted to challenge the packaging design people during an internal. It’s actually quite surprising to see a company of Microsoft’s size being able to laugh at itself (and hopefully being able to rectify their shortcomings). This has got to be the coolest thing I have found out about Microsoft in a while; a great PR move on their part for quietly letting the secret out.

Randomly popped by ‘blogfather’ mrbrown’s site today and discovered his podcast for March had a condom manufacturer sponsoring it. I guess this confirms the mrbrown show is really a labour of love, which couldn’t be protected from sponsorship.

That wasn’t really that funny, now was it?

If you ever need a cool click sound for the “Skip Intro” button in your next big Flash splash screen project, you should really have a look at elevator53. Seriously, they have a very nice site with some very well-finessed, cool, contemporary audio samples which are available for sale — they even have a free section for us freeloaders to hoard samples from.

For all the late nights, when it’s pointless going home at 5am when you know you have to be back at your desk before 8am, the SELK’BAG sleeping bag would be very useful to have around in the office. Despite the promised mobility, going to the john while being in one of these sleeping bags looks a little hard to achieve.
[Via Gizmodo]

Second Life is a virtual world with a sort of self-sustaining universe (a metaverse, in actual fact). In this world, some bunch of fans created a Second Life U2 concert, complete with audio overlaid from a U2 concert in Boston and a speech on poverty by Bono.

Looks like we’re getting ever closer to Snow Crash in real life…

Jeffrey Zeldman finally gives up hand rolling his HTML in favour of WordPress. He also chronicles why he switched, much to the WordPress founding developer’s delight. It is such a great endorsement to have, especially when Matt spends a lot of time on what essentially is free software.

When I read about all these new-fangled publishing software, I feel like a Triassic-era dinosaur for still using MovableType 2.6 from almost three years ago. Though it’s tempting to give these new toys a spin, I have no plans to fix what ain’t broke (and I’ve also had the experience of screwing it all up once).

This is the funniest thing I have read all week — about an Apple switcher who was hesitant to do so because of the ‘aesthetics’ involved.

I was very wary to cross this line, convinced that once I owned an Apple product, I’d have to start typing all in lowercase, wearing scarves indoors, and listening to a lot of Belle & Sebastian. I’m aware that this is my own skewed stereotype, because about 90% of the people I know and love own Macs, and not one of them makes me choke on twee. Clearly, this is all in my own head, but it loomed very large in there: it made perfect sense to me that I could not own an Mac simply because I like dive bars and men who don’t put product in their hair…

…I think a lot of this comes from the annoying iPod commercials, and just the interior of the Apple store itself — it’s all brightly-lit and full of right angles, and free of clutter or any human involvement, like an IKEA catalog fucked Annette Bening. I do not feel comfortable in the Apple store; I feel like I should lint-brush my clothes.

You don’t have to put up a fight
You don’t have to always be right
Let me take some of the punches
…for you tonight

Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own, probably one of Bono’s most heartfelt moments on U2’s most recent album. And probably everyone’s heartfelt support goes out to the family of the band member who are dealing with a serious illness.

A few months back, after showing my book to a well-respected & much awarded ECD at a Big Agency, I was labeled a ‘creative generalist’ — a breed of creatives, I was told, that was almost disliked and generally shunned by the specialists at many a Big Agency. (He said it without any ill intent or malice at all, but I digress…)

Steve Hardy’s Creative Generalist provides much food (and links) for thought for generalists, specialists and everyone in between.

A prominent corrective fluid brand, along with its agency, asked our favourite Ad-rag to remove references to (poorly done) scams that weren’t approved. The censoring was almost like applying corrective fluid itself to a website… what a great web strategy that is so ‘on brand’ and ‘on message’! This whole censoring fiasco is now spreading around the web — you could never plan for an online strategy like this, even if you tried.

Get the full story at the Consumerist.

Tom Waits For Nobody (designed by Ferret).

I first started tinkering with computer hardware more out of necessity than curiousity, when I learnt how to upgrade an Intel 80486SX processor to an AMD 5x86 processor to prolong the life of some unbranded DIY computer back in 1995. Since then, I have been through a couple of processors and several different brands of motherboards.

Despite their price, I have always preferred Asus motherboards, and haven’t experienced any problems whatsoever so far. But with the ABIT brand of motherboards, I have experienced nothing but comprehensive arse luck. Twice I’ve used their products – an NF7 sometime ago and a KD7A recently – and both experiences ended in unexpected & unusual hardware failures. While everyone else has a perfectly workable machine with this reputable and relatively budget-friendly motherboard manufacturer, I just don’t know why I’m ABIT unlucky.

All I can say about the simulated realism here is… Fwoah!.

Pure brilliance - “Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface”

Aston Martin, Lotus, BMW, and once even Audi, have had some of their most beautiful cars featured in James Bond movies of old, my personal favourites being the crushingly timeless Aston Martin DBS V8 Vantage (pictured above) from The Living Daylights & the Aston Martin DB5 (which was last seen in Goldeneye). In the upcoming Bond movie, our suave agent will be in a car chase of some sort in a Ford Mondeo, and it seems Ford paid a fortune for it.

So much for the brand we once knew as James Bond …

After analysing a billion documents, Google Code spills the beans on popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata found in documents on the web.

The question was asked and some real fiery comments followed.

Like the Dust Brothers before them, The Crystal Method take a crack at scoring for a movie. The soundtrack to London (the movie stars the hot, hot Jessica Biel) has 8 tracks by the Meth duo and 6 tracks from other artistes (including an excellent track from Evil Nine). It’s a pretty good album by itself — London is one movie I would want to watch, if only to find out how the soundtrack unfolds on screen.

A good, fun timewaster brought to you by the folks at Veer where you can build your own world, with some heavy eBoy style isometric-ism.

Apple released a slew of new products yesterday, the highlight of which is probably the iPod HiFi. I think it looks tacky, ordinary and even downright soporific. But then again I probably am too much of a deluded audio snob to ever buy speakers from a computer company. (I don’t even think much of the MP3 decoding ability of iTunes/iPod, but that’s a rant for another day.) What is interesting among the new Apple products is the new Intel-powered Mac Mini — Apple proclaims/admits them to be up to 5 times faster than the older G4-powered ones. While its great to have speedy Macs now, it only shows how deeply inferior & terribly slow the older PowerPC line of processors really was towards the end of its product cycle.

• Thievery Corporation gush over their Apple software.
• Greg Storey details the interface design process when designing Ma.gnolia.
• How a sketch moves to screen at 37Signals.