In what sounds to me like a personal demon roosting over reality — or at very least a case of misattributing the evils of materialism to design — Phillipe Starck says that he apologizes for the waste his design career has caused.
“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.”
Starck is mainly responsible for the interior design of some fine European hotels as well as an entire cadre of consumer products, from toothbrushes to citrus juicers to wrist watches.
While I do believe that what Starck is talking about is a more personal issue than meets the eye, I quite frankly don’t see design being dead. In fact, I think there’s quite an awakening to design across many consumer markets. I do agree with Starck, however, in saying that a new sub-domain of designers moving forward will indeed be diet consultants, lifestyle/wellness coaches, and personal trainers. For an increasing number, the issues most important to them are wellness, prevention and graceful aging.
Clifford Stoll, among many other things, is the most eccentric and energetic presenter I’ve ever seen. I can’t recall seeing so many topics (not) talked about, a real experiment to measure the wavelength of sound, and a valuable life lesson wrapped into a single presentation.
Like all things TED, this simply shouldn’t be missed. Better than any TV channel out there.
In the spirit of Dove’s Onslaught campaign, here’s a look at a 2007 Redbook cover featuring singer Faith Hill. Now, Mrs. Hill is an attractive woman, but if for one second you really believe the images in a high-gloss commercial publication, it’s about time you wake up. You’re being sold a bill of goods, which is bad to begin with. Holding women up to this artificial bar is another thing altogether.
Photoshop: the best and worst thing to happen to the notion of seeing is believing.
I see John Gruber is talking about the Flip Video Ultra Series. I have one, and I can attest that since getting it as a Christmas gift, I haven’t touched my $800 Canon Optura 40 camcorder that has 20x the features and capability.
In my office will soon hang a picture that espouses a “less is more” ideology. I think many people are coming around to this idea. In so many cases, what’s offered in “more” is outweighed by complexity and the fact that “more” is there for the sake of being “more.”
When it comes time to use these devices, “more” gets in the way. Less becomes more when it enables people to more effectively and simply use a device as it’s intended.
The Flip Ultra is about the size of a deck of cards. It runs on AA batteries, so there is no charging cable to haul around. The USB connector with which it connects to your computer smartly folds into the side of the device itself. The Flip is eminently pocketable. It is to larger video cameras what the point-and-shoot camera is to DSLRs.
You turn the device on by flicking a switch on the right-hand side of the camera. An audible chime tells you it’s ready to film, a state the Flip arrives at in about two seconds. To begin filming, you hit the big red button. To stop, you hit the big red button again. To delete a clip, you hit the trash button. You have 60 minutes of surprisingly high-quality video capacity and very good low-light performance.
Go. Have fun. The hardware gets out of the way entirely.
Downloading content is (almost) equally easy: the Flip Ultra shows up in Finder (on my Mac), and will prompt you to install and use the included 3ivx MPEG-4 5.0 Decoder QuickTime codec. This lets you do basic video edits and file operations within its own interface. I wish this were Universal Binary instead of PPC, though. The days of using Rosetta should be gone entirely.
But overall, make no mistake: it doesn’t get any easier than this. There are no cables, battery packs, or tapes to muck around with. If you shoot a few clips that you don’t like, you hit the trash button a few times and instantly free up capacity for additional video. Very nice.
I have only a few complaints: (1) the USB connector, while conveniently included and neatly tucked away, is short and forces an awkward orientation, at least on my MacBook Pro. I wish the connector swiveled so I wouldn’t have to jury rig my setup to get it to connect comfortably. (2) The Flip software for Mac is still PPC code, so it’s shamefully slow and clumsy on Intel Macs compared to its Windows counterpart. Where’s my Universal Binary? Finally, (3) given the Mac’s adeptness with video, I wish PureDigital included an easy way to download your shot video into iMovie without having to go though format conversion hassles. It’s not that big a deal, but still.
For about $150, you can get the Flip and help evolve the shooting of video into the same realm of ease and convenience as we have with photographs. No, the Flip won’t replace your high-zoot HD video camera that you bought to shoot your feature film with, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll quickly be using your Flip for any video task not eventually destined for a production studio.
I use Windows Vista at work, and while I find it decent, I don’t put it markedly above Windows XP. I used to think that SP1 would propel Vista into the ranks of serious operating systems, but so far, it looks like I’m wrong. So wrong, in fact, that when SP1 shows up in my MS autoupdate, I’m going to have to think very carefully before pulling the trigger.
Anecdote: Just today, I tried to save a JPEG file from the web. I specified the desktop as my download path, started the download, and then killed the tab that contained the image. I wanted to fetch the downloaded file for an email attachment, and it was nowhere to be found on my machine. Nowhere. I searched for 10 minutes and could find nothing.
Also, my Recycle Bin randomly disappears from my desktop. I have to go back into the Control Panel and re-instruct Vista to place the Recycle Bin on my desktop, thank you very much. This happens weekly.
See here, and pay attention to the comments. I think the time is upon us when we can cogently say that Windows Vista is starting to drive Mac sales. No tongue-in-cheek, and all kidding aside: the age of people actually wanting to use their computers instead of fuck with chipset drivers is upon us.
I can’t argue with a single thing Jack LaLanne says in this video. The coming trend is to eat natural foods, exercise vigorously, and live simply. I think we’ve lost our way, and no matter how affluent you may be, there is a movement afoot to get back to solid ground — for our health, quality of life, and happiness.
Rich displays of short-sightedness and zealous persecution (whoops, that was redundant) are almost always funny. Especially when someone goes with a guest to see the new creationist propaganda movie Expelled, gets carded and IDed, and immediately asked to leave the premises. He gets the boot, but the guest — left orphaned in line — gets in with no problems.
What’s funny, you ask? The guest is Richard Dawkins.
I’ve always held the belief that if you interview anyone in just about any field who’s been doing it for a while, you’ll undoubtedly come up with some awesome stories. As it turns out, I’m right, and human resources is no exception.
Here’s a list of the top 10 interview mistakes, and I swear I couldn’t make some of these up if I tried. Among the most notable:
- Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a “private” conversation.
- Candidate told the interviewer he wouldn’t be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died — and his uncle wasn’t “looking too good.”
- Candidate smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.
- Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was “classified.”
- Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss
- When an applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn’t want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.
- Candidate took out a hair brush and brushed her hair.
To cite John Gruber @ Daring Fireball, today’s speech by Barack Obama in Philadelphia was indeed historic; the best speech I’ve ever seen given by any politician anywhere.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”
You can get all the text here, and the YouTube video here.
Breakthrough game in which the calmer, more focused player will beat the stressed, amped-up player every time.
The object is to relax so that you are able to focus. The lower Alpha and Theta waves you have the better. That means that you are physically still and thus hopefully relaxed. Then focus. On what? On anything you like, as long as it keeps you focused during the game. A stressed player will definitely loose.
I know it’s been quiet around here, but I’m coming off a self-induced blogging break over the past few days, mainly because yesterday was my birthday and I decided to spend time with my son and some friends rather than write.
I suck. I know.
As things ramp back up, I would like to share this with you, because it’s all sorts of awesome.
“Whatever you have forgotten, you can remember. Whatever you have buried you can unearth. If you are willing to look deep into your own nature, if you are willing to peel away the layers of not-self you have adopted in making your way through the tribulations of life, you will find that your true self is not as far removed as you think.”
– Meredith Jordan
Also, a huge thanks to the many people who wished me happy birthday yesterday. I appreciate the wishes more than I can say, and if I haven’t responded to you over email yet, I will.
The Acid 3 test is far more complex than the Acid 2 test. It covers a wider range of standards and consists of many more individual tests. Browsers have to render a sequence of boxes that display dynamically in a stairstep pattern. For every cluster of tests passed successfully, the boxes will fill in with a color, which signifies that all of the tests covered by that block have passed.
If you run Acid 3 on the shipping versions of current browsers (Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera 9, IE7), you’ll see that they all score quite low. For example Safari 3 scores a 39/100. This percentage score is a bit misleading however. The situation with all four browser engines really isn’t that bad.
You can think of the Acid 3 test as consisting of 100 individual test suites. In order for a browser engine to claim one of these precious 100 points, it has to pass a whole battery of tests around a specific standard. In other words it’s like the browser is being asked to take 100 separate exams and score an A+ on each test in order to get any credit at all.
The reality is that all of the browsers are doing much better than their scores would have you believe, since the engines are often passing a majority of the subtests and experiencing minor failures that cost them the point for that section.
Shipping Safari scores a 39/100 with some significant rendering errors. We’ve been working hard since the test surfaced and are pleased to report that we’ve entered the “A” range on the test with a score of 90/100.
My current default browser on OSX is Firefox 3b4. When the new Safari is released, I’m hoping I can jump ship over to it — or that it’s at least as good as the current Firefox 3 beta version. I have one issue that must be addressed, though, before I can even think about it.
This was banned because we’ve become a nation of weenies and it’s too scary and inappropriate to have people playing guns like kids like we did every single day between the ages of 7 and 10. Enjoy this while you can before it’s stricken from the Internet forever by the the appropriateness police.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, offers a compelling interview with AlterNet’s Amy Goodman on what we should be eating:
Goodman: Shouldn’t people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol?
Pollan: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a — that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we’re told it’s actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there’s only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.
It’s a long read, but a mini-education in 10 minutes. We’d all be better served heeding Pollan’s advice.
Of course I already have the SDK and I’m totally thrilled. The hardest part is going to be not getting distracted from the updates to all of our desktop apps that are underway, while still getting in on the ground floor of what promises to be a whole new and very exciting business frontier.
It’s going to be huge, folks. I really can’t understate this. It’s the perfect storm of genuinely great technology, brand momentum, and unexplored mobile computing territory.
I agree 100% — never before has there been such a rich mobile platform in the wireless marketplace. Yes, Palm and Windows Mobile and BlackBerry have their share of 3rd party applications, but those platforms pale to the iPhone in terms of OS robustness, brand momentum and innovation.
The mobile computing market is about to be blown wide open, and Apple is the one responsible. If you doubt this, let’s get together this time next year and see where things are.
If you’ve been reading GF for a while, you know I’m fascinated by the Bugatti Veyron, which can touch 254 MPH full-out. It’s the car I would own if I could live a life without price tags.
YouTube is full of races between the Veyron and other cars, but here’s a new one: the $1.6M supercar vs. a Eurofighter Typhoon, which is an incredibly advanced air-superiority/air-to-surface multi-role fighter.
Here’s the eighth installment. I love these things.
In other news, there is some debate that ‘Donnie’, the star of these tutorials, is actually comedian/actor Dane Cook. Have you heard this?
I’m open to discuss theories either way. I personally don’t think it is, but whatever. If you care to argue with my superhuman, laser-like intuition, feel free.
Well, the SDK is upon us, and while I haven’t done a full analysis, I’m happy to say I was more or less right in my insistence that the iPhone must tackle real enterprise (Exchange) OTA synchronization to be a viable business phone. The half-ass methods — via browser, etc. — are worthless for real corporate citizens.
As John Gruber notes, however, the issues Apple pledged to tackle today are serious and difficult. Saying they’ll be addressed is one thing, but the gods live in the details: how they’re addressed — and how well — will be the proof points IT organizations will validate.
Gruber is also correct in noting that the iPhone will communicate directly with Exchange via ActiveSync, not an adjunct server to Exchange, like the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Depending on who you talk to, this isn’t necessarily a good thing: RIM’s server-side software is very, very strong. But I imagine from a management perspective, having another box (or boxes) to manage on top of your Exchange farm is, well, inconvenient.
So far, so good. I’m thrilled Apple decided to move in this direction. From what I can tell, with this enterprise program, the iPhone will be as viable a corporate citizen as any Treo or MS smartphone using Exchange ActiveSync.
Gruber takes a stab at the key scenario:
This doesn’t make the iPhone a BlackBerry killer, but the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things.
I tend to agree with him. The iPhone will have its feet in more pools than RIM, although how deeply might be the deciding criteria for some business users.
(And then there’s that cursed lack of a tactile keyboard, which, believe me, will be a showstopper for serious business email monkeys. But that’s another post.)
Time will tell, but for now I say: hell yes. Nice work, Apple.
The good folks over at clusterflock have decided, due to alcohol and a strange wrinkle in spacetime (but mostly alcohol), to have me as an author on their excellent blog. It’s a place full of intelligent and witty people, so my exact role there will be to drag that mathematical average down across all dimensions. I feel I am up to the task.
Of course, GF will be updated just as often with just as much crystallized inanity as you’ve come to expect. Don’t think you’re getting off the hook. But if you, for some reason, want twice the inanity, you can read me over there too.
If you don’t visit clusterflock regularly or subscribe to its RSS feed, well, don’t be a dummy. Do one or both right this very second.
Before the annoying music drowns me out, I want to take a second and thank the clusterflockers for the opportunity. It’s an honor and I’m geeked.
Ha ha, check out the sultry actress tart waxing political for the camera. It ’s like watching my three and a half year old son try to cook.
What demographic is carrying Hillary, anyway? Old women who really think Hillary will protect their children at 3 AM while some scary red phone rings in Washington and terrists crawl out of their sump pumps?
Oh, and Eva? Seen and not heard. Yeah. Write it down.
The clusterflock crew has been taken off double secret probation and is now a full-on member of The Deck, the advertising circle aimed at creative, web and design professionals.
One day, when I can actually get a high-end web designer to engage with me and come up with a cool design concept for a place clumsily named GracefulFlavor, I too, will have a shot at such stardom. Until then, my blog looks just like approximately 38,934 other blogs on WordPress.com, assuming an even distribution of canned theme choice.
Sigh.
Nice work, clusterflock. Thanks for dredging all of this up. Fuckers.
What can brown do for you? Apparently quite a lot:
On April 18, take some time to think when you take your time to stink. Think of yourself on your toilet, and George W. Bush on his, and Osama and Ahmadinejad and Chavez on theirs. Think about the children of Iraq and the children of America, and realize that while their skins are different colors and their gods have different names, their daily ritual is exactly the same. We all poop, which means we’re all human, which means we’re all brothers and sisters. Any other differences are arbitrary — we are all united in the daily struggle against the tyranny of the bowel.
