April 2007

I don’t have time to learn and understand everything. Who does? Me and my business need various skills to make things happen more quickly — now. So if you know anyone who can help, put them in touch.

I need a telephone geek to get my Nokia N80 and 3G network stuff working more efficiently. A workflow from the phone through to WordPress and Flickr would be nice.

I need another telephone geek to re-organise my business phones. Telcos are useless — they just want to sell products. Maybe someone who knows Asterisk is the answer?

I need a web developer who can work in XHTML/CSS code (no Flash or Dreamweaver muppets!) with excellent attention to detail and, ideally, a knowledge of WordPress and proper object-oriented PHP. We don’t do complex work, but we do want quality. I’ll be advertising this soon.

I’m still looking for a good technical support human who’s actually human. This is a full-time job.

A junior systems administrator wouldn’t go astray. This would suit a student who’s familiar with Linux, has run a website or two and needs a few hours paid work a week.

A techno producer who can work in a minimalist German style for a crassly commercial music project.

A graphic artist/designer who can do finished artwork for print as well as basic web stuff. We sometimes end up doing a full corporate image for clients. We need someone for the grunt-work, like doing ten newspaper adverts to a pre-existing style, or preparing fifty product shots for a website.

“Irwin Allen’s model train layouts?” asks my friend Richard. “Fascinating.” And I reckon he’s right.

This image is Accidentally Kansas from American artist-photographer Lori Nix, who creates miniature landscapes “out of any material that will simulate a real landscape; for example faux fur becomes field grass, buckwheat flour becomes dirt.” She then photographs the results as evidence of a world gone wrong.

Richard found this stuff on BLDGBLOG, a blog about “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures” — something that deserves exploration in its own right, by the looks. Thanks mate!

It’s also worth cruising through the whole photo-eye website and especially their photographers’ showcase galleries. Paying attention, ’Pong?

Following on from our discussion of Gerry Anderson TV series the other day, Anthony Taylor of FAB Gear USA emailed me to point out the official Mike Trim art website, and to plug the new book The Future was FAB: The Art of Mike Trim, which he co-wrote with Mr Trim himself.

“Featuring hundreds of full colour and black & white drawings, paintings, marker comps, and photos from his entire career,” the book includes work from Trim’s work on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, The Secret Service and UFO, as well as the feature films Thunderbirds are Go, Thunderbird 6, and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (a.k.a. Doppleganger).

Anthony’s obviously trawling the blogosphere looking for Thunderbirds postings to connect to — good on him! — so it’ll be interesting to see how successful that book is.

Meanwhile, perhaps I should mention that it’s only three weeks until my birthday… I’m sure I can find somewhere to put a 3m model of the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Then again maybe not. I’m not that much of a nerd.

The web is a shoddy piece of work, as any real information professional will tell you. The two incidents I’m about to relate are pretty typical — and in my opinion they’re also clear examples of unprofessional behaviour bordering on the unethical.

So why are web designers allowed to get away with dodgy work which in other industries would get you driven out of business?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you thought Ernst & Young was an accounting firm, think again. As this video shows, they’re some sort of weird cult.

Johnnie Moore and Hugh MacLeod say everything that needs to be said about this. Scary.

Last weekend I mentioned Fireball XL-5 and a conversation about Gerry Anderson Supermarionation TV shows ensued. So tonight I was very pleased to stumble upon Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s wickedly accurate parody, Superthunderstingcar.

Joy.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer.