Food

I was sent a great link about food the other day by Master Tim Sparke, with some great receipes, especially the pulled pork and char siu bao.....mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I've also had some more great meals out

Theo Randall, a very posh Italian for a lovely anniversary meal with my lovely wife. Good lobster spaghetti.
Numero Uno, on Northcote Road, which I think might be a chain, where the food was very nice, where I also had a very nice Lobster spaghetti and a very nice wholesome white bean soup.

Chez Bruce was as good as ever, we managed to get a table at the last minute on Ellie's birthday which was lucky. No lobster this time, but some amazing lamb's neck, falling to pieces and packed with flavour.

and for people who don't already know about it, one of the best food guides in London (at least the one that all the city PAs use for their bosses' lunches), the Square Meal guide.

LFPUG

Rachel, Sam, and myself did at a talk at the London Flash Platform User Group, after the ever eloquent Emmanuel Okyere (AKQA) gave his brilliantly prepared talk on Beans in Space (Java and Apollo, geddit?). Emmanuel was kind enough to ask lots of valid questions that raised a few interesting points. I must say I can't wait to cross intellectual foils again, it was great.

But enough on that....

Our talk was on how we thought how "Best practice made perfect". In hindsight, maybe a title like "Republic: The way we work", or more agency.com stylee "Republic: this is how we roll".

Anyway, I'll shortly be putting the slides up for people to see, so you can make of it what you will.

Holiday energy

Just got back from 2 holidays, one in New York, where I had an amazing 17 course meal with my beautiful wife at a 3 michelin-starred restaurant called Per Se, where my friend Guy works as one of their elite group of sous chefs, and then another holiday in Hong Kong, with family, where I bought myself a lovely new black macbook (saved myself a couple of hundred quid on it as well, nize!), and I convinced my mum to buy an imac, telling here that they're foolproof, and then it broke immediately.

But my main thing I took away from it all this time off was that I had a rethink about how often I put ideas on here, in part inspired by the creative breakfast we had at work with Russell Davies, and in part because I'm annoyed at myself for not putting those ideas out there, and just mulling over them.

Russell had a really nice point about scattergun-style ideas often being better than 1 single grand and glorious idea, which I really like the idea of. Means you might fuck up more, but, you'll also get some good stuff, and some really good stuff out there. Zefrank had a nice point about it as well, can't find the link that Russell showed us though. Anyway, he illustrated it very well.... imagine you have 2 friends, one who's always doing stuff, week in, week out, trying new things out, telling you stories about it all. Then you have a friend who only invites you around once a year, sits you down with all your mates, and then spend 3 hours talking about his big idea for the year, some years its good, some bad... who would you rather hang out with? I know who I'd prefer.

So here are my current ideas.

1.I must write any idea I have on the blog
2.I want to try and write a book (not on flash), my wife keeps telling me I should, about how 'Men aren't mindreaders'
3.Do a good presentation for the LFPUG in april
4.take more photos and put them on flickr
5.must learn to use my new macbook well
6.build a website or 2 on my own time

Flash on the beach

Had a really nice time at FOTB. It's great that we finally have a good flash conference in the UK. Even though I only managed to go for the tuesday and wednesday, there was still some really inspirational stuff.

Marcos Weskamp, the brains behind Marumushi newsmap was cool, I loved how he iterated his ideas through so many times with his japanese surname datasets, to produce some weird stuff, especially the Voronoi diagrams. My favourite bit was when he said "just play around with it, it's so easy!", methinks I need some more practice.

Mario Klingemann was very interesting. I loved seeing his Tagnautica experiments, and he had some cool image scratching experiment using one of the flickr groups that only had round images.

Hoss Gifford was tres amusant, as was Brendan Dawes.

My only negative point would be that the sessions were not very targeted. A lot of the 'code-heavy' sessions were rather light. I think it may have been better to grade them B=Beginner, I=Intermediate, and A=Advanced, to avoid going to some of the more mundane sessions.

anyway, roll on FOTB 2007.

Music to my ears

I've recently had a moment to listen to some music, and even some new music!

So imagine my delight when I found some daft punk I hadn't heard before (Live at Coachella).

I'm currently trying to kill my enjoyment of this, by playing it constantly, but it's not working.

anyway, it's nice to be back on the blog.

CIAs

I'm thinking of revolting against this RIA trend, as my agency seems to be building thing's that are rich, but don't really fall into the RIA category as I see it.

So, I'm going to use a new term, a CIA, a Creative Internet Application. Rad! I hear you all say, but WTF is it? Well I see it as using technology in a fun way that engages the user, and makes them want to explore, much like the Mercedes website we did.

I'm shying away more and more from these mundane interfaces that keep popping up, in the name of usability. You can still have complexity and usability in the same place, you just need to test the bloody thing first, and make sure that you educate your users in a fast and simple way, simple innit!

fluid dynamics

Got sent this link by alias about this german CG company that specialises in amazing fluid effects, Wonder if they are planning to put any of this in Flash player 10? hmmm, I wonder?....