18 Sep 2005
ArtsEdge is a seriously impressive website. Go there, check out the design (stunning, clear), then look at the technical aspects of it — this is the most surprising part. Semantically brilliant markup, even if a little div-heavy, and 100% CSS styling. This is the kind of website that print graphics agencies strive for – only, more often than not, they’re stuck in a fixed-pixel mindset which means no fluid design elements like on this site (e.g. the orange “lick” at the bottom and core content area background element, which displays in full at 1024+ and doesn’t visibly have anything missing at 800×600 or less). Its print stylesheet is also good stuff, trimming everything but the content and core branding itself — not enough websites do that.
As is too often the case with web companies, the agency responsible for this site, Cube7, don’t appear to have had the chance to give their own website this treatment yet. Even so, it’s a great testament to both their capabilities and the design potential of CSS.
17 Sep 2005
When the whole web goes crazy, and spammers send completely random characters down the line to completely random addresses, their aim now it seems moved beyond even any idealism of making money and simply into the abstract realm of “How much do you reckon we can piss these people off?” Finally, professional spammers and teenaged crackers have realised their lives are utterly meaningless, and that their stereotypically poor self-esteem is entirely deserved. You people are the scum of the planet.
Email, however, is not enough. You pump drivel down our contact forms, down every channel of communication, in the vain hope that someone will listen to your inane messages. Or, alternatively, not even to that: just that someone will read the random characters your program has generated. Congratulations, you’re a tool. You took a medium designed for communication, and reduced it to nothing. This isn’t communication, this is transfer. Of nothing. This is the realisation of the world of Lea, only worse. You aren’t even abbreviated humans: you can’t even pretend you have a language. You don’t even have that. Only your characters, lacking syntax, form, meaning. Not even in the sense of an abstract poetic idealism: just words. You don’t even have that.
We’ve watched from afar as you have spiralled to your death. As slowly, your attempts to evade detection have slowly fallen in purpose. From well written, but ill-founded, communications, you have regressed — your language loses regularity of form, anything to evade detection. Collective action has seen the demise of a medium, spiralling into nothing. You brought about this demise. Your own perception of what is and isn’t successful. You are, even now, destroying your own [messed up] livelihood.
Go back to being introverted geeks. Have no contact with anyone: we’d prefer it like that. Stay that way, or rot in the backwaters of the Internet: your own cess pool of meaningless characters.
17 Sep 2005
Stumbled upon Properly Chilled today, has cool music/big sets available for download. “Downtempo music and culture” — chillout by another name. What I’ve heard has more of an electronica bent (less vocals), but I’m sure there’s a mix (haha) of stuff in there.
17 Sep 2005
They’re a bit weird. Most telephone cable you can run straight through, but not Commander cabling. For whatever reason [read: establishment of a commercial monopoly enforced by tax-payer dollars through the ACA], their cables are different. Special. Not terribly complicated, but unnecessarily so.
They reversed it for no reason.
One end is the opposite of the other. You can see it in the picture above — note that both sides go black, red, green, yellow — but one side is the underside (note gold contacts) whilst the other is the top (note un-snapped-off[!] clip).
It’s not particulary hard, it just means you need to stay vaguely awake when crimping stuff. It also means that you do need to crimp stuff, and that off-the-shelf telephone cables won’t cut it. I’m pretty convinced that this means it’s not a normal telephony cable, and that the ACA can therefore go and shove their restrictions somewhere else. Or, alternatively, abandon them altogether, and let natural selection take its course. If people can get themselves killed whilst crimping signal cables, well…
17 Sep 2005
Beyonce, Becks and me me me – smh.com.au
Just a quick link. I’d love it if the newspaper actually provided links to the various papers mentioned. I’m no huge fan of the “celebrity as an object of study” thing, but snippets of this article stir [my] interest.
The only parts of any value to me in this article are in relation to the connection between media focus and our society — surmised in two short quotations from the piece:
Explaining how Beckham’s career has been littered with Christian symbolism, Brick said redemption, resurrection, and salvation “are the narratives that tell his story”. The footballer’s perception of himself seems to concur: he has appeared in magazines adopting a Christ-like pose, has a crucifix tattoo and named one of his sons Cruz, Spanish for cross.
But Brick’s paper said reading Beckham as postmodern religious icon, a new god of the global consumer culture, was insufficient. “Rather, Beckham’s celebrity speaks to the paradoxical desire to attribute meaning in a culture which is increasingly defined as meaningless…”
Paul McDonald, from Roehampton University in England, pointed out that at the start of last century, press profiles concentrated on political, business and religious leaders, “yet by the 1920s, the focus of that attention had shifted toward coverage of figures in entertainment or sports”. The media’s attention had moved from the idols of production towards idols of consumption.
Still, it’s worth reading the whole article to contextualise those snippets.