Archives for April 2005
Firefox at 50,000,000 and Rising
Firefox is fast becoming the Apache of the desktop. One day we’re going to see graphs looking like this, and it’s going to be good for web user experience all round. It’s not just about the tabs, the plugins, the skins, the goodness – it’s the phenomenon that I like most.
Get firefox and do some good!
Experience Design Chapter 2: Paradise Lost
Our weekly Monday-9am-with-buns department meetings usually consists of discussions about projects people are working on, techniques we have applied or are thinking of applying, department housekeeping issues etc. All good inward-looking stuff. But last week was a little different.
Language, Chiasmus and Communication
It’s been a while since I had a foray in the genre that I call “half-formed ideas,” but here’s a good one that I’ve been brewing for a while.
For no good reason I can recall, I was reading this essay about spontaneous use of chiasmus in contemporary English and it got me thinking. Not so much about chiasmus, which is of course fascinating in its own right, but about language and communication in general.
Letter Writing
My uncle Julian, Bagpipe Maker to the Stars (Warning: sound samples are not work safe) wrote me a letter the other day. It struck me that people writing to me by hand is now an immensely rare event, and that I myself have not written a letter to anyone in about fifteen years. The last may have been during my gap year in Japan.
Stultifying
The content mapping monster has started its onslaught, and mother I can feel the soil falling over my head.
Exploding Cow Problem
For some reason last night I decided to post a rather late April fool to uk.legal. It was a bit rough around the edges, but only took about fifteen minutes to do (and spookily time-stamped at exactly 00:00hrs). I’m quite proud that it seems to have at least partially hooked one person in, while producing some pretty good replies from others. Nobody picked up on the the first line about “giving me a steer” though. (The better replies are on the “next 10″ page at the bottom of the listing).
Rasin A Family
Ah he ha ha.
Enough of the April Fools!
It’s obviously a by-product of collaborative websites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin that April 1st generates so many fake stories. One or two might be funny, but there were about ten on Slashdot yesterday: EU to ban Macs, UN to outlaw Internet, Opera inventing a new P2P system called “SoundWave” etc. etc.
