So I’ve had this stupid revolutionary invention knocking around the old brain-box for absolutely ages. Nice bit of friday blog fodder.

Urinal spashback. All men, especially drunken men, have done a widdle only, to find that some of it ends up, quite uninvited, on their trousers. This phenomenon can only be described as irritating.

The solution, would you believe that the solution, comes from a little thing called mathematics. A Parabola to get down to the nitty gritty. It’s a bit like a big arc:

“a conic section generated by the intersection of a right circular conical surface and a plane parallel to a generating straight line of that surface. A parabola can also be defined as locus of points in a plane which are equidistant from a given point (the focus) and a given line (the directrix).”

The way I see it, if you make the urinals in this shape, there’s no way none of that pesky widdle can come back and get you on the leg. Or shoe. I drew a little blueprint:

Look forward to seeing me on the next series of Dragons Den. I’ll be hoping to get an investment from Theo Paphitis.

He’s the only nice one. He’s like a nice dad.

Having seen this ‘blog all dog-eared pages’ idea of Mike Migurski’s on Russell Davies’ blog, it seems that this is something that would really benefit from being more social.

I imagine some kind of web service that would structure your annotations a bit better than in a blog post. The site would provide a personal library of books that you have read - annotations attached. If several people have read the same book you’d be able to tab through their annotations too. You’d also be able to search for any book.. perhaps someone has expanded on a part that you didn’t quite understand. This could also be very useful for academic paper.

I imagine the user journey would be quite simple. You’d be able to search your library or everyones from the start, or input a new book. You’d add a book by inputting an ISBN number.

All the book information, including cover image, could then be pulled from the Amazon API. Adding annotations would be as simple as an input box, with entries indexed in a linear fashion by page number. The site could also tap into things like Google Book Search and Google Scholar, providing the actual book contents if it is available digitally - the annotations could be laid over the top.

If you still wanted to share on your blog you could have the site to ‘auto-publish’ a formatted post to your blog.

Could be neato.

I’m going away for a week and don’t intend to touch a computer.

Hurrah :)

How comes when you tell people you’re off to Amsterdam they always get a bit of a wry smile. I’m just going for a little rest with the wife in a nice hotel.

Honest!

Byesies!

I did a little freelance banner recently with a creative team from AMV.

It was a nice little project for the Museum of Childhood. It’s currently running on Best Ads on TV.com. It’s cool, you can grab some felt tips and scribble away on the page. Relive your childhood - not so novel for me as its not actually that far in the past!

What was most interesting about it was that, apparently, at AMV, they have a little scheme where you can go and approach little clients yourself - do the creative, and manage it all too.

Anyway, they did just that, and made a whole little integrated campaign for the Museum. I helped out with the digital bit. What a nice thing to be able to do. Don’t like the accounts you work on? Go find some more. :)

A mockup of it is here too

I like London, you’re always seeing stuff.

I saw this particular sign on some kind of industrial bit in Clapham. I liked it a lot. It made me think that if you tried to do a break in, then ninjas would silently come down on ropes and get you. We’ve all seen in films how shrewd and deadly those ninjas are. What a fantastic deterrent!

Portobello road proved to be a great place to spot strange people and also puppies. I like Portobello, it always gives me fond flashbacks of Bedknobs & Broomsticks (my favourite bit is where they go to the island of naboomboom and play an animal football match with cartoons, then they go under the sea, and get into all sorts of japes. Brilliant). Anyway, I saw this man who had a bit of a hump on his back, he seemed to have a jack-russel living on it.

What a legend.

I also saw this little chap. The owner let me touch it, it was so fluffy!

That is all.

Sometimes its really hard to design for context in digital… especially with banners - you might not know where they will end up, or what they will sit next to. And where different browsers and resolutions make your nice web layout look like a dollop of widdle.

I always thought those crazy print guys had an easier life - things being all fixed and that. But found one situation I doubt many people have ever considered. Say you have a tube poster, and your main CTA is at the bottom, and you have a dark background. Soon it will start to be covered with the tube crust that also lines the lungs.

Oops.

Apologies for the poor quality pic.

But this is incredible and everyone should see it ;)

Përshëndetje pals.

Posted this a few weeks ago, and the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s a good idea. In the meantime, I came across TweetStats - a similar but much more basic execution, which serves as a proof of concept if nothing else.

TweetStats only takes the (mostly) boring data that is packaged with the message, where as I would be more interested in interpreting the human data (the message itself) and presenting it in a much more meaningful way.

Who wants help out :o) ?

Having one of those days today where I absolutely fucking love the internet.

Firstly, PicLens (via Amy) - an amazing plugin for Firefox and Safari that creates full screen sideshows from web galleries, Google images and the like. Smooth.

Secondly, this amazing little web cam experiment called FaceOff, built with Processing and using face recognition technology. (thanks ZebraHorse!)

Find a friend, stand in front of your iSight and it swaps your faces, incredible! If you have no friends it even works with a drawing. Little bit of fiddling to get it going, but prepare to giggle.