Isn’t Easter brilliant.

Four days off work, big dinners, eggs & treats.

I didn’t do much over Easter, it was rather moist afterall.

The two things I did get round to doing, however, were absolutely bloody marvellous. On Friday I done a quick trip to the Design Museum to see the ‘Designs of the Year’ exhibition. It had the 100 best designs of the year grouped into graphics, interactive, fashion, architecture, furniture, product and transport.

Best one for me was this cool little music machine called Tenori-on. It had a bunch of buttons that you press to illuminate. Buttons correspond to notes, and lighting them up creates a tune. It’s really intuitive, I had a nice little ditty going in just a few minutes.

See the video. Fantastic.

The whole show was really inspiring. It’s nice to see some answers to ‘real world briefs’ that are also really well designed.

On Sunday I toddled off to see ‘The Harder They Come’ at the Barbican. The Barbican, I love that building! Anyway, it was absolutely brilliant - colourful, energetic, and despite actually being quite a sad story, a real feel good performance. It had me singing the tunes and doing funny Jamaican shaky leg dances on the way out.

If you can, I’d highly recommend going to see them both.

Isn’t central London fantastic.

Just walking round its streets and bars you might just happen upon people made familiar by the media.

I’m talking, of course, about our wonderful celebrities.

Just today I saw none other than Cold Feet’s own James Nesbit, just wandering along Great Marlborough street.

He goes onto the Celebrity Spot Cool Wall. (Thanks Top Gear)

Wonderful

Having almost got to the end of my contract, called t-mobile, requested my PUK code, told them I want an iPhone, told them yes I know that they are expensive, and yes I am sure I can afford it, and no I wouldn’t prefer a Nokia N95, and no the LG Viewty isn’t just the same, I’m almost allowed to have one.

It’s an exciting time for the shiny little box that makes little magpie twerps like me splooge all their money. Apple finally released the iPhone SDK, regular folk like you and I can now make stuff for it.

Anyway, we all know the best thing about it is that it’s tactile. Hence my brilliant app idea, with a caveat that I actually don’t like football - at all, is iPhone Subbuteo.

Here’s why it would be brilliant:

• Flicking mechanism = easy

I just done a silly document to someone’s printer over the network. It was funny.

I thought to myself, wouldn’t it have been cool to be working when fax machines were all the rage. I could send stupid paper messages to people all the time, and be gloriously unaware of the perils of climate change.

Shock, horror, I wasted a sheet of paper, but it feels nice to send a physical thing to someone. It’s a bit like passing notes in school. I feel all naughty and exhilarated.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send people physical notes over the interweb. Maybe they’d pop out of the bottom of your monitor and drop onto your keyboard. A bit like a ‘physical twitter’, but a bit more precious, less frequent, something you’d really look forward to.

Not the most eco-friendly idea mind. It could just be on really shitty till roll style paper that was all recycled and such. Maybe whatever you send gets turned into ASCI images to keep down the printing.

Fun fun fun. I’m going to invent it.

Flickr keeping up with the teh interweb funnies. Made me smile.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, more ‘lolcats’ here

A tablecloth turkey!

I don’t like those little twerps who hand out the free london papers.

They wind me right up.

Admittedly, I do sometimes have a flick through… but it is muck, and I’d much rather pick it out of a little bin thing if I felt the urge.

Anyway, Has anyone noticed how they seem to have developed crazy ninja skills? They used to just stand there, but now they whip them around like nun-chucks.

Quite fascinating. Maybe they don’t get to go home until they’re all gone.

I was talking to my good friend Zebrahorse about it last night. We thought maybe it might make an amusing YouTube video.

The interweb loves ninjas.

I like it a lot. Nice to see a little bit of a ‘making of’ too.

via Lunar BBDO

Read about this little idea on the CR blog. They’ve done a bit of floor graphics to try and make it easier to actually get off the tube before assorted idiots start piling onto it.

“London Underground is to trial various graphic devices on the Jubilee Line. The markings are designed to encourage those waiting on platforms to let passengers off the train before getting on themselves.”

While I think It’s a nice idea, and some of the solutions are pretty clever, I don’t really think its going to make much difference.

Saw it in action the other weekend having just read about it, it was really interesting to see how people reacted.

So, when i first got there, some ghastly chap was standing right in the middle in front of the doors. (figure 1) No luck there then. I’ll refer to him as Mr C.

It was quite quiet as I’d just missed one so I, being the first one at the door, stood neatly behind the line on one side. More commuters arrive. The ones that came to my door copied me. They stood all nice and well behaved. The people that went to Mr C’s door copied him and blocked it all up good and proper.

At this point I was pretty chuffed with my little social experiment. I was a pioneer of good tube behavior, a hero, confident that everyone would soon be just as courteous.

Anyway, a few minutes later the train pulls up and its really really packed. People start to get off. As soon as the train arrived all full you could see everyone that was waiting getting all visibly agitated. A few people actually managed to get off cleanly, but then, all of a sudden one guy starts to try and get on… still with plenty of people trying to get off. Everyone else follows him.

Conclusion? People will just copy what other people are doing and it only takes one person to mess it up.

Bugger.