Photographer's Rights
I’ve long been uncomfortable and unclear about the law when it comes to taking photos in public places and have read of several situations when …
31 Posts
Rants
iSmoke - How wrong? Very.
I walked past this ‘iSmoke’ ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes the other day. How wrong? Let me count the ways… It’s lazy creative. This is …
Got ripped off in a MacHeist? It's a UI failure.
No, not a hold-up in McDonalds, but the MacHeist Mac software bundle sale/game. Like many, I got charged ten times and received nothing and also heard nothing …
PayPal, A Customer Service Nightmare
Companies like PayPal are basically all service and no product, so it makes sense that they should spend a lot of their time on it as do First Direct. Sadly, …
Use Designers Better
For several years I’ve been trying to express how design thinking can be used across a whole range of disciplines from sustainability to education to, …
A balanced view of Second Life
I promised I would stop ranting about Second Life and I will. Putting People First (the experientia blog) have a balanced post called Second Thoughts on Second …
British Telecom's Lesley Gavin on Virtual Worlds
Okay, so the whole Second Life theme is getting rather a good going over on Playpen at the moment. I think I’m probably going to have to stop writing …
Second Life is like an empty restaurant
I wrote a post a while back about how dull I thought it was that Adaptive Path were researching Second Life (along with many, far too many, media academics). I …
John Gruber on the iPhone
John Gruber is one of the few Apple advocates that writes with intelligent consideration rather than just being an over-enthused fanboy. He has just written a …
Stealing the soul of design
There’s a great piece by Rick Poynor in Icon called The Soul of Design in which he de-bunks many of the management consultant myths and misunderstanding …
Adaptive Path research Second Life. Yawn.
It’s been interesting (in that way that your mum says your clothes are ‘interesting’) to see all the hype excitement about Second Life build …
Company relationships are like a marriage
Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users just made a brilliant comparison of customer relationships to personal relationships. She points out that many …
Notes from Transmediale 07
In general the main exhibition of Transmediale 07 left me pretty unimpressed. But that may be due to my general cynicism (or arrogance - I prefer cynicism) - …
Why people hate mobile phone companies
It really can’t be that hard, smart customer service from mobile telcos. Have these people learned nothing? Here was my experience of Vodafone and …
Vote for my manifesto
Having spent a long time thinking about and writing the Re-imagining Higher Education essay I am trying to get it published as a Change This manifesto. So, if …
Interactive Tedium from ISEA
I didn’t get to go to ISEA this year (not that I’ve been for ages) and I actually pretty pleased I didn’t. I really wanted to like the stuff I …
Cambridge University prove their stupidity
You don’t have to be stupid to be a Don here, but it helps. I really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s article in the Education Guardian regarding Cambridge …
Re-imagining Higher Education
Recently I have been giving much thought to the structure and issues that most of us in Higher Education have been struggling with for several years. There are …
The Play Ethic and Sustainability
For a very long time now (since 2005 in fact), Pat Kane’s book, The Play Ethic has been on my Amazon Wishlist (hint, hint) along with several other books …
Warner Bros. to distribute via BitTorrent
I can’t believe I missed this story last week, but Warner Bros. have finally started to get their head around the idea that BitTorrents are the most …
Perceived value in creative industries
I’m embroiled in an interesting debate about the perception of value of creativity versus (in this case) lawyers over at Greg’s Blog. I won’t …
Some thoughts about life as a creative individual
This is a piece I wrote and read out in a lecture a couple of years ago, just before I left my teaching job to move back to Germany. Lots of students have often …
Spam SMS
I just got my first true spam SMS today (the others have been from the network, so they sort of don’t count - I expect them). It was from a home loans …
Misunderstanding mobile phone cameras
Simon Castle’s rant against mobile phone cameras in today’s Sydney Morning Herald completely misunderstands new technologies and confirms his …
Screaming Fans - New iMacs and Apple's tech support
My friend Toby (check out his audio work, it’s great) recently bought a new iMac for his audio work (he and his wife are expecting a baby so he …
Bastardstone's - Waterstone's employee sacked for blogging
So, Waterstone’s bookshop have just fired Joe Gordon, an employee of eleven years, due to his blog. Pretty stupid move and another example of a …
Tsunamis shatter celeb holidays
Following up from the previous post about Channel Ten’s reporting, CNN get a bit of Tsunami entertainment news out with their Tsunamis shatter celebrity …
Flight cancelled due to snow. In Siberia.
Okay, another airline rant. This time my friend Sean coming over from London via Japanese Airlines (JAL). His flight was cancelled due to snow in Siberia. Now, …
Vice President Dogsbody - the rise of misleading job titles
I just saw a job ad today for “Vice President of General Duties”. Vice President? So what are these general duties then? They must be pretty …
Singapore Airlines air rage and the German Professor
Okay, I’m sorry to keep harping on about this whole thing, but being cooped up in a metal tube for 22 hours does things to one’s brain. So, …
Singapore Airlines fiasco continues...
I knew the whole upgrade hassle would come back to bite me. So, having finally sorted my flights I rang Singapore Airlines to check up on something and was told …