hello ian

James May said of the Bugatti Veyron:

Getting the car to do 155mph, frankly, isn’t really very difficult. The Veyron needs just a piffling 270 horsepower to do that speed. But 253 (mph)? Crikey!

...The faster you go, the more mother nature tries to hold you back, so to do the next 100 mph, the 100 mph that takes you up to 255 mph needs another 730 bhp!

I think is fair to say everyone has heard about, if not read the essay ‘Thoughts on Music’ written by Steve Jobs and posted on the Apple website not long ago. At the time, Jobs’ essay made sense, and I hold the belief that DRM use drives piracy rather than the opposite, but didn’t believe anyone would take a chance on DRM-Free music any time soon.

Today I was proved wrong, when tuning in to the BBC1 1 o’clock news (traditional media actually breaks the news first this time) I was greeted with the news that Apple & The record label EMI have signed a deal to offer EMI music on iTunes without the FairPlay DRM.

Do you know what a SPF record is?

No?

Neither did I until Microsoft decided to class me as a spammer, and if you read on you might just save yourself from loosing several days of your life trying to implement one.

They always say that you never know how much you appreciate something till it’s gone, and recently, that’s what happened with my Internet connection.

The ‘station has effectively been in a state of hibernation for the past few months, as I haven’t been able to get online to wake it from its slumber. The details of my problems are going to follow in a later post, as I have learnt much about the state of Internet access in the UK, and just what the companies that provide it can, and are, getting away with. Until then, all you need to know is that I am back, thanks to a new Linksys Router, and more importantly, a hell of a lot of perseverance on my Dads part.

Just for fun, I’ve decided to join Michael Heilemann on his little 3, 6, 9, 12, 3 exercise and take a photo of myself, every 3 hours starting at 15:00 on New Year’s Eve and finishing at 03:00 on New Year’s Day.

Firstly, to those of you who have for some reason, returned here on more than one occasion or subscribed to my feed, I apologise for the lights being out at the ‘Station over the past 6 weeks or so. For a ton of reasons I have not been here for a while, and not only that but I have been neglecting NewsGator and some of you guys too.

Since finishing my degree and receiving some serious shock treatment at New Designers, I have been working pretty hard on developing my technical (design) skills. Whilst I was at University it was always difficult to try and balance the academic side of design with the technical side, so it’s good to finally have time to concentrate on my skills.

Technical Skills

I am sure you may wonder what I mean by technical skills. Well back in the a day before the Mac (or PC) was common place in a studio, a product designer’s technical skill set primarily involved manual draughting, rendering and model making, the skills that allowed them to communicate their ideas with others. These skills took many hours of blood, sweat, tears and discarded first attempts to build up, but were, and still are and invaluable component of the designer’s tool kit. To put it simply, if you were going to make it as a designer, being able to draw well and having good (visual) presentation skills well was pretty much a prerequisite.

Once again the need to move things forward seems to be the very thing that is preventing me from doing just that. My current battle with Just3G seems never ending, and whilst I may have lost a significant amount of money, I can at least take some satisfaction in the fact that it would appear my efforts have stopped Just3G from catching anyone else out with their dubious terms & conditions. Now I’m looking for a new phone contract, and will be going with a reputable dealer in the hopes that this does not happen again.

So, other than the immense amount of hours I have spent on the Just3G case these past few months, I have been working part time to cover the bills so I can continue to spend the rest of my time working on my portfolio. It’s taking a long time, but hopefully the effort will pay off in the end, as having seen the standard of work at New Designers, I really need to make my folio something special.

Welcome to a new, ‘pinkr’ version of the Innovation Station. The site has gone pink (slightly late admittedly) as part of the ‘Pink for October’ initiative championed by Matthew Oliphant, to raise awareness of Breast Cancer.

I can’t believe it’s been 9 days since I last logged on here, but time has flown. It seems that the days fly by faster than when I was at University, although perhaps that is because I am focused on the future rather than the now. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not, but I am determined not to fall into the trap of finding a comfortable job somewhere to tide me by, and get lazy when it comes to trying to kick-start myself a career in design. To that end, everything I do ‘today’ is with a view to ‘tomorrow’. It’s not a particularly fun way of going about life, but let’s face it, that’s what everyone has to do from time to time, and I am lucky to have the support at home to enable me to get on with stuff without worrying about keeping a roof over my head etc.

Recently I have been looking at how to calculate rates for some freelance work I am going to be doing, and today I learnt one thing that is hardly surprising. I have a long, long time to go before I can earn in an hour, what my bank charges me (on a student account) for being unable to pay a direct debit. Natwest charges £38 for a failed payment, whatever its value (which in this case was £5.99), which is bloody outrageous considering they haven’t suffered any inconvenience. Of course they are totally within their rights to rip customers off like this, and no one can do a bloody thing about it.

It would seem that Apple have managed to transcend the gap between reality and the digital domain with their upcoming Leopard app Time Machine. Not only can Time Machine recover lost files, but it can recover the visual style of past iPods to new products. Interesting.

A close friend once told me that her mother had sternly instructed her never to trust a man in a pink shirt, a concept which both my friend, and her mother stand by firmly. I have no less than three pink shirts, so I’m not sure where that leaves me. Perhaps I shouldn’t wear any of them to interviews in the future, just in case they’re not the only ones with this line of thought.

Check out this fantastic parody of the ‘Dancing Transformer’ Citroen C4 advert.

Plastic. Fantastic isn’t it? Since the days of Bakelite the world has been transformed by plastic. It is everywhere, and has allowed rapid technological growth due to its versatile yet low cost nature. As a product designer, I tend to have a love/hate relationship with plastic. I love it because it is so versatile, easy to work with, relatively cheap, and it allows me to construct things that would not be possible with any other material. However, these very properties have meant the world has been cursed with a plague of badly designed plastic products. One of the primary reasons for this being that plastic can be processed into almost any form using a wide variety of methods, and in my mind, this promotes ‘lazy’ and thoughtless design.

Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast where he was filming for a documentary.

There aren’t many people who don’t know who Steve Irwin was, and the ‘Crocodile Hunter’ as he was known, was famous for his crazy antics onscreen. Whilst there were many who critisised Irwin for the way in which he interacted with animals on his programmes, Steve Irwin was a true professional, strongly against the hunting of animals, and was a massive advocate of animal rights. In his time he made massive inroads into educating the public about the secret lives of the animals he filmed.

It is a great loss, and I only hope someone else carries on with his legacy to educate the public in such an entertaining and enthralling way.

Over the past month or so I have really got stuck in to learning the ins and outs of WordPress and K2 whilst I have been setting up the blog. Whilst I have a basic grasp of XHTML & CSS, it is quite a challenge to apply that to something as complex as WordPress.

Watching the news about the crisis in Lebanon, the nightmare travellers are suffering at British airports due to the foiled terrorist plot and the never ending stories of British troops suffering in the middle east due to inadequate support and supplies and wondering how these images compare to those of Tony Blair sunning himself in the Bahamas, I was reminded of something I read a long time ago.

A Politician is someone who is prepared to give your life for their country.

In October I bought a mobile phone on a Three contract from a company called Just3G, based in Birmingham. As is common with mobile phone contracts in the UK now, the phone contract I bought offered "cash back" on my bills, which would be paid back at 6, 9, and 12 monthly intervals. I previously held a contact bought from a company called Dial-a-phone who worked a similar scheme and honoured their promises, saving me over a hundred pounds on my bills over the year.