Aidan Williams - High Acuity

I’ve always loved 1950s/1960s retro sci-fi design, from those sweet torpedo-styled space ships to the ridiculously square robots. So knowing my sci-fi obsession, my girlfriend picked up a couple of the coolest clocks on the face of this fine earth for Valentine’s Day.

They now take pride of place on my rather sparse desk at work. The best part is that they’re solid metal and rather heavy, so I can beat people with them if they’re not working hard enough.

They instantly reminded me of the video John and Mark created a few years ago for their masters degree in computer animation: ‘Short Lived‘. What’s so amazing about this video? The robot in every one of the shots isn’t real – it’s not based on a real toy (John & Mark designed it themselves and named it ‘Deedar’) and has never been a real physical object. Youtube doesn’t do the video justice but when you see this you understand why they’re now working on so many Hollywood blockbusters.

The use of Internet Explorer 6 has been steadily declining over the last year. Unfortunately most IE6 users have moved onto IE7, but some sensible people have moved over to more secure browsers like Firefox and Safari. Still, the use of IE6 has recently dropped below 20% and I have to say; I will miss the challenge of coding for it when we finally deem it obsolete. Don’t get me wrong, coding for IE6 is a complete pain, but IE6 has such esoteric idiosyncrasies that finding ways to make sure a website displays identically in IE6 just as other the more modern browsers was sometimes a fun challenge.

Still, a website has been created in preparation for the old dinosaur’s demise. So if you’re going to miss the old boy, you can leave your respects here. Some of the comments are NSFW, but most of them are pretty funny.

Twitter has now become so popular that even Google is getting in on the act. Its first ‘tweet’ on 25th February was:

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″ which can be translated first from binary to decimal ASCII codes to letters and says “I’m feeling lucky.”

Welcome to Twitter, Google! Oh and…

01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00101110 00100000 00100000 00100000 00111011 00101001

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under General, Humour, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.