The best coffee in Observatory

I woke up on Saturday in search of food and coffee. So I ambled down to Tina's coffee shop on lower main road called Queen of Tarts and ordered a cappuccino.

It arrived with a small kiwi looking fern leaf embroyded out of smooth foam and espresso cream. It was the best cappuccino I have ever had.

If you have been to our studio in Observatory, you will know that we love coffee. We have had 3 different espresso machines downstairs, a Breville, an Expobar, and now a San Marco. Our current one is in for a service. Its seen some action. We found it on gumtree and it makes an amazing espresso. But if you know your flat white from your latte, you'll also know there is a real science to get it all right, and then hand it over for a tasting.

Tina (Queen of Tarts on Lower Main Road) has a new Barista and he is a legend. Go and see for yourself.

iphoned you from my iphone in my dreams

Is this a joke?

I have no idea who has that sort of cash for an iphone which will either, get nicked, be dropped or run out of storage space.

[update] - turns out that Gary has that sort of cash.

Creativity comes as radiohead stems

no need to apologise for brilliance, just nod your head and accept the compliment graciously. radiohead: a rock band that rocks has again open sourced under GPL (so to speak) their various stems from one of their tracks, Reckoner.

I received an email from radiohead about this development personally, although it did not say "dear trevor" at the top, which was a bit of a let down, because they know me, it was beautifully to the point and did not include a single graphic or piece of design. no need to dress up and leave a false name here, just us, radio (rock your mind control) head sending you a quick mail about something thats not sugar coated.

(sigh)

Creativity comes in many forms

Light-Paint Piano Player from Ryan Cashman on Vimeo.

I am rediscovering VIMEO. I should be doing a proposal but the temptation of surfing started when someone sent me this link of two crazy guys riding their skateboards at incredible speed, in suits. Turns out it is a viral campaign made by the fashion designer Adam Kimmel. I downloaded the HD version without realising, and now Im too scared to close my browser and feel it would be rude not to surf the internet.

girls and boys

I was in Konstanz Germany on my way to Zurich, when I stopped to use a WC. For those Canadians out there who dont know what that is, its a toilet. And look at the rad little icons I found on the doors. Makes a nice change from the standard icons that look like they were designed in days of shoulder pads and bad hairdo's.

People are obsessed by the strangest things, I have stumbled upon an entire FLICKR set dedicated to this subject!

Large Hadron Collider, whats all the fuss about?!

I got a little sucked up in the media hype last week about CERN, and as a result I went and ate a McDonald's burger because I thought that our earth space time would be sucked into a little tiny black hole.

The LHC started up today, and it seems the earth is still here. I found a very interesting article as why the earth is still here today. Anyway, that's such good news because I had so much still to do today.

Do you have a business card?

What do you do when your supplier doesn't deliver the stuff you requested before a trade show?

The one thing you really need at a trade show is business cards. When you're a designer you need business cards that are cool.

This is a sheet of stickers. The plan was to pull them off and stick them to my plain white cards.

I emailed a regular supplier some artwork for printing and asked for a cost. The correspondence went something like this.

-----
Hi,
Please see the attached artwork. I'd like these printed on A4. What would it cost per page?
-----
Hello, R30 + vat per A4
-----
Can I have 5 copies by 12 tomorrow?
-----
you can pick up at 2pm
-----

Literally, those were his last words. Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty conclusive to me. When I arrived at about 3pm on my way to the airport, he looked at me as if I was mad, and said "You didn't mail me back so I didn't do em."



Anyway I don't have the stickers that I wanted to stick to my plain white cards, so I'm drawing pictures on them.

Peace!

A new morewood website

We very happy to announce the launch of the latest morewood bikes website. And we managed to do it the day before Eurobike started.

Eurobike started today. It is the biggest bicycle expo in the Europe and probably the world. Its great to be here doing some research for the brand and to chat to the suppliers and distributors that we work with.

There is plenty to blog about here at the bike show, from weird bike company names to decals that look identical, or the new flavour of the month, I'll keep you posted.

By the way, we also did all the sticker designs for the bikes, and chose the frame colours so take a look and tell us what you think: morewoodbikes.com

Should we be conCERNed?

What makes us change our mind, or do something that we thought we wouldn't?

For those of you who know me, I'm anti McDonald's. There's plenty of reasons why it might be a bad idea to eat it out there.

But today, being on the road on the way from France to Germany, hungry and considering the slight possibility of a black hole swallowing up the earth on the 10th September when they start up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I thought, to hell with it.

What would you do with your time if we only had a week left on the planet?

future proof

Sorry, I have been on the move. I am in France and on my way to Germany next week to the biggest bicycle expo in Europe called Eurobike. It should be fun. It will all be revealed on the new Morewood website which is being launched next week. Our studio will posting pictures and videos everyday to keep the forums and traffic buzzing.

It seems technology has been on the move too. Did you know that Intel is doing this?

But the jury is out on who was first, of course, and so there will be a lot of noise from these guys, and maybe these guys about who gets the credit.

Personally I hope we dont fry ourselves with all the electromagnetic radiation. Or are they gamma rays? Aaaaaaah, shut it down!

I'll be back at the blog, with serious posts, next week.

GO FIREFOX GO!

Isn't it great how the underdogs of this (virtual) world can stand up to the Goliaths by capturing the imagination and rallying the popularity of the people, even for something which most people don't give a second thought to, like your web browser.

The browser wars have been going for well over a decade now, and finally we have a serious contender in Firefox. Please, lets support a world in which the little guy gets an even better chance to stand up to the corporate behemoth, by breaking a pointless world record!

Firefox will get a lot of free press if they do break a record, and maybe just maybe, we can shake some sense into the corporation that brought us MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Vista, Internet Explorer, and their funny box model, and now also Silverlight.

So please, spread FireFox, and contribute to breaking a world record today (17-18 June 2008) by being someone who downloads this great web browser.

Living in the future

It is products like this that make me feel like we are living in the future.

When you watch batman ripping up the streets of Gotham City in his batmobile that can morph and change shape, and then you see a real car like this, its easy to wonder about what the future might hold.

Same same, but different

Oh man, what a classic.


I noticed this old tractor, which I had never heard of before, while riding my bike in Tokai. It's called a SAME. Which marketing genius named this product? How about a name like Atlas or Titan rather. But the real surprise came when I found the logo on the front of the tractor was different to the logo on the side of the tractor. Same same, but different.

Its a marketing nightmare, but it made me smile. These days brands which are trying to be new or fashionable reset their logo in different typefaces so that it can be slapped on a tee shirt in an attempt for mass appeal. Billabong comes to mind. But then so many others do too. And now we have low price copycat brands like the Mr Price Red clothing label flooding the market with homogeneous tee shirt graphics that look like Billabong or Volcom. I wonder who copied who first.

Maybe these guys were way ahead of the game. This tractor is easy 20 years old.

Maybe all brands are the same, and its just the budgets that are different.

Writers strike or writers block

In light of the recent writers strike in Hollywood, I felt it was necessary to express my own radio silence on our blog. Admittedly it was a strong mix of sympathetic writers silence and pathetic negligence for the soapbox.

But I'm back. And I dare say that we have something rather interesting to post, right now.

the never ending quest

When will this dream be a reality?

The moon is mine

Do you know about this? Its a plan to mine the moon for the isotope called Helium 3. Its seems so far fetched, but then I have to remind myself that we are almost 8 years into the 21st century. A time when people predicted we would all be flying around in spaceships, living in near orbit.

But it still comes as a surprise. We are going to mine the moon. Its not even a case of if, just a case of how and when. Which brings me to this. I thought it was cool when I read that Google was to offer a $30 million prize for the first rover on the moon before 2012. But then a friend told me about this. It seems there is a shed load of the isotope on our lunar neighbour. I don't believe it, but rumour has it that 1 shuttle payload could power the USA for a year.

Oh, yes, sorry I jumped forward a bit, this is all related to the successful development of a nuclear fission reactor. I'm sure you have read about that, they started building it in the south of France, two years ago. Its an international research project by ITER. It hasn't been achieved yet but the plan is to burn the good stuff in the reactor at a temperature hotter than our sun. So now, the pieces of the puzzle are all starting to fit.

One of the biggest nuclear research projects for a new fuel for the planet, the abundant moon, and Google, just to incentivise the space race. Perfect.

When will they be putting their logo on the side of NASA's space ships do you think? Oh, no sorry, I think that's Pizza Hut's idea.

Welcome to the 21st century I say.

searching in the real world

This is so 21st century, and I really hope that they find Steve Fossett soon, whether they use Google Earth to do so or not.

Its interesting that the search needs to acquire up to date images for any sort of search to viable using Google Earth. And it makes you wonder how much of the data is live, and what is restricted. I thought I'd take a look at Baghdad one day, or hey what about the Afghanistan mountain range, maybe someone sitting in their living room in Pofadder could find Bin Laden.

Its a funny thing having this mix of amazing technology at your finger tips, with some of the letters in the alphabet kind of missing.

And its only going to get worse from the sounds of it.

The Google. The phenomenoun.

Its funny. Not funny haha, but funny peculiar, that someone would turn a phenomenal website into a new noun.

The other day a client phoned to ask if they were on the Google.

"Yes, you're rated number one if you do a search for yourself." I said quickly typing the name into Google, just to check. I breathed a little sigh of relief as we made some small talk and then we said our goodbyes.

Now correct me if Im wrong, but my client had unexpectedly turned Google into a phenomenoun. How funny I thought. But maybe, how true. Google is like a knowledge tree, and a tree would of course be a noun.

So it is with some humour and some truth that we studio geeks sometimes like to refer to our favourite websites as, the Facebook, the YouTube, and lets not forget, the Google.

Oh, wait, now this is funny. I just found this while looking for the Google typeface.

A random blog entry by, the sploosh

I just found this gem of George Bush using the same turn of phrase "The Google" in a television interview. Oh yes, he's so on it!

technorati tags:Google, Facebook, YouTube, Nouns, SEO, Funny, Weird

David Blaine Street Magic 2: The Sequel

A little bit of humour from the tubes. Enjoy the weekend.

Space Junk.

Now I don't know about you, but this concerns me, just a little. I'll never forget reading about space junk in the newspaper for the first time in 2000. It felt like watching reality tv for the first time, there was something blatantly wrong with it. Transfixed at first, but then, a nagging feeling that I would see it again.

Space junk is a near orbit phenomenon. Its so real that NASA have entire department dedicated to it, and have to monitor what they call space debris, for successful space launches of the shuttle.

This week Clayton Anderson aboard the International Space Station jettisoned a piece of space junk weighing 635kg's, due to circle the earth for about 300 days and then re-enter the earths atmosphere. NASA took a while to come to this decision and are hopeful that it will all break up on re-entry. Thanks guys.

What's always struck me about space travel, space ownership and commercialisation of it, is that we seem to be making the same mistakes as we have done on earth. Or our methods are the same. Which is to say, problematic. Apparently there is so much space up there that a little junk would not hurt anyone.

Uh, excuse me but, in the year 2000 a 3000 litre Delta II rocket fuel tank hit the ground at 30 000 km/h. No one in the Durbanville area was notified or even knew about it till it happened. To quote Douglas Adams, maybe NASA were thinking: "Don't Panic!" but who can really tell.

We know NASA can track these objects. Maybe its the just our geographics that don't warrant notification in the southern hemisphere.

Here's a snippet below from the tubes. Notice how the anchorman and woman are trying to pass it off as a meteor shower, when the space geek is clearly telling them, its junk. Maybe they are also thinking: Don't panic!