My flat. Virtually

As I may have mentioned (really?) I've just become a homeowner for the first time. This virtual model is a little project I started off before I'd moved in, to check out how the sofa would fit, work out whether I really wanted to change the lighting in the hall, etc. Now I've moved in, I guess it may still come in useful. Maybe.

It's not exactly TV quality video, and it'll flash by awful quick - sorry about that. But if I fiddle with it any more I'll never post it, and I have more important things to do (like clean the damn place), so consider this a first draft which I'll fix up eventually. Of course, the real view out the window is nowhere near as nice... but hey, in this version, I can make the view exactly what I damn well please. So I made it nice.

The actual model is very basic - I scanned in the floor plan and extruded it. Dead easy. The thing that takes the time is getting the lighting right.

Pictoplasma!

In the absence of any exciting projects of my own to share (I have several which I want to post, but they're not ready yet), core77 brought me this blast from the past. I came across pictoplasma in book form a few years back and loved it, but here's the website! It's a directory of 6500 character graphics and they are universally very very cool. Check out the archive. Great place for inspiration.

On the aesthetics of wind farms

Interesting article over at Design Observer (via core 77) about the aesthetics of wind farms. The author makes a couple of interesting points about one of the main arguments over wind farms, which is the question of whether they're ugly or not. Personally, I think they're rather beautiful, and eventually he comes out with that opinion too, but on the way he makes some interesting points about how our perceptions of beauty are to do with our perception of order, and the orderliness of natural vs man-made systems. Ugliness, apparently, is fragmentation - who knew? Glad we got that sorted out.

I do disagree with him on a couple of things:

1. It isn't our politico-economic system which doesn't place any value on nature, it's our economic one. That might seem like a fine distinction, but I think it's an important one. Politicians will value anything if enough opinion polls tell them to.
   
2. I think his list of natural 'principles' is a basically a list of platitudes. Nature doesn't 'design', and it certainly doesn't have 'principles'. We can make observations about it, sure, but still, I don't know what "Nature exploits the power of limits" means.

One thing he does mention which rang true, though, was when he said that modernists were crypto-materialists (wow, long words). I have to say that rang true to me. I love the modernist aesthetics, and I have to admit to being pretty darn materialist. In fact, I have great difficulty relating to people who claim to be 'spiritual' - I tend to just ignore that side of things. This may explain at least one disastrous relationship. But to get back to the point... on the other hand, I think there's an underlying principle which Justin is ignoring, in that both nature and modernist design use the repetition of simple units to create a larger effect (as per this rather effective image I found). I think there's more homage to nature in modernism than he'd care to admit.

Anyway. Any thoughts? How do you lot feel about wind farms? Elegant, or hideous? Would you have one in your back garden?

I want one of these (4) - Zenkaya prefab

Somewhere between the so-called 'static caravan' and a fully-fledged house comes this beauty from Zenkaya, a South African firm. Not sure if it'd stand up to British weather (or even if they'll deliver that far), but really, wow.

I want one of these (3) - light switch surround

It's kind of premature, but I'm worrying that my new flat - which I'm basically furnishing from scratch - is going to end up a bit soulless and drop-in-bachelor-IKEA-ish (if that makes any sense).  This young lady has come up with just the sort of thing I'd never have thought of, but which I soooo want now I've seen it... How gorgeous is that?

 

via design*sponge - which also has something VERY exciting - Andy Lang, a guy I went to college with, has commercialised one of the designs he did as a student and took it to icff this year! Fantastic to see his grinning face, and the cycloc is a brilliant design - in fact, I was thinking just the other day I could do with one of these in my flat right now! He deserves all the success he can get, and it's good to see him out there.

 

Bird in the vent

I've only been in my new flat a week, and a bird has managed to drop
into one of the wall spaces. I panicked a bit at first, thinking I had
a really impressive rat infestation, but rats don't make slapping,
flapping noises. Now I can hear it scrabbling pathetically against the
plastic grille on my wall vent. There's no way of getting to it from
outside (I mean it - it's a blank wall), and no way of getting the
grille off without destroying the vent (no visible screw holes or
anything, and nowhere to conveniently insert a Stanley knife).



The stupid thing is clearly injured and will die whatever.



Wot the blazes do I do? Let it die where it is, and hope it doesn't
smell too bad? Or do I make a mess of the wall in order to free it, so
it can die in the garden? It can't be that big - from the sound of it,
I'd guess it's a grownup starling or tit or somesuch. At the moment,
all I've done is cover up the vent so no light can get in, which seems
to have calmed it a bit. But it's been there at least a day now.



So in the meantime, it just scrabbles around at the bottom of a dark
hole waiting for death, like some ghastly metaphor for something.

My career as a guinea pig - fin

This is a little out of date - I wrote it a couple of weeks ago but
I've been moving house, so I never got round to posting it. It
completes a little cycle of blog entries, though, so I'm sticking it up
now.



Well, so much for that. It is with.. Well, with mixed feelings,
frankly, that I can announce the end of my career as a medical guinea
pig. It lasted a month, less two days.



On the one hand, I regret not
completing the course. I don't like to fail at things, and dropping out
of a three month course after one month feels like failure. It feels
like I let people down. I know how silly it is to feel that way, and I
know that even a negative result is still aa result, but... it's just
the way I'm wired, okay? I tried to stick with it as long as I could, I
tried to help... and I had to drop out.



On the other hand, I AM OFF THE
CRAPPY USELESS PILLS - WOOHOO! Thank crikey for that. Now,
hopefully, I can get back onto something proven which works.
This last month has been the crappiest of a series of crappy months
where I've had NO ENERGY and NO FUN. This has to be good timing,
given that I'm supposed to be moving house this week (well, moving from
one house-sitting to the next) and going away at the weekend too,
and I really didn't know how I was going to survive.



Let me just explain just how bad I've
been. I would have second thoughts about climbing a staircase two steps
at a time. This time last year, I was away surfing at the
weekend; this year, I don't think I'd be able to carry the board down
to the beach. This weekend, I managed to pack half a carload of boxes
and get them into storage - and that was me finished for the weekend,
completely wiped out. I had to rest up all that day and all the next,
just to recover. Now, hopefully, I can really start on the long road
back to some sort of sensible level of activity. It's been a long time.





Anyway - I am now moved into my new flat (more on that some other
time), and have been taking bog standard Prednisolone for three weeks -
and I feel wonderful. Last week, I managed to fit in a game of
five-a-side football in my lunch hour! That would have been totally
inconceivable three weeks ago. Glorious health!

I want one of these (2): Solar lamp

Gorgeous solar lamp with the solar panels incorporated into the design! That's something special.

I wasn't going to bother sharing this, but dammit, everyone needs a bit of extra elegance in their lives.

Gradisil

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author:	Adam Roberts

First off, let's be clear - Adam Roberts writes high-concept sf, so most of you can go back to you daily lives now - sorry! In the past, he's written about a universe where it was possible to fly to the moon in a biplane, and a world where gravity operates at ninety degrees... Gradisil is a story of do-it-yourself homesteaders living in tin cans in Low Earth Orbit, struggling to remain free of the bickering nations of the Earth beneath them. His style is meditative, with sparse dialogue (no scriptwriters in these people's lives). His characters are deeply flawed, and very human. His scientific conceits are sometimes pretty far-out and sometimes fascinatingly practical, but I think there's a deeper level where the relationship between his characters and their surroundings rings true. And I love it.

What's sad is that Adam will always be a niche author, because he embodies all the qualities which people assume science fiction doesn't have - fully developed characters, human-centred bittersweet stories, a deliciously innovative literary style - while still building his stories around crazy scientific and technological ideas. The best comparison I can make is with Stanislaw Lem, who died a few weeks back (very sad) - some of you might have come across 'Solaris'. If you haven't... it's the sort of style you might get if Kafka and Solzhenitsyn ganged up on Isaac Asimov, stole his wallet and headed for Vegas. That's my best attempt.

What makes Adam stand apart for me, though, is his characters. They're not the emotionless, super-rational cardboard cutouts that often crop up in the genre. They are always deeply human: they're emotional and passionate, often giving to uttering non-sequiturs, or doing stupid things and not regretting them until much later. They're making their way as best they can, in a world where baffling, unfair, Kafka-esque things happen to them. And the worlds in which they live are both the same as ours, but different - physically, they might be completely different (flying to the moon in a biplane?), but on a human level, they're still populated by people making selfish, stupid, emotional, deeply familiar decisions.

I don't know how Adam approaches his work; I've never read any interviews, or seen anything about him. But one theme I see coming out of his books is the idea of our relationship with technology being difficult, almost abusive - technology mindlessly making things more complicated while we struggle to live our lives in a way we can still understand. It's not about consumerism, or corporate evil. It's not about any sort of conscious will at all. It's just about how we get ourselves into a mess, and then have to live with it. And whereas with most books things can be neatly squared away at the end, Adam's stories never seem to fit into our neat, shrink-wrapped preconceptions. That, for me, is his greatest skill and his great triumph.

I'm still only halfway through reading this. I know the ending will be sad, or at best bittersweet - that's Adam's style. But it'll be great: I am utterly, totally confident that he won't let me down. Two things I am sure of; I'll be ambushed by weirdness a few more times before the end of the book; and I will feel these characters for every moment of it. I can't wait

Something for all you label-pickers

Okay, so this isn't physically possible as shown, which is a shame, but
I've got a soft spot for these little design... is there a word for
it?... these cute little observational comedy pieces which designers
occasionally come up with.
This one is for anyone who's ever peeled a label off a
bottle of beer...





Dammit, there should be a word for these.I'm thinking of these little
pseudo-products that may or may not work, but which are really more
about observing our foibles and reflecting them back to us. The two
examples I've come across recently are this one (obviously), and the
hand-hold dog lead...



... some cute word, kinda flowery but with bite.

Tinytine.

Blossitack.

Flosstomy.

Kittcrack. (ew)

... actually, I kinda like that. Kittcrack. Kittcrack. Gotta ring to
it. 'Check out this latest bit of Kittcrack'.. hmm. Doesn't convey the
observation aspect?



Like the idea of using the word 'tine' in there (it's the pointy bit of your fork, okay?)

Designtine. Destine. Intrestine. Trestine. Destign.

Designspot. Despot. Spogit. Splogit

Barbie (hey, it has the word 'barb' in it already, what''s not to like?)

Barbirism.



oh heck, I dunno. Maybe I should just call them art, and be done with it.

I bought some Lego

I'm a bad person. I did a bad, bad thing.



I bought me some Lego.



(heeheehee)



I marched into ToysRUs, wandered up and down the place for a bit,
pretending to be interested in the Batman action figures (pah) before
returning to the shelves, grabbing a couple of the (bigger) boxes, and
marching out. (there was a paying bit, but that's boring so I'm not
mentioning it).



There is method in my madness, however. I have as a little pet project
the intention of making a solar-powered sweeping robot to clean the
(wooden) floors in my new flat (which I move into in two weeks). And I
shall make it out of Lego. But the lego robot unit I want to use
doesn't come out until mid-September (I'm waiting for the new one), so
I figured a radio control version would be a good halfway-house - I can
do the prototyping work on it, then build in the robot bit later.
Granted, a radio-controlled floor-sweeper won't make the job any less
time-consuming, but I figure it'll be kinda fun to zoom it round the
house from the comfort of my sofa (which I don't yet own).



Lego sure has come a long way in the last..er... fifteen years. I'm not
sure I approve wholeheartedly... but I was once again struck by just
how sublimely flexible the whole system is. And I was doubly struck by
the extreme cleverness of the people who put together these kits. All
of a sudden, some apparently-random components (which elsewhere in the
design are used for mechanical transmission, or bridging a gap)
suddenly coalesce into a pretty good-looking engine grille!



But I am feeling a leettle bit thwarted. The radio controlled car comes from a series called
'Racers', which is clearly designed to be rather meatier than the
normal stuff, and is only just barely compatible
with the regular bits. In fact, the regular Lego Technic dumper truck I
also bought looks rather tiny and pathetic next to this brute. And then
there's the tiny problem that the radio-controlled car goes about
twenty times as fast as I want my floor-sweeper to go... and
all the gearing and steering bits for the RC car are inside a
sealed unit! This is Lego built for brutality, and not for
flexibility. I disapprove. I'll just have to take it into work and open
up the sealed unit, that's all. Irritating, though.



Nonetheless - Lego! Mine! Fun! And total guilt, of course. I mean, a thirty-year-old man, playing with Lego...



On unrelated topics, the TV in my flat has died. This is very annoying,
as it's not mine, and the owner is in India and comes back in two
weeks. I'm mildly annoyed at the idea of living without TV for that
time, but what am I supposed to do? I could try and get it fixed, I
suppose - but she might want to buy a new one, and anyway, I'm
reluctant to spend my money on something which was clearly on its way
out (it's been playing up for a while).



No, you're right, I should try and get it fixed. Damn. How annoying.



And... I'm still ill. Damn these useless freakin'
drugs, they're hopeless. Look - on Sunday I got up late, I went to
ToysRUs on the aforementioned mission, I went for a bit of a drive
around for an hour or so, then I came home. I felt tired and went to
bed - at SEVEN. And I stayed there 'til NINE this morning. That is
all it took to completely exhaust me. That's not
good at all. This is one reason why I went out and bought this stupid
stuff - to make me feel a bit better about feeling tired all the time.
This really sucks.