beatnic - just wondering

This evening my Dad and I went to see Wes Anderson’s fantastic The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

It seems difficult to go wrong with anything with Bill Murray in it these days.

I can really recommend it, it felt like a cross between one of my favourite films Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) and Tim Burton’s work.

And having grown up in Brazil (briefly when very young) and Lisbon (my parents lived there for most of my teenage years) it was amazing hearing David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese played superbly by Seu Jorge forming the basis for the soundtrack.

It’s definitely made me want to dust off my PADI certificate and see some more underwater life.

East Dulwich:

• is a classic example of a laste Victorian suburb
• had a cinema between 1938 and 1972 (the building was demolished in 2003)
• was bombed heavily in World War II during the Blitz and by V1 and V2 flying bombs
• had electric trams until 1952
• was originally in the county of Surrey and in 1965 became part of the new borough of Southwark
• was gentrified in the 1990s!

according to this timeline on southlondonguide.co.uk.

To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control. In short, it opposes all means of disorder and accident.

Emil Ruder
Typography

See entry about Emil Ruder in German Wikipedia

If children live with criticism,
They learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility,
They learn to fight.
If children live with ridicule,
They learn to be shy.
If children live with shame,
They learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement,
They learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance,
They learn to be patient.
If children live with praise,
They learn to appreciate.
If children live with acceptance,
They learn to love.
If children live with approval,
They learn to like themselves.
If children live with honesty,
They learn truthfulness.
If children live with security,
They learn to have faith in themselves and others.
If children live with friendliness,
They learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Dorothy Law Nolte

From Robert Paterson’s Weblog via The Obvious?

Kate read a variation of this to our nephew at her sister Lucy’s wedding last year

Winter is finally on the wane. The clouds are whiter and whispier and there’s sunshine.

Sitting in the office yesterday with the window slightly open, I really noticed how the noise coming in from the outside sounded different from the overcast day before.

The science bit, my colleague pointed out, is that there’s less moisture in the air and cloud cover to absorb the sounds.

It sounded like the sun was out.

I like that :-)

Good run…

• Up Dunstans Road and turn left (South) on to Lordship Lane
• Opposite Harvester on South Circular go through gate and up Cox’s Walk to Dulwich Woods
• Up hill over disused railway tunnel at back of Sydenham Hill Wood (Nature Reserve) which comes out on Sydenham Hill
• Turn right along Sydenham Hill to mini-roundabout (towards Crystal Palace Television Transmission Mast)
• Left at mini-roundabout (as if going to Penge)
• First right through gate in to Crystal Palace Park
• Follow path through to where the palace used to stand and then head across park towards Crystal Palace railway station
• Turn right just before station to bring you out by bus depot
• Go right (East) back towards East Dulwich
• Take a left down College Road… until you reach the South Circular by Dulwich College
• Turn right along Dulwich Common (A205 South Circular)
• After 250 metres go left through gate in to Dulwich Park
• Run across park, exit through the gate which takes you up Eynella Road
• Go up the hill, over the lights at the crossroads, and down Barry Road
• Turn right at Goodrich Road
• Go left either down Friern Road or Upland Road to take you to Underhill Road to complete the circuit

It’s quite leafy and fairly undulating. There are some great views North across London and it’s great imagining what it must have been like when The Crystal Palace was in its prime

47 minutes this morning

Not sure how far, feels 10k-ish

Stuart Beebe: "Societies do what societies think"

Originally uploaded by PhilWolff.

This from David Weinberger via Euan:

1. Open, transparent environments are more secure and more stable than closed, opaque ones.
2. While Internet services can be interrupted, the Internet as a global system is ultimately resilient to attacks, even sophisticated and widely distributed ones.
3. The connectedness of the Internet – people talking with people – counters the divisiveness terrorists are trying to create.
4. The openness of the Internet may be exploited by terrorists, but as with democratic governments, openness minimizes the likelihood of terrorist acts and enables effective responses to terrorism. fertile ground…

Chatting to my friend Claire earlier about having cleared my inbox thanks to Mark Hurst’s very handy guide to Managing incoming email.

We talked about how, because of the tools we’ve been given to deal with our information, we’ve been encouraged to organise our information in hierarchical structures.

A few years ago I built a directory structure in Outlook that I thought reflected my working life. First under the headings “Me”, “My work” and “My team”, and then further sub-divided “My work” in to all sorts of folders to do with the various projects I’m overseeing or inolved in as well as the operational elements and so on.

For me this no longer works.

Now I’m so used to tagging in Flickr and labelling in Gmail etc., I want to be able to apply the same approach to my work information.

“The fundamental ‘formula’ of Gestalt theory might be expressed in this way. There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes. With a formula such as this one might close, for Gestalt theory is neither more nor less than this.”

Max Wertheimer
Über Gestalttheorie [an address before the Kant Society, Berlin, '7th December, 1924], Erlangen, 1925

Great idea: This is broken

“A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it.”

Amongst the hundreds of posts is a picture of a “Restroom” sign in Seattle with an arrow pointing to the sky

Courtesy of Mark Hurst in New York who’s behind goodexperience.com

Sign on train today…

Just wondering… what constitutes using a mobile phone these days?

I read the news on mine today quite happily (and quietly). If I’d read it to someone else would I have been arrested?

Kate’s parents met at one of these…

Buttons to operate toilet door on board train today…

Just wondering… how do you know when it’s locked?

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

I’m starting to narrow in on what to write about when I do my Masters

At the moment it’s looking like:

The application of Gestalt theory in user interface and information design for web-based applications

More later.