merry xmas all

Here are some xmas birds I painted today (last minute!) for my mum's xmas present. They are saying "happy xmas" to everyone who sees them.

I am posting this from 'PerFormancing' , a dweeby plug in for FireFox that lets me post just by pressing F8.

Peace and good tidings all.

china

I find Tom Peters really inspirational. But even when he released a huge powerpoint deck which mentions the economic importance of China (Tom Peters - Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age), I still wasn't that fussed about China. You can get it here, along with lots of other horribly/brilliantly designed slides.

All Tom Peters ppts are good fast reading and you defo find at least one or two directly useful quotes or factoids, like:

“The Ultimate Luxury Item Is Now Made in China” — Headline/p1/The New York Times/ 07.13.2004/Topic: Luxury Yachts made in Zhongshan

and

“China’s Next Export: Innovation” —McKinsey Quarterly (Cover Story)


For me though, the seminal event that made me take notice of China was this weekend - my derranged cheering-on of 18 year old Ding JunWei as he thrased Steve Davies to take the UK Snooker Championship title.


The first non-UK/Ireland guy to ever ever win the UK Snooker Championships!

So please take note of China. If you work in advertising I am sure something very Chinese-inspired will make its way into a campaign soon - and I don't mean kung-fu, or vaguely-oriental-wise-men. Something not so obvious like their fascination for electric bicycles, or typing "88" as goodbye, or just something to do with the fact that there are 3 billion people living in a culture which is pretty alien to most of us.

party costumes - gorillaz

The theme for our agency xmas bash was popstars. "If we go as the Gorillaz, we could just virtually project ourseves there and not even have to go!"

Instead we maimed a lot of cardboard to come up with these cutouts. The plan was to go with these and wear black invisible outfits like those puppeteers who make things float across a dark screen.


the kitchen, post-construction

Shopping list
giant ASDA: paints, marker pens
Marks and Spencers: black tights x 5 pairs (what are the numbers on tights packets?)

Here we both are in situ, with Marks and Spencers tights on our heads.
The party rocked. Click on any picture to go to the flickr set.

a greeting card I made

I posted a while ago about greeting cards, claiming that I made them. Well it's true, here is one I made a couple of weeks ago. Paper gerbils coloured in, cut out and stuck onto a montage of Sunday magazines.


click on the photo and then click on the "all sizes" button above it to see the full size version

my keytar

ok this is a bit of a frivolous post. I have been learning to play the keytar since I got one off eBay. I can’t play the piano properly – can’t read music and don’t know scales and fingering. I never had an incentive to learn what a minor scale or mode was – until now, as I am very slowly working my way through Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time.



Here is a soundbite of my bad rendition of half the solo from Led Zepplin – Stairway to Heaven (right click save target as). Hey, I am still practising ok. You can hear the onboard chord sequencer playing over Rhythm 23 “hard rock”.



The keytar rocks. Even though it's almost a toy, and is almost 20 years old, it wails. If you want to read more about keytars, check out the wikipedia article or this guy's most excellent mp3 samples!

All in all it’s a lot of fun. I think it’s interesting how what is essentially a packaging gimmick – small plastic piano with strap and pitch bend wheel – has finally motivated me to learn about scales and piano fingering after 10-something years of refusing to do so.

del.icio.us

is a website where you store and share all your bookmarks. You can browse other people bookmarks and sort and search by ‘tags’, which are words/categories assigned to links so that you know what they are.

It’s not new or anything, but anyway I am going to tell you why you should use it even though it sounds frankly a bit frivolous.

Here is what it does, from my geeky plannery point of view.

1. storing all your bookmarks online
Even though I have 2 computers (a work laptop and a home one), I don’t find this very useful at all. Any takers?

2. super surfing
My old flatmate at uni was brilliant at amusing himself by surfing, and affectionately referred to it simply as ‘clicking’. We spent hours finding things like articles about new species of squid, or the entire script from Ace Ventura 2 and so on.

Try going to http://del.icio.us and searching for a couple of tags of whatever you’re interested in – I guarantee you will find something useful, fantastic or interesting.

3. “people who liked this link also liked…”
Once you have found a good link, then you can see who has listed it as a favourite, and crucially, what else they have listed as favourites. As a planner, I try to find and read all the good sources of knowledge and info about new consumer trends, advertising, bits of industry thinking and so on. So I found some people who I guessed are advertising/marketing strategy or researchers (by warrant of what they had already bookmarked), and started pillaging all their good bookmarks. In under five minutes I had found:

a good site about emerging consumer trends that I hadn’t found before
http://news.agendainc.com/

about 100+ tips on how to think creatively, and aids to problem solving
from lifehack.org

a blog all about how technology is changing the face of marketing communications
http://www.micropersuasion.com/

http://www.influxinsights.com/
a good blog: Influx Insights is a weblog with articles about emerging trends that matter to brands

You can also set it up so it automatically sends you new links from either certain people, or with certain tags on them.

There is some geekier functionality, e.g. pretty much everything on it has an RSS feed, and you can send people bookmarks (this would be useful if you were working on a project with someone).

Anyway it’s good, check it out.

If you want to, you can see and search all of my bookmarks! Right now they are mostly work related so no saucy stuff. That’s here: http://del.icio.us/dead_insect

console games

I have been at back at my childhood home on a kind of urban detox. My life now is full of big out of town shopping centres and those retail parks that are built around big car parks.

So I have been sorting out lots of boxes of old things and junk, and have dug up the old consoles that me and my brother used to play.


They are a heady slice of nostalgia. Look at the Japanese-import megadrive with 16 BIT proudly across it in gold. This was back in the days when the only region/copy protection that Sega/Nintendo used was making the US/Euro/Japanese cartridges slightly different shapes (which you could circumvent by simply breaking off a small plastic tab on the console). What a different world we live in now.

Also the Sega light gun thing for the 8-bit Sega Master System – the microswitch trigger (microswitches on game pads = unheard of these days!) still feels awesome. I layed down a lot of gangstas with that thing, and never once thought of holding it on its side.

And look at the size of that Atari Lynx – it’s bigger than the non-portable consoles!


Finally here is a cool controller that I used to use on the old Sega Master System. I was trying to work out for ages what the switch on top was for, and have just remembered it was so you could use it on the Atari ST, Amiga and so on, because they all had the same kind of connector... things were simple in the past.