Filed under: Coffee Break
Here at Neoco we likes us some Karaoke. So when Benn stumbled upon (in the real sense of the word, not the online sense of the word) a new Karaoke bar near Soho (that shall remain nameless) we had to check it out – especially since it was substantially cheaper than our favourite haunt Lucky Voice.
So down we all go on a Friday after work, looking forward to seeing what was on offer. On arrival we were ushered into the basement, and into our booth… bristling with anticipation.
The owners seemed unsure exactly how the Karaoke machine worked, but eventually got it up and running – admittedly with a huge amount of echo on the mics and the hilarious disco ball on the ceiling (this turned on for each song and then turned off at the end).
The graphics were inspired. A bit like a tour of industrialised Eastern Europe, with some bad Holiday snaps and random animals thrown in for good measure. Drinks were ordered and brought to us. A bottle of white wine with six small plastic beakers (the disposable kind you would have on sports’ day when you were 8 years old). One of the cups actually had a hole in the bottom and swiftly leaked it’s contents all over the table.
And then there was the actual Karaoke machine. Now I’m no Frank Sinatra, but I like to think I can sing. But not here, no way, not today. The backing consisted of a slightly cheery MIDI song, usually with a few extra instruments thrown in for good measure (think pipes / mouth organ). This was the same for all songs – regardless of genre. My favourite was Rage Against The Machine: Killing In The Name – rendered utterly absurd by the cheery sound track. And my god, if you didn’t know the song 100%, you were in trouble. Unforgiving would perhaps be the best single word to describe the system. Or crap. Depending on your view point.
The simple lesson to learn from this experience is: you get what you pay for..
And on that note… we’re all off to Lucky Voice tonight for the real thing.
This morning as I worked my way from Charing Cross station, down the Strand, to work, I experienced the best bit of Direct Marketing I’ve seen in ages (on a scale of one to ten where the boxing gym people are somewhere near 3, this would be up near 8.)
I was accosted by a smart looking guy offering me the chance to grow my own jalapeno peppers at home. He handed me a small pink package, that looked a bit like a book of matches (the type you used to get in pretentious clubs). Inside were five chilli-pepper seeds, with instructions on how to plant. As I accepted this gift, I was told about the new healthy Mexican seafood restaurant that has just opened nearby.
Genius! Such a simple idea – but seemingly so effective. It wasn’t just me who was taking up on the free chilli-pepper seeds offer. I’m definitely going to pay the place a visit; now all they’ve got to do is impress me with the food as much as they did with the marketing.
++++++++++[>+++++++> ++++++++++>+++>+<<<< -]>++.>+.+++++++..++ +.>++.<<++++++++++++ +++.>.+++.——.— —–.>+.>.
… or Hello World! to those of you who aren’t versed in the intricacies of the computer programming language brainfuck.
Brainfuck is an eight-instruction Turing-complete programming language. Anyone who’s not impressed by that may as well just leave now; or skip to the next post. “Any machine that can act as a universal Turing machine can, in principle, perform any calculation that any other computer is capable of”1. So this means that I could reprogram the Neoco site using brainfuck.. an interesting proposition.
So what does it all mean? Is there any point? Possibly not – although the language can operate on “the smallest compiler ever”2.
You can find out more about this, and other defunct coding languages, from this interesting article.
Links
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
2. http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/
Today, I am pleased to upload a guest entry to the neoco blog by Ivan Pope – the British ‘been there and done that’ web guru. This is a terrific read and well worth the 5 mins of reading time. Thanks Ivan. On with the show…
“Driving home late last night I was listening to a radio program about whether there is such a thing as the Zeitgeist and how we recognise it.
This made me think about Facebook and the current obsessive coverage that the site gets from the blogosphere and whether we really are seeing something that will grow to become a key part of the internet, or whether it’s just a case of zeitgeist mania.
Following the launch of the Facebook f8 platform, discussion of MySpace (the previous zeitgeist candidate) has dropped to zero (does it still exist, has anyone been over to look recently, maybe we should send a searchparty out just in case) and Facebook has become the dominant theme. Far reaching claims have been made for the power, beauty and all consuming glory of Facebook, including that it’s become the operating system of the internet, that it’s the new Google and that it will be bought for $6bn by Microsoft. I’m not going to argue about it’s potential value, anything that claims our attention and obsession the way Facebook has no doubt has a huge value. But I’m interested in the value to you and me, to the millions of individual users. I love hanging out on Facebook, but I’m not sure I’ve found out what it does yet. And it seems the more I look, the less I find. I’m beginning to get the feeling that Facebook is only fun for tracking the now, the mememe moment. It’s great to see all your friends arrive and add friends and add applications and … then?
As Facebook continues its march to total world domination, for the record I’d like to articulate why I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s a zeitgeisty thing – we’re all talking about Facebook so we’re all talking about Facebook. But can Facebook sustain our interest over the next year?
The Web is something rich and strange and Facebook not something rich and strange.
Back in 1988 before the Web arrived we used to play a lot of image based games around the internet, passing encoded images back and forth and basically working hard to make some sense of this dark network where
no-one could see anyone else. From that point on for me the internet and the web have been a rich and strange playground where each new person, each new application, each new network, added something
unknowable to the sum total of where we worked and played. Facebook doesn’t really do any of that. It’s a nice tidy ‘burb where everyone has more or less the same house, same garden, same car, same attitude.
Sure, we can all add friends and join networks and add applications, but it’s always clear that there is no curtain behind which strange things might lurk. Facebook is the uber controlled environment – useful and wanted by many, but not pregnant with potential.
There are only so many new people
Facebook is experiencing a huge wave of migration. This is held up as proof of the genius of Zuckerberg, and indeed in many ways they have played a blinder. From a closed College based network, they have taken a gamble to open up to anyone and everyone and seen it play off bigtime. The viral nature of Facebook is supreme, with member get member raised to a new artform. I’ve read dozens of articles about how all of someone’s friends have arrived in Facebook in the very recent past, usually in a great splurge of arrivals as a single outrider reports back to the group that, yup, it looks safe in here and there are lush pastures for the cattle. Then everyone else takes up residence, and as they overlap with other social groups, the process repeats itself. There is something engaging and exciting about arriving in an easy to understand social network, with tools to explore and people to Poke (ooh, the underlying sexual thrill of it all, it reminds me of my first disco, I didn’t know what that was all about either, but by god it turned me on). Face it, when someone invites you to join Facebook and be their friend, its a cheap thrill to sign up and be that friend.
Call that a network?
I live in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, UK. So for some reason that’s my network. It has 54,384 members who, I guess, live in Brighton and Hove. The total population of Brighton is 247,820, which means my network contains approximately one sixth of the entire population of this town. There are only 117032 15 to 44 year olds, which means that almost 50% of them are members of my local network. Huh? I mean, this is some kind of groovy town, but I find that rather unlikely.
More to the point, what the hell am I supposed to do with a network that includes every single sentient being between the ages of fifteen and forty-five in my town? I see I can go to a costume making event at 2pm or *GUILDFORD MONDAY NITE* at 7pm (that’s Guildford, not Brighton, but hey). Popular in Brighton and Hove includes the facebook wide food fight and Brighton’s Largest Water Fight. The Discussion Board has 164 discussion topics, starting with ‘How Many Ways To Say I Love You?’, but frankly life’s too short. And then there’s The Wall. 754 posts starting with a bit of spam from Ben Williams.
To say the will to live deserted me at this point would be an exaggeration, but to say the will to live in Brighton and Hove fled my feeble frame just about sums it up. Why am I in this network? I am a sophisticated online denizen, I partake of and participate in hundreds of online societies and fora of all kinds. Some are good, some are bad, some are essential to life. But none are as depressingly pointless as this all consuming Brighton and Hove Network.
And yes, I know I can change my regional network, but what exactly would be the point of that? I quite like seeing my local friends’ faces peering out at me from the sidebar – but that’s not quite enough to make it worthwhile.
I guess this approach worked quite well when it was a college based network, but imagine what it is like to be a London or Shanghai network member – they’ve elevated inanity to a whole new level.
Give me my tools back
I’m used to some level of sophistication in my toolset. I don’t mind using your online tools, after all, it’s your community. But ffs, all I can do in my Groups is write on the wall? And then you can write on the same wall back to me. I can upload photos? Every time someone does something, I get sent an email without the content. There just are no sophisticated tools in Facebook – everything is like a shallow version of what we’re used to on the outside. For sure, the apps have started to put some depth back into the system, but it’s hard to imagine that we’ll en masse abandon our email and our IM and our other contact and memory tools and use the stubs that Facebook offers. Not for a while anyway, we’ll get disillusioned and wonder off as our attention drifts.
Did you know there are other colours?
I know this will sound very shallow and pathetic, but I really can’t imagine living with 3b5998 only for the rest of my life. As someone who was working with the web when there was not even any right align, let alone fancy layouts or the CSS wonders we see today, it pains me to have to use such a limited interface. With respect, it is the sort of interface that the East German government would have commissioned for their citizen network if they had lived to see in the true glory of the web. Where I come from we call this colour Navy Blue and with good reason, children grow up to hate it. Allied to the fixed layout, 3b5998 is the antithesis of everything that design stands for and everything that the web has taught us – that we are individuals and that we make and remake our environment to work with our needs and desires. Even Google, that great interface reducer, has relented and offered multiple funky interfaces to their start pages. So what’s with the fascist control freakery? Don’t you trust me to change things the way I like em? think I might, like, go mad with funky colours? So what, that’s my freedom.
All this is not to say that I don’t enjoy Facebook – it’s been a blast. I’ve got on with it so much better than I ever did with MySpace. It’s calm and clean and pleasant. It’s just that, after a while, I start to wonder where all the there is. What can I actually do with this stuff, apart from add my voice to a list of comments on a wall and show off my nous by adding new apps, knowing that all my mates will see me adding it. Then I can have a little thrill when I notice them in return joining my Groups or adding my apps. See, it’s a bit ego driven, but after the thrill comes not very much at all. So here’s to a long life for Facebook. Facebook has become the zeitgeist for a few months. But our attention will wander. It’s not Google. It won’t change our lives. It won’t become the centre of all we do online, adding a new layer of amazement. Google did that. Facebook is just another thing to play with.”
You can find Ivan on FB by clicking here!
You can submit your own entry for consideration to the neoco blog – just email us.
Filed under: Cool & Online
here are quite a few websites that offer the user some glimpse of interaction, but not many that offer as much as sodaplay.
Sodaplay is, according to their website, the home of creative play. It provides an app for building and manipulating wire-frame models which behave according to the laws of physics. These models can be animated by building “muscles”. Add this all together and you have a quite fun and addictive experience.
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The genius of the site is how you can build, from scratch, models that behave in vastly different ways. Check out the sodazoo for examples.
Filed under: Coffee Break
I live on the Northern line, which brings with it a fair degree of morning travel misery. I choose to live there – so I guess I have to live with it. It would appear too much for TFL to make it work properly.
However it’s not all bad – the randomness of the Northern line does make the morning commute more of a lottery. And this morning I hit the jackpot.
Having arrived at the station to the sight of five-deep crowds, I was resigned to a slow journey in. How many full trains would pass before I could get on? Would it be a Charring Cross branch train or would I have to change? Oh the excitement.
Having watched one train leave, filled to the brim, the next one up on the board was “out of service”. So imagine the surprise when the empty train pulled up, opened the doors, and explained that it was back in service! The fickle tube god had blessed me and my journey.
There is often discussion in the metro about the lack of smiling on the underground – but believe me, people were smiling this morning. There was a palpable sense of celebration.
I figure I probably have more chance of winning the lottery than an empty train ever pulling up in the morning rush hour again.
For years, the clean white page and simple search bar has been synonymous with Google. Now there is Blackle. How can I put this best…
Blackle is Google but with a black background. Yes, that’s it. One tiny change. But why? Well, black backgrounds use a (tiny amount) less energy than white backgrounds. Yes, it is tiny, but imagine the saving when multiplied across Google traffic – it’s currently saved nearly 100,000 Watt hours in a matter of weeks.
It’s an idea and ideas are a good thing. Ideas that contribute to energy efficiency are even better. So set Blackle as your homepage and do your bit.
Filed under: Coffee Break
The pun is so weak I’ve even included brackets just so you notice – unlike the contenders for the inaugural Neoco badge making competition.
Having recently completed a badge maker for a client, it seemed only natural to break it in by holding a competition. The rules were simple:
1. Use the badge maker
2. One entry per competitor
3. Badge must be original (eg: no downloading the “coka-cola” logo)
4. Entry is not optional.
Entries were duly reviewed and carefully considered by the appointed judge (myself). But there could only be one winner – and that winner was indeed my entry:
All agreed that the badge maker has a certain charm and character – it almost draws you in and forces you to make a badge!
I became an avid DS owner last Christmas (mainly because I couldn’t get my hands on a Wii – and it seemed like a logical consolation prize) and yet still I have only got three games – Brain Training, Mario Kart and Super Mario.
It was therefore with unbridled glee that I greeted a message from a friend telling me that SimCity DS was soon to be released.
I searched the Internet and stumbled upon the obligatory game microsite – complete with “send-to-a-friend”, “flash-game” and all the other bits and pieces expected.
Now, it takes a while to load, I’ll admit that, and I was in a slightly overexcited mood when I visited the site, but still I was fairly impressed by the DS microsite. I loved the animations – the little slice of city. I wanted to interact, to build, to knock down, to put my mark on the city (a city of around 5 buildings). You can’t do any of that – but it does make you want the game.
Dig deeper and the site is less satisfying. Finding out the game must be done via boxes that are inexplicably too small – forcing you to scroll up and down – or via slow, bordering on painful, videos that explain the bleeding obvious (you build a city). I’m sure that someone forgot to include most of the planned content – somehow it just doesn’t tell you much about the game.
Looking back having got the game now and played it I realise that some of the frustrating features perfectly mirror the game’s frustrating features – so perhaps hands tied on that one (I’m thinking of the annoying yellow speech bubbles that load oh-so-slowly).
The microsite plays up “Wi-Fi” as one of the three game features. An interesting idea since the Wi-Fi features in the game are almost pointless. Then there’s the mini-game. It’s basically Pipe Mania but with bits of road and a car rather than pipes and liquid. A cracking game that I have fond memories of (and so do a few others in the office). Now either I’m absolutely rubbish at the SimCityDS version (very unlikely) – or it’s next to impossible. The jury is out on that one. It’s difficult to tell because there is no high-score table. Why on earth not?
(I’m rubbish at this as you can see from my paltry score.
But enough moaning already – the site works! I bought a copy a day or two later. Without reading any reviews.
And then the game… I’ve been playing it for about a week now – pretty much solidly. It all ended in tears the first time; no money, large loans, no residents, bankruptcy. I don’t want to turn this into a full blown game review – I’m glad I bought it – but it lacks in some areas. There is a serious attention to detail problem. Probably due to budget/time constraints.
Example: There are two levels of zoom; when you use the arrow buttons, you move around. When zoomed out it goes at a reasonable speed. When zoomed in, not only is it all a bit too close to be of any use, but the keys still move it the same speed as if zoomed out. The result is that a light tap on the left key sees you shooting violently left. I could go on.
The biggest flaws? A single save game slot and serious lack of cooperative features. When I started the game I was prompted to choose where to build my city. I was immediately excited by the prospect of filling each these slots one-by-one, joining them up. Perhaps my girlfriend could build a city in an adjacent square to mine and then we could join them up. But no – one city at a time. One player at a time. Wi-Fi? Not really. You can send “mail” to people – but only by choosing from the pre-defined list of messages, and only if they have SimCity, and only if they are sat next to you.
Enough about the game though… you can read a brilliant and accurate review here.
In summary, I liked the microsite. I just would have liked to be able to read the text easier. And find out more information about the game. And figure out if anyone is any good at the microgame (high score table). And perhaps build my own monument. And then send that to my friend. Or save it in a gallery. Or import it into my DS. Who knows… there seems like a lot of scope for SimCity DS #2 – both website and game.
But an enjoyable enough start.
Go and buy it! You know you want to.
Filed under: Coffee Break
I don’t think I could be described as a massive Harry Potter fan. I’ve never read any of the books, nor seen any of the films. However I was quite impressed with a number of useful bookcovers supplied by www.pointlesswasteoftime.com for all those adults who are slightly embarassed to be reading children’s books. I’ll definitely keep this in mind if I ever do get the urge to read any of the books.
My personal favourite is “Shaving your balls with a butchers knife – for Dummies”; although there are quite a few good ones.
