Snow monkey king

Tweet The Snow Monkeys of Jigokudani near Shiga Kogen, Nagano. After two kilometers of very snowy forest trail we came upon this amazing scene. It’s good to be the king, but judging by the missing finger he’s had to fight for the right to sit in the sauna and been attended to by the gang.

Japanese menus aren’t for the fussy eater

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Organic buildings

TweetHong Kong buildings remind of some type of coral-like organic life form. A good example of the ‘Porosity’ of Asian city living…

Apple’s web-app directory has gone very quiet

TweetOriginal post from April 18, updated for the 1 year anniversary of apple web-apps going dark! Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its ...

Google Developer Day and My presentation @Creative sandbox

TweetSo I was off to Darling Harbour for the annual Geek-fest that is #gdd11, and was pretty impressed with the quality of the lunch boxes…the talks weren’t bad either. Actually the highlights were Timothy Jordan & Julia Ferraioli’s presentation on Using the Google+ APIs and also Eric Bidelman’s Bleeding Edge HTML5. I even managed to ...

Hong Kong UX

TweetThis Hong Kong street-scene snapped while rolling along up the soho escalator looks like a crazy UX drop down menu design

Why buzzwords like HTML5 are useful

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

Wikileaks Cablegate on HRH Prince Andrew

According to a dispatch in the Cablegate Wikileaks treasure trove, American Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a two-hour brunch to brief HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York ahead of his meetings with the Kyrgyz Prime Minister. Much of the banter is actually quite amusing and a rare peek into the attitudes of the British royal family.

“The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him.”

Social Media; doing good vs making money

Two social media videos…one inspiring, one impressive yet slightly scary

Very funny/true from Charlie Brooker: Google Instant is trying to kill me

TweetLast week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band. ...

Author Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial post on hyperlinks in which he argued that links were a distraction for readers

I agree with the posit that excessive hyperlinking can be very distracting, I’d love to see some scientific data on the effect of hyperlinks on comprehension

Running Extra Mile Sets the Human Apart

TweetWhile slogging my way to Bondi beach yesterday in the annual city to surf amongst the world-record 80,000 strong throng I was reminded of this article on how the ability to run long-distance had a big influence on the development of the human form and brain. At least it helped keep my mind off the ...

iphone irrationality

I’m glad I don’t work in a phone shop…

Planning for “long-fuse, big bang problems” in an age of uncertainty.

TweetScenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To find that “robust” strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that each scenario diverges markedly from the others. ...

Power in the Networked Century

TweetInteresting thoughts on hierarchies vs networks in this influential paper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century. In this world, the measure of power is connectedness. Almost 30 years ago, the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote about differences between the genders in their modes of thinking. She observed that men tend to see ...

Social Networks – a Darwinian Perspective.

Interesting application of Darwinian theory to social networks from Justin Milne until recently head of broadband at Telstra.

The net in all its forms, wired or wireless, fixed or mobile has become the greatest contributor to the spread of memes the world has ever seen. Never have so many people been able to share so many ideas or concentrate their intelligence so rapidly.

Digital Diplomacy

Looks like the u.s. state department is ‘getting IT’

The underpinning philosophy of 21st-century statecraft is that the networked world ‘exists above the state, below the state and through the state’

Christopher Hitchens on the Grape and the Grain

A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—​the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—​is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea.

What the internet is doing to our minds

HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey” the machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”

I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet

Their new three social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.

Mobile is the future according to google

Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload

trying out the iPhone OS4.0 beta

TweetAm enjoying the Multi-tasking and folders but my beloved nytimes app is crashing boohoo

Microsoft vs Google vs Apple

It’s hard to grasp the breathtaking scale of the epic war between Microsoft, Google and Apple. Billions upon billions of dollars. Entire industries at stake. This is the board. These are the pieces.

Whats the deal with Iceland?

As if on cue, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in the same week as the release of a long-awaited report from the investigation into the country’s financial collapse.

Twitter as History: Library of Congress Will Save Tweets

Perhaps maybe we should put more thought into our tweets now that they’ll be history

Governor Macquarie’s Rum Hospital

My daily walk into town through some sydney history

Oriental Pearl TV Tower Pudong Park, Shanghai

Tweet The Pearl tends to polarise opinion; most people either love it or hate it. In all fairness giant pink balls tend to generate a response… well  some kind of response either way! I have to admit despite its gaudiness…I love it!

My Transit of Venus, Sydney 2004 / Bristol, England 2012

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena occurring every 243 years