bodmas blog

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

About the Pixar building. Brad Bird describes how the use of physical space leads to interaction. I’m thinking about College buildings and how staff rooms can be used to improve communications in education.

You can buy the big box and get a tea towel and a DVD with your tea bags. There is only one catch…

Don’t you love that phrase? ‘Not suitable for use in Apple slot drives’? That is 80% of the product range and 90%+ of sales guys!!

Looking out towards Cradley Heath hill and the television transmitter – I realised that none of the buildings would have been visible in 1759 when Perrott had the tower built. Nice to see this 97 foot tall one room wide tower being used for exhibitions. The deer parks and heath land were built over to give us the city we see now, but this strange tower survived.

Bodmas has been upgraded to Wordpress v2.5 from v1.5 following the WordPress Codex instructions and all appears to be well apart from some theme issues. There should be a small image below (actually of the ‘Drama Triangle’ from a paper on transactional analysis of all things).

The fancy new media library isn’t working so I’ve had to use an older plug-in. The media library looks like a good feature so I will be trying to sort it out.

Brass corners on the tables makes them last a few decades longer. Continuity expressed in small details.

The Herbert Gallery in Coventry is having a new wing added. In a glass case on one floor, there are some pages from a sketch book with drawings and some quotes by construction workers involved in the project over the summer. I snapped one page above on my mobile phone – I thought these quotes said a lot about the values of the people working on the project. Just up the hill by the Cathedral and the Guildhall, you can see mason’s marks from 1200 or so…

Cormac Faukner has an audio installation on the staircase in the Herbert Gallery – 16 loudspeakers are triggered as you walk past them – each plays a sample of an instrument, and some a sample of speeches made when the Herbert Gallery was opened in the 1960s. Faulkner is curating some more stuff in Coventry early September…

Watches, bicycles, cars, the art and language movement, the cybernetic culture research unit. Coventry has been the birth place for all these remarkable innovations but has suffered a bit of empty nest syndrome since they went on to live elsewhere. It is time to pull all these influences back and create a new Thing for Coventry.

The idea of a festival devoted to ‘artists who use technology invented in the past 100 years or so’ is interesting.

Harry Shaw’s bold colours and improvised typography came as a welcome antidote to IKEA induced trance. Ruth and I think this has to by rhyming slang, but we are still working out what for.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron installs easily (I have my home directory on a separate partition) from the Alpha v6 ISO and after 250Mb of upgrades appears to be working well. Flash actually installs when you click on the pop-up in Firefox.

The pie chart above is from the Disc Usage application that I think is new in Hardy. I like the layered display (sectors nearer the centre are directories lower down the tree). When you hover over a sector you get the directory name and the size in Gb.