One of the perks of downtime—perhaps the perk—is that you have time to play games. I’m a casual and very infrequent gamer: before this past week, I’ve literally spent about 30 minutes playing games in the past two years total. I’m therefore about as skilled playing “Call of Duty 4” as you might imagine.

And yet: how thrilling that Valve & Steam was coming to the Mac; and even more so to hear that Half Life 2 was coming with it! Your average PC user might think my enthusiasm retro (really? I’m super thrilled to play a six year old game?), but I just never played it. I’d only seen screenshots. It looked good.

I’m not into this for the blood & gore. Much like Nicholson Baker in “Painkiller Deathstreak”, his article about gaming in this week’s New Yorker, I’m struck by the beauty the artists have imagined for their worlds. Even when the setting is a depressed industrial town, in ruins after the alien invasion, it can take my breath away.

But the following moments looked… familiar:

Looks a bit like the Park Hill Flats over the Train Station

This could be the block of flats across from the Arts Tower

Wait! How did the Ponderosa get flooded?

I just wish people would stop shooting at me so I could enjoy the scenery.

Before I started Argument from Design, I worked for a local marketing firm. The people running this company fancied themselves clever marketing strategists, or “marketeers”, as they called themselves: something which always made me think of the Mickey Mouse Club. When I interviewed with them, they showed off some of their self-marketing ploys. They had a penchant for sending prospective clients miniature items: briefcases, etc. Once they sent prospective clients tiny tin buckets, with no accompanying letter, to pique their interest. A week later they sent out a letter: “You’ve got the bucket. Do you want the ideas?”

It’s clear what they were aiming for: the proverbial “bucket of ideas”. But the problem, of course, was that the bucket they supplied was tiny. This implied that they didn’t have many ideas. Or maybe it implied that their ideas were small & promised very limited success. Whatever. It wasn’t a clever or successful campaign: it only served to make them look like a stupid, Mickey-Mouse organisation—of which there are sadly many in the marketing/graphic design world.

And it was very old-school, or at least it seems so now: send prospective clients some cutesy little thing to garner interest & they’ll be delighted by how clever you are. In these days of economic distress—not to mention environmental consciousness—you might think the days of spending on such wasteful endeavours would be over. You would be wrong.

A week ago, I received a package from Extensis, a company that makes (among other things) font management software. I’m a customer, albeit an unhappy one, since when I upgraded, Suitcase Fusion refused to import any of the metadata on my collection of nearly 7,000 fonts. I had to recreate all of that data. By hand. Anyway, the package contained nothing else than an adult-sized styrofoam head. You know, the kind that would sport a wig.

A few days ago, part two of their remarkable campaign kicked in. I received a wig in the shape of a mullet. In one of the more strained examples of marketing prose that I’ve encountered, the accompanying letter stated:

Extensis invites you to don your “creative mullet” to experience the perfect balance of professional level and playful font management found only in our solutions.

…[Suitcase Fusion 3 is] more than just business in the front and party in the back.

…Check out www.extensis.com/creativemullet/ to… sign up for a demo or even share your mulletude with us.

Seriously, wtf is a “creative mullet”? This is such a prime example of wankery pokery (a favourite expression of mine) that it beggars belief.

Despite all my sniping at them, I’m interested to hear that Extensis are about to move into the world of web fonts with a product called webINK to compete with the likes of TypeKit and others. I’ll reserve judgment until I hear more about it: like a lot of software companies with a history of print design, Extensis’ forays into the web haven’t been that great. Anyone remember BeyondPress? Gaaaah…

Someone has collected bad paintings of Barack Obama:

Possibly my favourite example

It’s a site that does exactly what it says on the tin!

It’s shocking how a mere interstitial from the 1970s has embedded itself in my brain. And many other people’s, apparently.

“Special” interstitial as a t-shirt: it still excites my childhood brain
with the promise of a “Charlie Brown Christmas” showing

As a design, I’m impressed by how well it stands up over time. Especially for something from the 70s.

So Microsoft has been churning out lots of really crap stuff recently—as well as really good stuff like the ongoing work on IE9. But this post is about the crap stuff. A prime example is “Songsmith”, software that helps you create the most banal music based on how you’re singing.

We’re going to place Songsmith within the context of a big joke. First:

The Wind-Up

Then:

The Pitch

“Running with the Songsmith”, based upon the old Van Halen song. Seriously? That’s what it came up with to accompany the singing? I laughed until I cried.

The University of Cardiff’s Chromoscope is a fantastic way to visualise different wavelengths—visual, x-ray, radio & more—in the universe. Use the slider to see the differences: you start to see some of the interactions between them.

These screenshots don’t remotely do Chromograph justice.

Not only is this great data visualisation, it’s great astronomy (I’m a bit of an astronomy geek, but only level 1) & a wonderful use of jQuery.

Culled from my Facebook posts:

Back in the 1990s, Comedy Central did a series of fantastic interstitial ads called “Think Positive” with the Buddy Scott Trio. It was filled with the ironic 50s nostalgia that characterised so much of the US in the late 1990s.

The subject in each ad’s focus was always in a dire, impossible situation (my favourite was with the man on death row) and, when things seemed their darkest, the Buddy Scott Trio would strike up the song “You’re Gonna Win!”.

This song is frequently in my head, particularly if something is going spectacularly wrong.

And the drummer: he is awesome.

Culled from my Facebook posts:

I was born in the depressed industrial town of Waterbury, Connecticut. For about the first half of my life, I lived within 30 miles of it & so knew the town pretty well. As a child, it seemed like a big city to me. It’s not.

In any event, looming over Waterbury, on a hill, was a huge, glowing cross. This was the site for a kitschy Catholic attraction called the “Holy Land”, a 1/4 scale representation of Christ’s life. My understanding is that the cross has been replaced, but I vividly remember flying back to the UK from Newark & passing over Waterbury: you always knew you were there because of the huge looming cross. The attraction is not maintained: there are some wonderful pictures of this decaying place.

“Jerusalem” in Waterbury’s Holy Land (photo by Shaun O’Boyle)

My mother brought me there as a small child & inadvertently added to my confusion about religion. My father always brought me to a tiny church in a village called Bethlehem: I clearly remember thinking, “If this stuff is so important, wouldn’t it be a bigger deal?”. Now, however, as we walked through a depressing plywood Jerusalem, with statuary about waist height, I thought “Well, people were supposed to be smaller then”.

Culled from my Facebook posts: Twenty signs you don’t want that web design project, via Zeldman.

I swear that I’ve experienced at least some of these, particularly #3 & #6.

I have to hold myself back from buying everything in the Tumbao catalogue. Net Sublette, an excellent source, recommends them.

Such fiscal reticence didn’t stop me from immediately snapping up this, though. Recommended in today’s Guardian Guide, Kanaval: Vodou, Politics & Revolution on the Streets of Haiti has some truly amazing photos of unadulterated Carnival costumery. All the photos were taken in the city of Jacmel, destroyed in the recent earthquake.

“Esclave”, from Kanaval. Pleasant dreams!

You’ll also notice that the ability to comment on posts has been removed. The subject of site comments has emerged recently. The simple fact is that most comments posted are spam, and while they rarely make it onto the blog, they gunk up the system. Comments are still gratefully appreciated: just use our standard contact form.

You may also have noted that Ian has been quiet for some time. We split amicably: he left the company to pursue his own projects. They’re incredibly worthwhile: if you’re a developer, I strongly encourage you to have a look at what he’s got up at GitHub. And of course you can always follow him on Twitter.

So, is this blog dead or what? It’s undeniable that there have been few posts on it all year. Why is that?

Part of the silence is due to work: we’ve been busy, and in fact I’ve yet to write up a report on our latest launch. But even when there has been downtime, I haven’t posted here. Instead, I’ve posted to… Facebook.

Yes, Facebook. I regret this now: it’s insidious how it sucks you into its own little world. I don’t want to get into an extended reflection on Facebook, but the promise of speaking to friends is very compelling. It’s just too bad that generally it encourages the shallowest of interchanges—similar to how it devalues the meaning of “friendship”. In any event, I’ve been posting things I like there instead of here. That’s going to stop. I’ll repost on the blog the things I’ve been posting on Facebook.

It seems that GTD, that favourite of serial procrastinators, is being supplanted in people’s affections.

That should be reversed, so he could see it in a mirror.

From the ever-fantastic Photoshop Disasters blog, someone from the Globe forgot to replace that trust standby placeholder text with the real content.

Apple’s latest release of OS X is version 10.6, or “Snow Leopard”. For most users, upgrading isn’t a worry: you upgrade, and everything just works. Developers, however, will find that upgrading is more haphazard, as the environment has switched from 32-bit to 64-bit. Plus, you have to find enough downtime in which to upgrade & deal with any issues that arise. For me, that downtime finally occurred over the Christmas/New Year’s holiday period. In a hazy, and admittedly alcohol-induced moment, I rashly decided to install 10.6 around midnight a couple of days ago, forgetting that I hadn’t fully thought out what to do with all the Rails apps I had on my machine.

So here are some notes for when/if you want to take the plunge to 10.6 (which I recommend that you do). Matt Aimonetti’s August 2009 article on the Riding Rails blog contains very good general information. What I took away from it is that Snow Leopard requires 64-bit versions of your Unixy software: remaining 32-bit isn’t an option, as I’d hoped (from a position of laziness, that is, prone). So you’ll need to recompile not just all your MacPorts goodies, but of equal importance, all your gems.

Matt suggests that upgrading ain’t that bad. In my experience: lies, all lies. Virtually nothing he or the commenters suggested worked for me, so like some crazed frontiersman, I had to forge my own path. I blew everything away & started afresh. Here’s what I did:

• Before anything: export your databases (or at least have their contents close to hand in some fashion);
• Start your MacPorts dance, installing/upgrading to the latest MacPorts & then installing all the software you need;
• I had a lot of trouble updating MySQL. The tips in this article did me a real treat when nothing else worked;
• A little titbit of info: apparently you can have problems with the MySQL gem, as apparently it wants to compile as 32-bit. You’ll have to force it to compile as 64-bit:
  sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5 --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5 --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_config
• Re-create your databases & use your db exports to populate them;
• For Rails apps that have gems in vendor/gems (thanks to Ian for this), you’ll need to recompile them for 64-bit: rm -rf vendor/gems/* ; sudo rake gems:install ; rake gems:unpack ; rake gems:build
• For Rails apps that don’t have gems in vendor/gems (boo! hiss!), the situation is more hit & miss. The easiest option is to just install new versions of all your old gems. However, I wanted to take this as an opportunity to prune through the thicket, hence my slight pain. If you follow my lead here, just try to run your app & see what gem is missing: then install it.

The end result: when the sites popped up, I was stunned by how quickly they appeared. In addition, the whole compiling MacPorts apps was shockingly quick.