zombie meme

I have been Zombie Tagged, by Ginquinn to celebrate the young Mr Burt's birthday. By a stroke of sheer coincidence I put in an order at Threadless about two weeks ago, and what should be in that order? Well I'll tell you what - an "In case of zombies" t-shirt which quite frankly gives me answers a plenty on how to survive a zombie invasion. How handy is that? So without further ado:

1. Describe your zombie escape plan (generally). Explain your choices.

Well on another stroke of coincidence I was discussing zombie escape plans up in Leeds recently. Corner shops with their own generators seemed a good idea at the time, but since then I've come to a different conclusion. Somewhere with only one door, a long hallway and some stairs. That seems the best idea. You see, zombies a) arn't very clever and b) you can only fit one through the door at any time. So they're likely to form a nice queue, whilst lots of well-armed people can line the hallway and safely dispose of them. Of course, if it gets too much you just climb the stairs. After all zombies can't climb stairs and certainly don't have any ridiculous dalek type hover skills.

2. Who would you choose to have with you and why?

Strong men. This is for two reasons a) strong men are always handy to have around. I rather like them. And b) strong men are strong and therefore very good at killing zombies. I thought everyone knew that?

3. What is your choice of zombie bashing weapon?

Well obviously a cricket bat. They're great! In fact, my t-shirt helpfully says "sporting goods can be handy in a panic". But I'd like some big guns too - just to look cool.

4. Finally if you escape plan goes horribly wrong what will you do?

Sack all the strong men for a start! But fortunately here my t-shirt comes up with some helpful hints: "zombies are slow and dim-witted. It may be possible to move amongst them undetected". So I'd try that for a while and if all else fails, I'll die or become zombificated. Mmmmm brains......

designing interactions & friendly software

On Wednesday evening I jumped on another train up to London with Andy & Tom for Designing Interactions at the RSA, part of their ongoing lecture series. Overall I found the talks really interesting, but it was the question and answer section which I got the most out of. There was a range from, "how can I find inspiration" - one I defy anyone to be able to answer, to how we design products to interact better with themselves.

Despite protestations that London is the place to be for design, I was not surprised to hear from Tony Dunn that a number of his students were finding it difficult to find placements here. I remember my brother finding a similar situation when he finished his Product Design degree.

Tom and I headed off at the end, missing the drinks in what I know to be a beautiful vault, and spent quite a while discussing whether software can ever be held in esteem in the same way that hardware is. You don’t hear people discuss Omniplan in the same way as they talk about their Macbook, when I can imagine voices softening as if talking of a friend. I boiled this down to the physical, you can reach out and stroke your ipod, you hold your mobile, but you don’t get that same level of closeness with software. It is an integral part of all these things that we use on an every day basis, but we don’t reach out and touch it. I think the closest we get to the same sense of engagement are social networking sites like Flickr – which has a voice that we can personify, can build a sense of community with. However, reading comments on Tom’s post, I could well be wrong!

On another note: finally, seven months later, the wallpaper is now all up. The Chinese Dragon print went up on Thursday, and looks really rather fabulous. Thanks to Mum for popping in and putting it up whilst I went to work!

more on ghosty

Serge has uploaded video footage of last Friday night's ghost-in... Cool!

car trouble and late nights

It’s turning out to be an expensive month, first the car, then the washing machine, now the car again. A trip out to The Ram in Firle was scuppered this afternoon when, having got to the Kingston roundabout I realised that there was something most definitely wrong. This was after Tom found the passenger foot well filled with water (a leak from the soft top I think), and so had been bailing us out at 70mph. Limping home, the revs all over the place, the engine stalling or just loosing power I was a bag of nerves by the time we got back. I love my car, I don’t want to sell it, but Lord only knows how much it’s going to cost this time.

Fortunately the rest of the weekend has been spent either out in the glorious sunshine (yay, summer’s back), asleep (most necessary), or staying up all night at FP towers watching Most Haunted Live from the Eastern State Penitentiary (it was only for the Ghost Detector for your mobile, honest). American TV – what can I say? There are lots and lots of terrible adverts, the majority of which are still jingling around my head (especially the Campbell’s soup one! Ghastly!). I don’t remember much else, I was tired, there was wine, and we didn’t leave till 7am. Good fun though!