I keep seeing pictures of this wierd little brown furry thing and finally discovered what it was.

 It’s called Domo Kun, a little character created in Japan (…wierd character….made in Japan….naaaah…). I’m downloading some clips from domo-kun.de, and it’s all very dodgy. Very surreal. Have a look at a few if you’re bored and have broadband.

Update: Just found a Japanese translation of what ‘Domo’ is (this is a direct quote!):

“DOMO is a strange creature born from an egg. One day he fell into Usajii’s house,the old rabbit likes TV. After that he began to love watching TV. He is gentle and strong. When he is in a bad mood,he breaks wind.”

Also I think this program also features an alcoholic bat called Shinobu. How about that.

This guy is a genius photo editor. The photos are excellent. Love this little animation about Buffy

A useful reference for font sizing inconsistencies shows that there are still a few bugs with the ways browsers render fonts as set by different properties (pixel, em, keyword, etc.). I use all three in different places on different sites I run, and am still not happy with the best one to use. At the moment I’m sticking with pixels because keywords are horribly inconsistent across browsers and ems have some wierd bugs in IE. I am also vaguely interested by those scripts popping up that let you resize a page by clicking +/- buttons - I may install one of those.

Also of note, the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has just been launched (well, a few weeks ago) with some interesting and influencial heading the team. I may consider becoming a member when their website grows a bit. Although the president, who doubles as Interaction! Designer! at! Yahoo! Inc! has a very daunting homepage.

I know what I want for Christmas…
One of these babies sells for just under £100, has 320×240 30fps video recording (enough for a lot of things), and takes stills at 1280×1024. Amazing value for money.

Also, Thinking Putty is supposed to be quite cool. It’s a special kind of material that can be moulded, act as a liquid, tear apart, and even shatter. I don’t quite understand the chemistry involved but it looks like bloody good fun.

Firebox is such a great site

An interesting site, Weblog Kitchen contains information about Weblogs, Wikis, and the like. And of course, combinations of the two - something which I happened to be contemplating last night (and which lead me to that site). I am starting to get really into this whole weblog and wiki business. Well worth a read.

I’m also convinced one of my lecturers, Les Carr is stalking me. I noticed that he is talking at a conference at part of an exhibition I’m going to in early December (Online Information 2002); and he also appears as a contributor on Weblog Kitchen. To be fair though, we share similar interests in this sort of field (although I suspect he was there first Maybe I’m subconsciously stalking him? *shudder* nah, there’s only one for me for now.

I decided tonight that I didn’t particularly like the look of the yetanotherblog site - so i did a slight tidy up, redesigned it a bit and here we go. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but for what it’s worth i think it’s OK.

Of course the real news is that I added comments now don’t go jumped over yourselves eager to create replies, but don’t hold back either.

Here we go again, it’s that time folks for the second Fire Strike. This time it’s 8 days long. I saw a Green Goddess driving in Southampton last night. Bloody hell the vehicles are aged. The driver was crunching the gears and it looked in a right state.

Also, it was more black than green.

Universities possibly charging £10,000 a year for tuition: the government is proposing removing the current cap on tuition fees. Amazing how this is all panning out. BBC News ran a feedback forum, and the results are pretty much all against this idea. Quite a few individuals also suggested that universities are becoming ‘the norm’, with the government’s pledge to get 50% through uni in the near future.

Margaret Hodge, the Higher Education Secretary explained to Universities UK, that university graduates have a better chance at higher paid employment from leaving uni. This is correct, however lets not forget that as salaries rise, the taxes do to, so the government gets a higher return from higher paid employees anyway!

It’s a scary amount of money. Fortunately by the time this might be passed through I’ll be out of uni.

This is possibly one of the most crazy new websites on the Internet. I present http://www.roadrave.biz/ - a site where you can text other road users using their registration plate… what a great way to express your love, annoyance, road rage for that pillock in the Corsa. The author makes it very clear that you shouldn’t use your phone while driving, but frankly that’s like providing ashtrays then saying “don’t smoke”. Okay, I’m crap at metaphors but you get the gist.

Somebody just reminded me of Scratchy and Co. A really quite shit program on ITV in the 90’s. I still have nightmares.

“Main gimmick was the irritating Max Headroom-esque presenter - some tosser in “a solid rubber blond wig and sky blue jacket marked with clouds”. - PaulMorris.co.uk