Archive for October, 2009

Windows what now?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Some sort of software thing launched this week, so it was a busy one for us at work. On Wednesday I ended up doing two TV things on one day, starting with the BBC at 6am – in a spirit of shameless self promotion, here's me on C4's midday bulletin:

Note the jeans – normally hidden behind a desk on these things – and slightly strobe-prone shirt. Oops. Interesting to see the ITN C4 people at work, though – it was by some way the most complicated TV studio setup I've been in, with two huge, mobile cameras being ordered around by the floor manager. On most of the 24 hour channels the cameras stay pretty much in place, fixed on different parts of the desk.

On Thursday I did another unusual bit of TV, this time staring into the black void of a camera with a huge picture of the London skyline behind me and only an earpiece for company. A bit scary, but I think it went quite well. And today I have a piece on the future of home computing in the Sunday Post which, annoyingly, doesn't appear to be sold anywhere in London.

So, a rather strange but interesting few days. Next week I plan to compensate by doing nothing but play Xbox and drink tea for five days straight.

Javier Mariscal

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Joie de Vivre

Dropped into the Design Museum today for the Javier Mariscal exhibition. It's well worth seeing, with a good range of his work from sketches through to corporate identities and even a temple (!) built from his parts of his plastic shelving design. A couple of photos are on Flickr here. Mariscal is also conducting a performance at the BFI in November – details here.

Also on show is a retrospective of designs by the late Jan Kaplický, the architect of the bubble at Lord's Cricket Ground and the new Selfridges in Birmingham. Some of the models are baffling, and many look wildly unfeasible, but this model for a huge tower block is quite striking:

Tower concept model

This photo only captures a small part of the building, which is strangely reminiscent of cold war television towers or the giant Arcology buildings you could construct in Sim City games. It alone is worth a visit. As the first floor of the museum is currently closed, admission to both costs just £6.

Boxing not so clever

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

Because it's amazing what you can get done when you should be writing about Windows 7.