Battersea Power Station

Battersea Power Station is currently open to the public for a Chinese art exhibition. Apparently it's never been open to visitors in this way before. I went with a few friends on Sunday to check it out.

The art (mostly video art) was cool but, as you might have guessed, I was more interested in the venue. Soon the builders are moving in to convert it into a trendy riverside apartment complex, so this was a unique opportunity to have a look inside the famous crumbling structure.

Oh, yes, and to take some photos. View them on Flickr »

Reflections

From an email conversation at work:

“Everything is cyclic. Today we love them, tomorrow we hate them, in two years time they’ll be back as retro. I am a cynic. Today it’s funny, tomorrow it’ll be a tired attitude, and next year everyone will say ‘shit, he was right all along’. Then they’ll throw me to the wolves and the Design Week will shred me for breakfast, before setting up my comeback and saying they discovered me. I am a Ade’s burnt out drop shadow. I will return.”

“Dangerous” Dave McNulty.

BEAKING NEWS

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6083468.stm

Firefox 2

Forget Internet Explorer 7, I've had it for a while. It's nothing special.

Get Firefox 2, whether you're running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. It was announced earlier but just got officially launched.


*Edit* Digg it here
And, a quote from that page, affirming my opinions on IE7:

“Today I installed both IE7 and FF2. IE7 required about 25 mins of my time and two system restarts, while FF2 took <30 seconds and required 0 restarts.”

Spammers, I hate you

I've not been able to use email addresses at my own domain name ajrdesign.net for over 18 months now due to spam. I get about 60 spam emails a day to my old address there. So I switched to a Gmail address, pretty much as soon as it came out. I now receive spam to that account too but Gmail is usually very good at filtering it all out.

On my website is a feedback form so people can contact me without me having to reveal my email address. It's worked well until last week when I started to get spam messages coming in via the form. More every day. This morning I received five spam messages from the form in as many minutes:



So now I've had to disable the form too, and until I can install a 'human verification' system (probably using my dusty but still present PHP knowledge and probably a small SWF file) it will remain that way.

But why should we have to adapt to avoid this crap? It's the digital equivalent to being forced to nail your letterbox shut and put bars on your windows. I have two words for spammers, and they begin with the letters F and O. In that order. I hate you. All of you. You should be in prison. In the communal shower. Bending to pick up the soap.

Amen

All about the break. The world's most sampled drum loop.

Tuesday Links

A couple of adverts:

Sony Bravia advert #2. Not that impressed to be honest, though the first one (with the bouncy balls) was a hard act to follow. Certain shots look like CG to me, which sort of spoils it (even if they were actually real).

And this is a video promo by some colleagues of mine here at Dare. It's for Vodafone's new TV show The Big Idea and was made using 10,000 £1 coins. Less expensive than Sony's ad (of course) though I believe it was very stressful. For the obvious reasons.

Tuesday Links

Google stuff for Mac users. Yes, it's that G word again.

Google Mac Blog

Google Software for Mac OS X

footbridge

The best photograph I've produced for a while. It's of the footbridge at Poplar DLR station, London.

Looks good LARGE | Google Maps view

I post the photos I'm most happy with on my photo blog fairly regularly.

Sour Lances

this-exists.blogspot.com

Monday Link

Some light bedtime reading: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Someone's put the whole thing online. I'm not sure how legitimate that is, but there you go.

Actually I think I'd rather read the real book.