photos, fly fishing, food, maps & cycling
Lance Armstrong’s steely glare might not be seen on Le Tour again, but any aspiring cyclists should beware that he’s passed it on to someone else…
Saw this photo (right) of Lance and his son Max on the Livestrong website, and was immediately reminded of the celebrated Armstrong ‘look’*. Peas in a pod eh?
Really saddens me to see recent stories regarding new marine parks and sanctuaries lead to ill informed, populist, knee jerk responses from fellow fishermen.
Firstly: conservationists, or ‘greenies’, the word so many fishermen spit out without any clue as to the meaning. What do greenies want? In this case, they want better living conditions for fish species so that those species may prosper and their environment improve. So, what? are all these angry fishermen against that? I don’t think so… when are you all going to realise, YOU ARE ON THE SAME SIDE.
I love SBS, Australia’s second ‘public’ broadcaster. I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the World Cup, and am now settling into enjoy the Tour de France.
During the World Cup, I’ve found the free ESPN Soccernet 2010 iPhone App just brilliant. It does what you need, scores, reviews, stats… an exceptional example of a sport app. So when the Tour de France rolled around, I thought there’d be some great free app that I could use to keep track of the big event…
I have to admit, I was a little surprised to find hardly anything, however, the only app that looked promising came from our own SBS – they do such a great job of the TV coverage and website, that I thought the app was bound to be good too. There was a free one to try and a paid version if you feel the need for extra features… at least that’s the way these things usually work, isn’t it?
The free app seems to be nothing more than a ‘rich’ ad. I can’t get anything useful out of it. Every screen is dominated by a huge ad, which doesn’t matter that much given that the app doesn’t do anything anyway! This is wrong, I don’t pay for many apps, but free apps aren’t supposed to be useless, they can provide a cut down experience, but they’ve still gotta work!
OK, so maybe the paid app is better. Ouch!! $5.99! it’s going to have to be a LOT better, might read the reviews first… Uh Oh, those are not positive reviews. Seems like SBS have a problem on their hands. I have never seen such a low rating on a ‘serious’ app before, so far they have 1 positive rating out of 51. Stay away from this app! To be fair, SBS is not the developer, it’s some dodgy crowd called Participant Sports who seem to have no website – both the developer and support link lead to some facebook page that I can’t even load. How can Apple let something like this go by?
I’ve just been on a team that developed an iPhone app, so I have some insight into just how complicated it can be – not the app itself, but the whole back end supply of feeds and resources. So, I’m not going to harshly judge, but they are going to need to pull a massive rabbit out of the hat to get the whole thing working and save face. It’s a disaster!
I’m thinking the rabbit might need to look like: a refund to all paid users, a real fix for the app, drop the paid app and release the full app for free, and all of this in no more than two days. Not asking too much really 😉
I work for a large university. My workload is split about 48% support, 48% production and 4% design. Needless to say, my Graphic Design skills are rusty. It’s the sort of thing you really have to do regularly or it just slips.
Anyway, recently, I had two new site designs to work on. Nothing ground breaking or particularly difficult, but the requirement was a bit more than the same old university template driven site. I tried. I tried again… and again! Those ‘rusty’ skills seemed to have seized up altogether, I had designer’s block!!
You can laugh, but I even had nightmares about not being able to get the computer to do what I wanted it to. I sort of knew the problem – my workplace is an IT production environment, not a design studio. It’s full of noise and clutter, devoid of character and cadence, it’s boring and grey, not colourful and inspirational. On top of that, the flow of work never stops! Emails, tweets, IMs, newsfeeds – there were too many distractions. Anyway, after the bad dreams the other night, I decided on an action plan.
As it happened, it was surprisingly easy. Clearing the desk – well, that’s straightforward. Tuning out – a pair of headphones and the iPod. Electronic distractions – a little trickier, after all, I use the computer to do the work, I can’t very well turn that off!
What I did was create a new user account. I called it ‘Designer’, and I turned off everything – no email, no IM, no bookmarks – not even a desktop pic! Just Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock and a shared folder to move files to and from my main account. Using this account is like stepping into a private office, I get incredible amounts of work done without the distractions. When I need to, I just switch back. The change has been so dramatic that yesterday, having made huge progress on my design tasks, I was looking forward to coming to work for the first time in days.
So, there you have it. My #1 tip for getting things done. Create a purpose built account and use it to escape! It got me past my designer’s block 🙂
