Barbara
My beloved wife Barbara lost her nineteen month long battle with brain cancer almost a month ago on the 24th July 2011. She was an artist, a scholar and my best friend. We were married for six wonderful years and she is sorely missed..
Garr – Lessons from Bamboo
I have been a fan of Garr Reynolds, since I discovered his first book Presentation Zen. This is Garr’s recent talk from TEDxTokyo which is well worth watching.
These are the slides for the talk, which are done in Garr’s trademark style.
April Fools: Google’s GMail Motion
It seems like motion control is a theme this year for April Fool’s pranks, this time with Google getting in on the act with a motion control interface for their GMail email application.
However due to the open nature of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for Xbox360 some students at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies actually went off and built a working prototype of Google’s fictional Gmail Motion application after seeing Google’s April Fools video.
April Fools: Starcraft returns to console for Xbox360!
I think Blizzard’s April Fools gag (Starcraft II on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect sensor) is the best I’ve seen so far this year: amusing concept, decent production values for the video and humourous (to fans of the game at least).
Reddit has a good round up of this year’s April Fools offerings by the games industry you can find here.
Site redesign
I’ve been working on a new design for this site for a while now and today I finally made it live online. I hope you like it.
The header image is a stock image from iStockPhoto, the WordPress theme is called Emptiness, the social icons are from IconDock and I tweaked the CSS design using CSS Edit. I used XAMPP to host and run a test WordPress blog on my MacBook so I could experiment on the new design without worrying about the possibility of wrecking the live site.
I’ll document how to use XAMPP for easy WordPress prototyping in a later post as its very useful.
Books…
This weekend I decided to rework the contents of the old recommended reading page into a bunch of posts as the page was getting so large and I wanted to add more books to it. For some reason WordPress has decided to push some of the new (old) book posts into the RSS feed despite the published date of those posts being before the newer posts currently in the feed.
Apologies for any confusion this has caused you. I am working on a new design for this site and I’m refactoring things as I go.
