nil desperandum

Awesomeness 2.0

Found this via High Snobiety and it's simply the coolnes thing I've seen any sports brand do for a while. I think it's got more to do with my passion for utility gear more than anything else.

"The 8-wheeled ill-mobile is capable of crossing deserts, climbing mountains and taking the team to any secret spot. Racks for bikes, surfboards, wakeboards, skateboards, mean going anywhere for any scene. There’s an on deck bbq for grilling up fresh meat, a deluxe camper shell salvaged from a junkyard in remote corner of Oregon and a basement couch for a front seat.

Rails to grind are featured on both sides, and a quarter pipe folds down for impromptu sessions. The stereo system requires 2 car batteries, a set of jumper cables and a little luck, but once it’s blasting, it’s like a stick of dynamite in your eardrum."

For some reason though as soon as you slap on the Nike swoosh, it just takes a lot of the authenticity away. I guess Nike is new to the scene. May be they need to take the truck out for a spin and get some mud and scratches on it.

Awesomeness 1.0

How awesome was the opening of Beijing Olympics? It was like a proper Zhang Yimou movie but without the flying arrows. Bit props to all the performers and such. Wicked.

 

(great photos APF - please don't sue me)

I thought the way they montage the torch relay pics on the scroll while Li Ning flew over the sky was very web 2.0.

I love a good typhoon

Nothing beats a good typhoon.

Live blogging

Live blogging from 3G iPhone baby!

Shirt's out

So over the past couple months I've been working on a side hussle of making tshirts. The t-shirt's been designed by my co-conspirator, Hoon Kim. It started from a conversation about all the bad stuff that's going on in the world and the over politicized Olympics in Beijing. We just wanted to create something that was fun and something celebrated the true spirit of the Game. So we came up with this thing. Hoon tell's me it's inspired by Olympic tracks and what not - believe what you will. :-)

It's taken us forever to find the right supplier and test the samples before doing full scale production because the design is so detailed as you can see here:

And then all the packaging came together. I had to lugg a bunch of Ziplock bags all the way from LA back to HK, just to keep the shirts nice and fresh.

Anyway, that's the fruit of our labour. I hope you like it. Go to www.thisisschool.com to check it out.

Muscle beach

Clean Food, Good Taste

You see lots of these signs in restaurants in Thailand. It reminded me of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The fact that it doesn't say, "Food here" means food is properly abundant in this part of the world. Instead, this sign focuses on safety and taste which I guess are higher up in the hierarchy?

Cool Shrine

Spotted a shrine made out of shells close to Bangkok. Mad skillz.

Y Water x Yves Behar

People in the communication industry have been talking about making the media work as hard in expressing the idea as words or pictures etc. That kinda makes sense and all. When designers take a brand idea and build it into the heart of a design, its simply mind blowing. Here's something really cool from Yves Behar, the designer of the famed OLPC.

Y water is billed as a "developmental drink" for kids that is organic, nutritious, low calorie. What's cool is that you can chain the bottles up into pretty neat atomic structure like things. The design is therefore developmental in its own right. genius.

Pretty

Incomplete information

If I were in a rush, I think I'd like to know how frequently the train comes and how long the journey takes.

Ain't this cute?

Badass King Kong

One of our colleauges left recently but his King Kong statue stayed. Check it.

Always connected

Taxi drivers in Hong Kong don't make much money. With the soring fuel prices they're barely making minimum wage. As such more and more taxi drivers are teaming up to form small private fleet giving up to 30% discount for private bookings. And to stay connected to the team, they use mobile phones. They sign on to a no limit package with their network and use the Push to Talk function to talk. Here's a driver I met recently. He goes by the name of Cowboy. And this is his dashboard.

A wee thought

Like one does, when I first got my iPhone I was trying out all the features and what not. I went around the office adding in people's numbers (and showing the phone off at the same time). One of the things I did in "Contacts" was that I took pictures of some people.  And one of these people called me recently and their face popped up. It made me smile and that just reminded me what a great feature it is. Now, I believe this feature is common on most phones today but I wonder how many people actually use it extensively?

I reckon uptake is really low simply because we were never taught to take pictures of someone when we take their down number.  In the ol' days we took down numbers with pen and paper - no camera. So it's not part of our habit - we don't use it(so much).

Quick Fix: a pop up window appears when you click "save contact" to ask if you want to take a photo.
Better Fix: your camera is automatically switched on when you add contact, the picture square goes "live" and you just have to frame that persons face and click.

I think both fixes should increase the usage some what.

So that will sort out the data input - what do you do with that data you may ask?

Well, say if you bump into someone in a bar and you know you've met that person before but you can't remember his/her name. You know you've taken down that person's number (with his/her photo) and its somewhere in your phone. I guess you could find an excuse to duck to the loo and flick through the photos in your phone and get the name

Now next question is how should those photos be organized? Alphabetically by name will be totally useless given you don't know that person's name.

May be the first filter is male/female? (that would require an extra gender input - but may be the computer can do that for us from the pic)
May be you could do it by where you met? Geotagging would be useful here.
May be you could do it by a photo wall so you can scan through ten photos on each page or something
May be photos can be clustered into groups by facial likeness? That's how I tend to remember names and faces, I put them into look-a-like groups.

Anyhoo..possibilities are endless.