Points aren't always good incentives for participation.

I’ve bought a handful of video games this year and my local Gamestop seems to have trouble getting new games on release day (”sorry, UPS didn’t show up yet, maybe tomorrow”) and for the popular games, they insist on pre-ordering with a deposit. Since Gamestop was a hassle, I started ordering stuff on Amazon instead, usually a month or so before big games came out.

For the most part, it’s worked well except items ship on their release date instead of arrive. I know a lot of games are done and in boxes, ready to ship weeks ahead of release dates and it sure would be nice if Amazon could ship them a day or two before release date so they show up on time. I know that’s a minor problem, but it’s tough waiting 24 hours when everyone online is talking about a game that’s available down the street at a store.

Lately though, Amazon has been a big problem with popular games. I’ve had a couple games delayed by 1 week and 2 weeks respectively and Amazon doesn’t inform you until the actual release date of the game. So if you pre-order a month or so early and you’re thinking you are going to get the game shipped on day 1, you don’t find out until that day arrives that they ran out. It’s really unfortunate, since I guess Amazon has no idea what their supplies will be like when they start taking pre-orders. Today I got this message about Guitar Hero III (PS3), which got released today:

We wanted to let you know that there is an unexpected delay with your video game order you placed on September 11 2007 17:47 PDT. Unfortunately, we are unable to ship the product(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when they may be delivered:

“Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Bundle” [Video Game]
Estimated arrival date: 12/31/2007

I pre-ordered a month and a half early and they estimated it would take anywhere from 1 to 2 additional months to get a copy of the game sent to me. That’s pretty ridiculous and why I won’t be buying video games from Amazon anymore.

Check this photo out. It is the worlds oldest image of a tornado.

http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/wea00206.htm

So here it is. The long awaited 100th episode of Boagworld.com

To download this show click here.

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The audio quality isn't as great as it could have been, there is a lot of background noise and we are even more rambling than normal. However, this is our 100th episode and we are both proud and excited to have got this far.

Sorry, but there is no transcript of this show. There was just too many people talking and too much background noise to make that viable. I hope you will forgive us.

Thanks to all who turned up or emailed us. If your question doesn't appear we apologise. We had 2 hours worth of material to reduce down to an hour. However, for a more complete record of the evening (including video) check out Ryan Taylor's post on the evening.

More thoughts on the 100th show.

Thanks to all of you who support the show. We really appreciate it!

Looking for web design services? Then contact Paul directly or visit Headscape

DO contributor and all round graphic all-rounder* Adrian Shaughnessy (that book, this place and other stuff) is coming to Belfast.

Friday 9th November sees Adrian alongside Andy Stevens of the brilliant Graphic Thought Facility and Andrew Summers of Design Partners at the University of Ulster. That's the Design Futures event. Brilliant!

It'll cost you a tenner (or a fiver if you're a student). Sign up here.

* Perhaps that's a horrible way to describe him.

As anyone sensitive to the subtleties of graphic communication will tell you, the conduct of Architects when it comes to visual communication is an interesting one to observe. Whilst I, as a communication designer, would never presume to think I could design or build a house, sensitive to the multiple complexities and considerations involved in such a task, the converse is not necessarily true, and the sheer ubiquity of personal computing positions visual communication as an accessible ‘entry level’ craft compared to ‘higher’ levels of design. There are of course upsides to this and the perceived accessibility of ‘communication design’ is not always a bad thing, the sheer vibrancy and conflict that drives popular culture, and the graphics part thereof, being a case in point. That’s why I think this is a really interesting exhibition, organised by Zak Kyle “especially for architects who lost track of the medium sometime around Max Bill, Otl Aicher or the invention of Helvetica … a post-critical, post-disciplinary deconstruction of the all-too-serious solidity of architecture culture itself”.

Hopefully a wake up call for Architects to drop the reliance on helvetica, thinking that ariel and helvetica are the same, use of the vernacular graphpaper/grid etc as a graphic-motif, the terrible line spacing, the widows and orphans, lack of consideration for legibility, random stylistic ticks such as filled counters and stretched letterforms, and to start thinking of some actual graphic communication ideas rather than constantly recycling stylistic mannerisms. It’s also a wake up call to me/us to stop doing these things when we work for architects, thinking that that is the only thing they understand. Crass generalisations I know, but cliches usually exist for some reason. There are always however, exceptions to the rule.

Another excellent post from Chris at Brand Avenue about Chicago’s 2016 olympic bid, with handy video of school children explaining the logo.

Funny, weird.

After installing Leopard on three machines and using it for the past four days I figure I might as well write down my first impressions. Here are the high and low points for me:

• The installer is a bit buggy in that it doesn’t seem to recognize hard drives with any sorts of special partitions made for previous versions of Boot Camp (made by Apple themselves!). One Mac required wiping out the Boot Camp partition completely before I could proceed, the other asked me to open disk utility and do some sort of GFI Journaling thing or something that I can’t remember and could barely decipher. It took quite a bit of noodling with the installer to figure out where Disk Utility was and in a buried advanced menu was the option I needed. Why didn’t the installer just do it for me with a quick one-button click? I’ve had Microsoft Windows installs go smoother than my macbook install of Leopard.
• Spotlight is super speedy now, to the point where it works as fast as Quicksilver used to for application launching. I say “used to” because Quicksilver lost its index of my system after upgrading and couldn’t seem to launch very basic apps I use dozens of times each day. I ended up breaking down and uninstalling it today, converting over to Spotlight instead.
• Things seem a little faster and a little more stable (less beachballs, for sure).
• Time Machine is a godsend. I’ve been waiting for a transparent backup system with easy retrieval for the past ten years, ever since I worked in a place with nightly full backups saved for months on end (but even then, retrieval was a pain). I rarely have hard drives crash, but I accidentally trash or tweak Photoshop, Textmate, Excel, and Word files all the time. Getting a copy from a day, a week, or a month previous has already saved me once since I installed Leopard and I suspect it’ll be the kind of thing I use for fetching previous versions of mockups and writing drafts often. I really hope they return the network storage feature, since I could easily hook a usb drive to my airport extreme and just have my computers backup to that.
• The downside of Time Machine is that I have noticed a couple beachballs and my second hard drive spin up around the top of the hour. I figure it’s probably Time Machine since my second hard drive is entirely dedicated to that, and it’s only about 20 seconds of unexplained lock-up, but it’s still annoying when you’re in the middle of something and you have to wait for it to finish whatever it is doing.
• Firefox is my browser of choice and seems to take forever to launch. I usually leave it open all day, but it seems to take about a minute to launch on my 4-processor machine. Safari pops up in just a couple seconds, so I’ll either prune my extensions and hope for a quicker firefox, or move over to Safari when I’m in a hurry and just want to look something up real quick.
• Screen sharing in iChat is freaking awesome. I’d finally have no qualms about buying my dad a mac now, since I could give him tech support whenever he needed by just popping in and fixing things over iChat. I also like the new Keynote iChat sharing as that might be a great way to practice my talks for upcoming conferences.

Overall, Leopard looks like a welcome upgrade and I can’t wait to see what application authors do with the new animation capabilities.

CFL bulbs actually make economic sense in the micro scale: change over and you can save $15-20 on your own bill every month.