Tamlyn

I’ll be going to Chinwag Live: Real World Usability next week courtesy of PlusNet. It’s a panel discussion about where usability is headed as a discipline. Not sure quite what to expect but they’ve got some good speakers so it should be interesting. I’ll be blogging it on the Community Site.

Update: Blog review now posted

Do you sometimes feel you spend more time on the London Underground then actually at the office? Village Underground have gone a step further and converted some old Jubilee Line carriages into offices!

Going Underground has the scoop and more pictures.

Incidentally I rather like how the Village Underground site uses scrolling in an unconventional way. The foreground is fixed but the background can be scrolled about to see more images of the space. What they perhaps hadn’t considered is that this causes problems for people on mobile devices. The small screen of my phone means most of the content (and all the background) is hidden from view and cannot be scrolled.

[via Reaction!]

My original plan for a-mix-a-month fell through in January when I failed to produce anything. Now I’ll just put these out as and when I have time.

Featuring classics from Aphex Twin and Mr Bungle as well as some more obscure tracks, this mix showcases some of my favourite computer game-inspired music. It’s a bit shorter than usual because I wanted to keep the quality high. Extra geek points to anyone who can tell me which game intro the bonus track is from!

I’ve just been without electricity for half an hour while the landlady installed our new oven and I helped her carry the old one out to the bins. I suppose I could just as easily view it as an enforced exercise break

So here it is, Merry Podmas… and not a Christmas song in sight! It’s an easy-listening, I’ve-eaten-too-much-please-don’t-make-me-get-up kind of mix. And unlike alcohol, no moderation is necessary in the enjoyment of this product.

With 33% extra FREE!!!

I got a spam MMS from my mobile provider, 3, this afternoon with a short video promoting Yahoo! Go. At the end were some instructions:

We’d like to keep you up to date with what’s now on 3. But if you’d prefer not to receive further messages just send us an email to [email protected] quote your 3 phone number in the body of the email and type ‘opt out MMS’ in the subject header.

I duly did that and received an automated response telling me they would deal within three days. A few hours later I received a phone call from 3. First the agent asked me to confirm my details – you called me, confirm your details! Then she asked me if I would like to opt out of 3 MMS – well, yes, clearly or I wouldn’t have emailed. And finally she politely asked me if I was aware that I could do all this on my phone through the My3 web service. I politely advised her that maybe she should be telling that to whoever wrote the MMS.

Seamless.

Just in time for October.

from xkcd, see also Lolcats if you need an explanation

This month’s mixtape comes to you from Durban, South Africa. Actually I’m back in London now but I made it while I was there last week. It’s a collection of my favourite original film scores: tracks which were produced for a particular film. Bonus points for spotting the three tracks which were not composed for the film in which they were used and the one track which was not used in the film it was composed for!