Players will receive a message informing them that if they weigh themselves while holding their pets, then weigh themselves again separately and subtract the two, the difference will tell them how much their pet weighs

(Shigeru Miyamoto’s translator Bill Trinen, speaking about Wii Fit)

17:18
[a] ah
[a] do you have a box spring bed?

[b] I’m not sure, what’s one of those?

17:19
[a] basically it doesn’t have a frame
[a] it has a springy thing as the base
[a] basically

[b] Oh, with big springs going across sideways?

17:20
[a] if you fill a sandwich bag with vaseline and stick it between the box spring and matress
[a] it hardcore feels like you’re doggying someone
[a] haven’t done that for a while
[a] but it’s going that way yunno
[a] yunno?

Here’s the original page.

From the site, here’s ‘how it works’:

1. Create an Assignment. Ask for what you want.
2. Get Submissions. People create and submit their work.
3. Peer Review. Community voting helps find the best.
4. Pick Winners. Select your favorites and download.
5. Rewards! Winners get prizes and rewards.

Now, maybe I’m just being cynical, but isn’t this just a way for businesses to get a load of free design on spec, something which is a big, big no-no for the creative industry?

In other words, artists spend their time creating something purpose-made for a business’s specification, and then, except for the ‘winner’, receive no compensation for the time involved.

I know there are lots of community art sites and artists out there who happily create stuff for free for the simple of joy of creating stuff. That’s great, and clearly what this site is based on. But tying it in so closely to ‘businesses paying for your work’ just feels incredibly skeevy to me, and bordering on exploitation of talented amateurs.

Still, it’s a free market, I guess, and nobody’s forcing these artists to get involved. But the mere existence of things like this strengthens a increasingly popular mindset that says that creativity comes cheaply, and that the creators should take the financial and time risk of producing something that may not be what is wanted, rather than the purchaser taking that risk.

As AIGA (the professional association for design) says:

Organizations sometimes initiate contests as a way of developing logos or other identity work. Unlike disciplines in which the designer can bill for implementation of the proposed design (e.g., architecture), in communication design, the submitted solution already represents the bulk of the intellectual work…

AIGA believes that doing speculative work seriously compromises the quality of work that clients are entitled to and also violates a tacit, long-standing ethical standard in the communication design profession worldwide. AIGA strongly discourages the practice of requesting that design work be produced and submitted on a speculative basis in order to be considered for acceptance on a project.

Update: Pixish do mention these concerns on their About page:

But isn’t this spec work? We acknowledge that some artists are against working before there’s a contract in place, so they may not want to participate here. And that’s fine - Pixish isn’t for everyone. If you’re already making a living as a pro, hooray! We’re thrilled for you. But you’re lucky. There are a lot of really talented folks who aren’t. We want to give them a chance to get out there, get seen, and get paid.

Which is true, but doesn’t really address my problem with the culture and expectations that this sort of site perpetuates.

I seem to start writing a lot of stuff that I can’t be bothered to finish. Or, equally, I write stuff that I decide is stupid, and so I decide not to post it. The latter, at least, is good, I think — I’m being my own editor. And everyone knows that every good writer needs a good editor.

Therefore, I am a good writer.

What is a boy to do?

Update: I have ‘email[ed] an expert’ at Clinique. I will let you all know what they say.

Now their London datacenter has suffered a similar loss of power and service. Half the servers are down.

Not a good couple of months for Rackspace.

For many years, MFI allowed customers to buy their items in the store and leave the store with their furniture . This was stopped in the mid-1990s due to cost and from then on all furniture was delivered from large warehouses. This has resulted in MFI having the largest two-man delivery service in Europe.

It’s true.

It’s based on a new Nokia handset, the ‘6131-NFC’, which has a specific new kind of wireless technology built in. So you’ll need to buy a new handset for it. There are also issues with “the logistics of managing tickets within the phone interface, and the security of the system”. The handset actually has a special “secure memory module” to store the ticket information.

Impressive collaboration. And technology.

Too bad I got there first:

Forces you to do hand-stands, thus decreasing your risk of RSI.

However, Microsoft did finally get the floppy disk icon right. Previous versions of Office on both the Mac and Windows depicted the floppy disk with the metal shield backwards from how a real floppy looked, with no hole in the shield and an extra hole in the disk. That wouldn’t actually work, of course. Over the last 12 versions of Office, nobody at Microsoft ever actually stopped to consider what a floppy disk really looked like, it just kept reusing the same odd icon.

Microsoft’s erroneous floppy icon also has no “HD” hole, indicating it only has a 720k capacity and dates from the 80s; it does have a copy protect hole. (The correct but stylized new Mac floppy depicts no holes.) Even this year’s Vista version of Office has the same incorrect floppy disk icon. It is amusing that the MacBU fixed this error for Mac users in 2008, ten years after Steve Jobs yanked the floppy out of the iMac and stomped it out of existence.

Even slightly more ironic is the fact that Word 2004 used a Zip drive icon, which at least some PowerMacs prior to the G5 in 2003 offered as an option. Four years later, the MacBU has reverted to the floppy disk, either to atone for Microsoft’s decades of error or as a nostalgic nod to saving documents in the era Word originally sprang from.

Rackspace advertises on 37signals’ site.

So you get this:

David: God, whoever wrote this is way too into Ritter Sport.
David: Also, “sport”?
David: It’s a fucking chocolate bar.

Update: Something tells me that variety number 24, “Nutella with horse power”, may not be an accurate reporting of the facts.