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Tuesday, 25 June 2002 |
And not only that, they are designed in Rose Bay, Sydney, by a two-man firm named Standard Technical Merchandise.
I need another backpack, and I am tossing up between the Sports and the Parachute. Gotta find a local retailer in Perth, if there is one.
8:47:20 PM 
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I have a relative by marriage here who believes that anything designed by a designer is by definition bad design. He seems to think instead that objects that are badly designed, ugly to look at and crude to use are actually good.
The topic came up again the other day when he wanted a stepladder to do some handyman work. I got out a terrific and not at all expensive little aluminium and plastic stepladder made by the Italian homewares firm Magis, set it up, and told him it was made by a firm that employs many notable designers, including Australia’s own Marc Newson, to create their products.
“In that case,” he said in all seriousness, “I’d better not use it. It’d only collapse.”
My Magis stepladder is the best and most stable I have ever owned. I had several stepladders when I was a studio photographer, and got to tell good from bad, by falling off the bad ones.
By the way, if you want the best ironing board I have used to date, it is the Magis Amletto Ironing Board. Even the little things in life should be done with pleasure. I wish I had one right now—this top-end Hills ironing board is really pissing me off, and is rusting like blazes.
Here are some more Magis products. I have the Dish Doctor, the Rock doorstop, and the Mago Broom too. They all look great and work even better. I got them at ECC Lighting and Living in Sydney.
8:13:43 PM
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I went looking for daylight-balanced Edison screw-capped light globes this afternoon. I used to use these all the time at home in London and Sydney.
My ex-wife and girlfriends used to whinge about the colour—“Whaahh, that light makes me feel really cold; get rid of it!”—but it was great for judging onscreen colour accurately and had the effect of making me feel less tired when working through the night. Besides, you could always have all the other lights in the house the usual dull amber.
Today I had added incentive as I have learned that direct daylight blue lights balanced with regular amber incandescent light bouncing around in the background is the best combination for working on your writing.
But of course I could not find any daylight balanced incandescent lamps anywhere around here, and when I asked the shop assistants about them they responded to the question, and description, as if I was crazy.
I seem to recall you could get daylight lamps, and Edison screw versions at that, at damned near every store in London. I used to get mine at the lower ground floor in Jon Lewis in the Kings Road. They weren’t so hard to find in Sydney either, even in Parramatta when I briefly lived there.
7:29:52 PM
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They put up an early beta, invited people to try it out, asked for comments and feedback on how to make it better, and here is the newest version.
1:27:44 AM
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You are sick to death of those damned expensive Windows networking technicians cluttering up the place every day. They think they live here. No wonder we can’t afford to replace all the old computers, upgrade the production software, or take out more server licences to connect the new users to the network. (True story.)
12:57:03 AM
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Although it seemed that plans to make Linux more usable on the desktop, instead of just as a server operating system, were stymied when Linux GUI specialists Eazel, Inc. went bust, Red Hat may be considering broadening its approach.
Currently “Red Hat, the leading seller of Linux, gets the vast majority of its revenue from the use of its product in servers,” News.Com reports.
“An awful lot of people in the consumer environment are… using desktop computers just to write memos or letters, access their Internet service provider, and send and receive e-mail,” says IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky. These people would be much better off with a more reliable, free, fast, and secure operating system installed on their Intel boxes. The difference between using Linux and any version of Windows on such machines is incredible.
Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik is aware of Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. “You’ve got to solve the .doc problem first,” he said, referring to the file format used by Microsoft Word but not shared by Microsoft with the rest of the industry.
“Compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats is a big problem. Microsoft Office has about 92 percent of the market for packages of programs such as word processors and spreadsheets,” Kusnetzky said.
Sun Microsystems partially addresses the issue with its StarOffice software and the open-source OpenOffice project on which it’s based. Apple Computer’s AppleWorks software suite, which comes free on many of their computers, will open and save to the .doc file format. But “Microsoft can play the game of changing those file formats when it wants and indeed has done so,” Kusnetzky said. “The name of the game is Microsoft wins and you lose.”
So much so that most Windows users have no idea that the Microsoft Word .doc file format is not an industry standard document interchange file format, and think they can send .doc files willy nilly to all and sundry.
As I have often observed, many Windows users have no idea they use an operating system named Windows—they think their OS is Word. Watch them get endlessly frustrated while trying to open every other type of file in Word. Or a file of a type that their machine’s registry is not set up to handle properly.
It is like watching Homer smacking himself on the forehead with a brick, again and again and again and again and again… Double-click, D’oh! Double-click, D’oh! Double-click, D’oh! Double-click, D’oh! Double-click, D’oh!
12:21:37 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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