Sometimes cheap really is best:I bought a £1.99 metal Proteam footpump for my bicycle tyres. The box was dusty, so maybe it was bankrupt stock; but it’s robust and works a treat. I bought 10 x Imation CD-R’s for £4.99; they work flawlessly after Sony’s expensive coloured ones stuttered and failed. I bought Brian Eno’s […]
Archive for July, 2003
Sometimes cheap is best
Sometimes cheap is best:I bought a £1.99 metal Proteam footpump for my bicycle tyres; the box was a little “bankrupt stock” dusty, but the pump’s robust and works a treat. I bought 10 x Imation cased CD-R’s for £4.99; they work flawlessly after Sony’s expensive coloured ones stuttered and failed (all except the blue ones, […]
FlowerPixel v1.0
FlowerPixel v1.0:I’ve been messing around with CSS and DIVs, and have made a little freeware template. The site’s ‘pages’ are, in fact, DIV layers which simply get hidden or revealed using some robust javascript. The style is, admittedly, a little florid – like it should be the home-page of the daughter of a South American […]
Knowledge Economy
Knowledge economy:Is the knowledge economy mainly a northern European ‘thing’? Certainly a new map on the front page of www.localfutures.com clearly shows a huge polarily between the lands north of Paris and almost everything below that line. The UK looks like a clear leader in Europe. But within England’s knowledge economy / graduate-retention situation, Local […]
Artists & regeneration
Artists & regeneration: There’s not a lot of hard information online, although several costly one-day seminars have been held this month (a sure sign that there’s likely to be money involved, and the cheque-writers are mulling over this flavour-of-the-month idea) such as the Orangery Summer School, and Creative Collaborations. Here’s a few selected links…. Books […]
Creative Advantage Fund
Creative Advantage:The West Midlands Creative Advantage Fund has a new name – Advantage Creative Fund -, a luvverly new web-site, and a new tranche of £5-million for commercial loans to creative industries firms in the West Midlands. They had a tasty launch party at CODE a few days ago, which friends Nigel & Sabine say […]
More re:location photos
re:location More re:location photos from last evening’s visit… (large version, 42kb) (large version, 80kb) (large version, 62kb)
“Something off the top, sir?”
“Something off the top, sir?”Talking with the barber about scalp cyst removal. He’d had four done the week before. They freeze your head, by sticking a needle in the cyst. Then they cut it open. There’s lots and lots of blood. So much blood you won’t believe, he said. He said he’d had to wait […]
ArtsJournal adds blogs
Blogart:Arts Journal Digest adds weblogs.
re:location site is live
re:location site is live:re:location is now live. The site’s still “not quite there yet”; three pages need finishing, and it may be that the colour-scheme gets changed around. But for the moment, it’s ‘done’. It would have been nice to have done it in a lightweight CSS & DOM combo; but that’s not quite ready […]
English Heritage gets it
English Heritage gets it:Regeneration & conservation isn’t just about the buildings. It’s also about the micro-geographies of the eye & the heart.
re:location
re:location: I went down to Birmingham to visit the re:location building (the follow-up show to Intervention) – eighty artists take over a disused X-ray factory. One major train derailment (five days of delays!), two stuffy coach replacements, only three hours of sleep, and the sweltering weather were my unwelcome travelling companions. So it was some […]
After the Ice
Currently reading:After the Ice – a global human history, 20,000-5000 BC. Steven Mithen’s lucid follow-up to Prehistory of the Mind and (as editor) Creativity in human evolution and prehistory. Where his previous books were painfully dense, Mithen – Professor of Early Prehistory at Reading University – here vividly brings to life a century’s-worth of dusty […]
‘404, call centre not found’
‘404, call centre not found’:That “career” in a call centre might last for about as long as it takes an average caller to get through. Calls answered by software are very much nearer reality these days. It seems the UK industry is set to be squeezed to death between software and shipping jobs overseas. Not […]
Creative Industries Development
The demographics are a’changing:The British Music industry; the megacorps are whining harder. Machine-produced perkypop has to rely on the fickle fadish audience of female under-12s. 90s formula dance-music is rapidly loosing the interest of the crowd that grew up with it. But that doesn’t mean that British music is going down the tubes. Far from […]
re:Location
re:Location: Dave Pollard is putting on another Intervention show. As big as the last one, same format. This time it’s in the Black Country, in Soho (Soho Smethwick, very different from Soho London!), at an old X-Ray factory. re:Location artists will be working through the summer for a 12th Sept launch.
Something useful at No.10
Something useful at No.10:Deep inside No.10’s web-site, Tony’s cronies have found time to stash a rather useful little booklet which is a toolbox of future-forecasting methodologies (PDF, 100kb). Sadly, the stereotypical fashion guru’s cork-board pinned with feathers and photos ripped from magazines doesn’t seem to feature. Nor does a creative’s zeitgiest-tuning intuition. But then you […]
Terraced houses back in vogue
Don’t say I didn’t warn you:Terraced houses used to be evil. Now they’re back in vogue says today’s Times (Free registration required). And today’s Nationwide House Price Report reveals, buried in the regional figures, the fact that the average price of an older terrace in the West Midlands has now topped £100,000.