its how conan started

actually thats not quite right. conan o'brien was a writer for saturday night live first, so this should actually be titled, it's what conan did after snl.

the simpsons, beloved tv favourite of the masses, is doing a little crowdsourcing. they are offering up an opportunity for you, yes you, to create your own simpsons character. go take a look, fill out the form and you will have the chance to be flown to los angeles to put the finishing touches on your creation.

the site says that they plan to air the episode in january 10, 2010 so better get over there.

the new search?

so, wouldn't it be interesting if you could do a search and the engine generated a bulletin-board styled page with clips of articles, video, webpages and text and arranged them on the page according to relevance? and then when you clicked on something, it would enlarge to show you more before taking you to the page?

seems you can. check out spezify.

takes a bit to get used to but definitely has potential.

burn bunny burn

hmm, so bunny carcasses made a decent fuel. who knew?

it turns out that stockholm, sweden is overrun with wild rabbits. to the point that they contract out to companies to cull the herd. six thousand were killed last year and (as of the article) 3,000 this year. and the general public seemed to be ok with it.

but whats now turned some heads, is that the company contracted to perform these cleanups, have decided that the best way to dispose of the bodies is to burn them to fuel a heating plant.

apparently they have the same energy content as normal heating oil.

here is one of the first articles on it (i think), read through the comments with both enlightened and not-so-enlightened opinions.

simulates the warmth of a tauntaun carcass

after a couple emails back and forth between myself and a couple of other star wars geeks (which actually started off as a transformers thread [yes, i really am that geeky]), i was sent a link to a sleeping bag built to resemble a tauntaun carcass.

i want one.

badly

the joy of sketch

spend anytime around me at all and i guarantee, we will have a conversation about the death of creative thought.

many of my hours are spent as a designer. at work, at home, at play, its what i do. so its stands to reason that i spend time thinking about design. a lot of time. and the best way to get any (preferably all) of these ideas down is to sketch them. a sketchbook is of primary importance to me. at any given time, i have one at work, one at home and one available within arms reach. though any paper i can scribble on will do in a pinch. it then simply gets stapled into my current sketchbook for later use.

having said all this, there is a growing number of those in the creative field that reject the notion of sketching. they simply turn on a computer and output ideas from there.

dear god.

anyway, i have long maintained that this is not a good trend, and honestly, i hope its not a growing trend, but, if i have to relent at some level (and i won't), could those who refuse to use paper, maybe take a look at odosketch? it won't replace paper, but at least its imperfect and allows for exploration. and its kind of cool to play around in.

please?