cheezepie.com

Moving to the stream

In the next day or so I’m going to be removing this version of cheezepie.com and moving the blog over to cheezepie.com/stream

For those of you who have subscribed to this version’s RSS feed please update your feed now (the new feed is already up and running).

Thanks for your continued interest, let me know what you think of the new version.

Top Ten Tube Travel Tips - a new website

Some time ago I had a little bit of a rant to a friend of mine about the frustrating experience that is using the London Underground.

As it turned out my friend and most other people I spoke to about the topic also found it quite frustrating, and all for similar reasons: the other people using it.

There seem to be a whole host of unwritten rules that people should, but often don’t, know before trying to use the Tube. So in an attempt to make these rules more widely known, the idea of a new website was born. Today I can reveal that website:

TopTenTubeTravelTips

Enjoy.

Quote of the day from the office

Our very own Sarah at 16:08 today said:

“Don’t send a text, it’ll make my monkey swing!”

Made us laugh. Made Sarah turn red.

Stephen Fry blogs about smart phones and why dseign matters [1]

Stephen Fry has a blog. On his blog he has written an extraordinarily long post about the history and current maturity of the smart phone market. In that long post is a “sidebar” in which he explains why design matters.

This sidebar is possibly one of the best passages of text I have ever had the pleasure to read:

“By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.” … I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms – why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT??”

Celebrity photos - retouched

I’ve dabbled at photography for years, and occasionally manage to pull off a half decent shot (usually only after taking about 300 or so of the same thing first…) but I’ve always struggled to take good portrait shots. I’ve never been able to get that “magazine” look.

Now, I’ve always known that that “magazine” look was not natural, and was photoshopped to make them pop, but now I can see just how much in this amazing portfolio of a “professional photo retouching service” www.iwanexstudio.com

(Found via Unstoppable robot ninja)