Aaaanyway. I could ramble for hours about the shortage of credible, 50ish, focused businessfolks in candids, and even longer on attempting to include Indians, Southern Europeans or non-US diversity in general, and briefly-but-passionately on the continued existence of the “pretty-young-woman-takes-orders-from-an-older-man” shot, but I wanted to write about Veer.

I liked their search engine system — it wasn’t perfect, but I liked it. I liked that I’d find images which weren’t in Getty’s vast library, images I could use on a regular basis. I liked the site design. I liked the super-friendly European telephone support people, who were always able to solve the problem (and several of whom sounded…rawr). I liked their crazy side projects, the blog, the merch, the various silly things they did in addition to the main type-n-images focus. And then they were acquired by Corbis.

Fast forward a little while, and the dismantling of Veer as it was appears close to complete. Don’t get me wrong, Veer.com is still there, and it still has much the same site design. But Corbis have apparently decided that Veer is to be its *budget* brand, for microstock and the like. They’ve even introduced Veer “credits”. Example: a search today, looking for technology images with a Middle East slant wasn’t especially productive. Even with the “illustration” option unticked, it was about 50% cheapy map outlines and flag buttons made in photoshop.

I guess that means searching only on Corbis.com in future. Which is fine, but I *liked* Veer, for more than just the list of things above. It seemed small, and a bit personal, and a bit creative, and it was useful to me and I liked it. And now it’s not anymore.

Valid business reasons, economic downturn, consolidation in the market, blah blah I DON’T CARE. I won’t be weeping into my whiskey tonight, but my image searching duties are now even less appealing.

One of the things I like the most about my current role is that it’s fairly diverse (within its own boundaries, of course). So this afternoon I’ll be mostly working on a print publication but I could just as easily be editing some video footage, or writing/editing text for an ad or invitation, or creating a construct for someone’s presentation, or possibly even working on simple Office automation. I really enjoy the variety, and not having to do the same thing day in, day out.

The biggest problem I have is reigning myself in. There are exciting new projects I’d like to work on, and it’s hard to say “no, I’m not the person for that”. New design for a corporate website? I’ll do that. iPad app? Sounds interesting, sign me up. Interview production? Let’s do it in-house!

This is the hard bit. They might be hugely interesting projects and an opportunity to learn something new, but they’re NOT jobs for me! Let’s bring in some specialist expertise. Let’s get a contractor. I will learn to say this through unclenched teeth. I will!

But let me have just one of the cool new projects, k? Please? Just one?

*twitch*

But I bloody HATE the sales they have on Steam.

“But why would you hate the opportunity to pick up games at a discount? Are you STUPID?”, I hear you ask?

Because I am weak. That’s why. So there was/is a July 4 (date format snerk) sale which I spotted the other day. And I ended up buying three games completely randomly, because the were “cheap”. Only as well as being “cheap”, they were also, well, “shit”.

The best of the bunch was Rainbow Six: Lockdown. I was pretty excited when I saw this, as I think I own ever game in the series, from the original almost-a-strategy game Rainbow Six (and the Eagle Watch expansion) on PC, through Rogue Spear (and expansions), Rainbow Six 3 and the “Vegas” games on Xbox 360. And, while I loved the “devise a route through the map and control it with gocodes” play of the original games, in which you could even opt to have the AI play *your* character and restrict yourself to an OpsController role, I *also* loved the more action-focused later games.

Lockdown, I didn’t recognise. So what if it’s a couple of years old, more R6! Great! *Buy* *6Gb download*. Oh, waitaminute. Wasn’t there a *really* shit game in between the strategy and the action. Where they got everything wrong, and it didn’t work? Yes, there was. It was Lockdown. It’s dreadful, it’s clunky, it jitters and stalls on my dualcore PC, it looks bad, it sounds bad, it plays worse and it smells. Still, at least it was cheap. Sigh.

And then there were the Gothic games. Gothic 2 and Gothic 3, in a pack, together, for cheap. I’ve heard of those, vaguely. I’ll give them a punt. ~10Gb download, for the pair.

Imagine if you were to concoct the ultimate RPG from all the best bits of other RPGs somehow fused together in a way that actually worked: the writing from Planescape or maybe Baldur’s Gate, the depth and complexity of an original Fallout, the shiny graphics of a Fallout 3 or a Mass Effect (having first taken the sticky labels from the designers’ screens that hide every colour except brown, blue and red). Throw in some of the better Bioware dialogue, have Obsidian do rewrites but someone else do QA, and on and on. Imagine the wonder you’d get.

Now imagine what you’d get if you combined the leftovers.

That’s probably a bit unfair, as I haven’t played Gothic 3 for more than about 10 minutes, but I don’t think I can. The controls are horrible, the voices dreadful, the script (what little I’ve seen of it) it painful and if the combat blossoms into something wonderful later, it was probably a mistake to make me kill 30 or 40 orc-things by clicketyclicketyclicketying before even telling what, why or how.

But it was cheap.

Not only is it Apple’s right to not include Flash on Safari, it’s actually to the benefit of Mac/PC/iPhone/Android users in the mid- to long- term. I almost feel like this section needs little to no explanation if you’ve been keeping up with the HTML 5 / Flash debate. If Apple had continued to support Flash, a viable alternative would certainly not emerge for years to come, not to mention the quality of their products would have suffered in the meantime. Conversely, and for the sake of argument, this could also make Adobe revisit Flash and make it a much better product.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many criticisms that can be levelled at Flash, and at Adobe. Its security history is spotty at best, and recent flaws have been rather unpleasant and hard to work around short of disabling flash entirely. At various times, it’s been a horrible CPU hog, and even now it’s easy enough to create a page which bogs down the mightiest of PCs unless the host browser has some form of plugin throttle or has successfully moved plugins to separate/multiple processes. Of course, it’s closed-source commercial software, so if you’ve a bee in your bonnet for the GPL then it was never going to be your favourite. And y’know, I’ve ranted at length in the past about Adobe’s corporate policies — their “ha ha, because we can!” pricing policy (particularly for non-Americans) and their “how long was the illustrator graph tool broken for?” patching timescales. They aren’t perfect by a long chalk.

But, based on nothing more than gut feeling, I’d suggest that what the greatest number of people hate about Flash are the annoying ads it’s allowed into being. The “punch the monkey and win a prize” ads, the stupid autostarting video clips which blare out loud audio at the worst possible times. All the websites with 3 minute unskippable intro animations and menu systems that take 5 seconds after every button push before starting to load the new content. And guess what: none of that will go away.

HTML5 and its associated tech is looking to replace the underpinnings, not the mechanism itself. There’ll be HTML5 smack-the-spider ads, there’ll be opening sequences and too-clever-to-be-navigable interfaces. There’ll be video blaring out EVERYWHERE.

So by all means call the for destruction of Flash if you like, praise Apple for excluding Flash and others for stepping up, but just keep in mind that the new reality, when it arrives, might look a little familiar.

On arrival on Thursday 8th April, we dumped our luggage at the Edison hotel, Times Square and wandered over to the Rockefeller Center. Taking an early flight from Heathrow meant we were admiring the NYC view from Top of the Rock by 2pm (local time)!

Now I’ve discovered that K will travel to the places on my hit-list, provided he can play a video game set there first, I’m on the look-out for new games set in Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, Russia…

Highlights of our Florence trip include:

Taking a bite of the Leaning Tower of Pisa

Palazzo Vecchio (Florence’s government palace – once home of the Medicis)

View from the cupola (dome) of Firenze Duomo (cathedral)

More
~ Lou’s Florence photo-set
~ K’s photo-set
~ Mayday cafe-bar, Florence – LardButty award

Link to magazine extract:
~ Lottie, featured hamster

Link to Lou’s journo pages:
~ Lou’s journo pages

And so time-consuming too, when you’re reminded of stuff like this:

I pop bubble wrap at 2.07 bubbles per second! I popped 196 bubbles in 1 minute and 34.7 seconds at www.Virtual-Bubblewrap.com! Can you beat my score?

]]> http://www.theanorak.org/2009/10/Distracted-by-bubbles/feed/ 157 http://www.theanorak.org/2009/10/Distracted-by-books/ http://www.theanorak.org/2009/10/Distracted-by-books/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000 Lou http://www.keithfryer.co.uk/?p=383 Hmmm… that wasn’t very successful. Or was it? Trying to make some space on my overloaded bookshelves, I started out by trying to select a few oldies I could get rid of but discovered some recipe booklets I’ve never used.

A trip to Asda, a pile of sesame prawn toast and a mound of lentil + cashew curry later, my bookshelves are still overloaded. So too’s the kitchen, with ingredients for a pumpkin curry this hallowe’en. Roll on the weekend…