Stuff it would be great to have designed
In this interview with designer Jack Schulze (which also contains this great aphorism: "No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say."), a magnificent list of stuff he wishes he'd designed:
There are products I wish I'd designed because I like them and then people would think I'd done them and like me more. This list is massive. Off the top of my head: I wish I'd directed and conceived the perfume commercial where a guy on a helicopter kisses a woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a Channel commercial with Little Red Riding Hood shooshing the wolf. I'd like to have been the first to take the photomontages Hockney produced in the 60s. I wish I'd written The Filth by Grant Morrison. I wish I'd conceived and made Super Mario Galaxy. I love the table-top skirmish game called Necromunda in the Warhammer universe, although I only played it once, because the social negotiation of the rules that always happens around the game, are embedded back into the rules. I think Formula 1 television coverage is visually completely remarkable. I have no idea what is going on, but it's so good I can watch it just for the optics. It's like injecting Photoshop filters straight into your eyeballs.Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze (via Beyond the Beyond)
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I stopped caring what he said. I stopped reading when he started talking about the software he could do better.
Why should we care about the ideas of a person who, when asked about things he wishes he had done, comes up with perfume commercials?
Well, I think he proved his own point.
Well, I think we all proved his point. No-one ever really cares what you say ^_^
I wish I'd invented the chalkline. One of the real pleasures of manual labor is working with perfect, beautifully thought out tools and processes...
If you don't know what a chalkline is, here's a brief description. It's a string on a spool, the spool mounted inside a box filled with chalk powder.
Let's say you want to nail down flooring but you're not sure where to put the nails. Two people go to either end of the beam you're nailing the flooring to, the chalkline stretched between them.
Each end is placed against the middle of the beam and the line is snapped, leaving a blue mark running directly over the center of the beam. That marks where the nails should go.
Simple, perfect. Brilliant.
ive just finished using a chalkline, and they do make laying a floor possible.
i wish id invented the for loop.
these are a few of my favorite thingss!!
I love that aphorism you quoted, Cory. It is just a bit too long to fit on a t-shirt.
Formula 1 TV coverage is not so great, especially in the USA. First of all, it's not even in high definition. If it were, that would be truly epic!
Secondly, even though the sports is watched internationally, the video feed is controlled by a single company. The networks use their own cameras for pre-race coverage, but the feed of the race itself is provided for them by Bernie Ecclestone. The result is that the broadcasters are not even live at the race. They are watching the same video feed that the viewer is watching, but at a slight delay.
The beauty of F1 is not in the TV coverage, but in the beauty of the sport itself. The cars and the tracks are such that even a really crappy TV production will be amazing.
I hate chalklines. Messy, inconvenient, inaccurate... and every single "improved" chalkline you see for sale actually performs WORSE than the previous model - messier, less accurate, less convenient....
The only chalkline I ever liked using was my grand-dad's, which was made of kite-string and a piece of chalk shaped like half a baseball. Once you learned how to use it, it worked as well or better than any modern fancy-shmancy powdered-chalk-dribbling jam-prone made-in-lower-slobovia over-priced difficult-to-tighten piece of crap they sell today.
The only improvement over grand-dad's chalkline I've ever seen is called a LASER. And those are much, much better. I've used a laser line on a grassy field wet with dew - try that with a chalkline!
@9: F1 coverage via DirecTV and U-verse (Speed for most of the races, Fox for a few of the more high-profile ones) is in HD and very pretty. It was my test sample for deciding whether to keep DirecTV or switch to U-verse for TV. (Decided to keep DirecTV, too much compression of the U-verse stream.) Although I agree that the commentators talking over a video feed they can't control is rather odd and less than ideal. At least once a race they're left saying "I wish they'd go back to that last shot so we could see blah better."
That said, I don't know that F1 is particularly special in the amazing department, I'm in awe of most live sports coverage. I try to imagine how they keep it all going, choose the right camera, instant replay, special graphics, etc. it just seems like an amazing feat of engineering.
The eiffel tower helicopter kissing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lmzITeIZr4
Wish I'd designed, and patented, those reflective, embedded highway markers you see on every gd road in America.