Must See Video: "C'était un Rendezvous" by Claude Lelouch-
If you're a car geek, a film geek, a history geek, a Francophile -- or any combination of these -- the short film presented here really is a must-see
It's called C'était un rendez-vous, and it was made in 1976 by French director Claude Lelouch.Thanks to the miracle of the YouTube, it's recently become a cult classic. Here's the Wikipedia summary:
C'était un Rendezvous ("It was a date") is a short film (under 10 minutes) made in 1976 by Claude Lelouch, showing a high speed drive through …(more)
- Telstar Logistics Races Battered Volvo During Ridiculously Wet 24 Hours of LeMons
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We took to the track last weekend. The automotive circus came to town, in the form of a 24 Hours of LeMons endurance race at Infinion Raceway just north of San Francisco. LeMons (Pro Tip: It's pronounced "lemons") is the nationwide auto racing series for crappy race cars that cost $500 or less. It's car racing for hackers, basically, in a spectacle of self-parody that's equal parts Burning Man, NASCAR, and Click and Clack.
Telstar Logistics participated as part of Bernal Dads Racing, …(more)
- A Remake of "The Road Warrior"... on Bicycles
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San Francsco's Cyclecide has released "The Loaded Warrior," a clever remake of The Road Warrior:
A remake of the greatest action movie ever, The Road Warrior, A.K.A. Mad Max 2. San Francisco's Cyclecide replaces cars with bikes and gas with beer. A film by Jay Broemmel, Taylor Fitzgerald, and Steven Bellesiles. Warning: contains violence, nudity, drunkenness, & exploding Pomeranians.
…(more)
- San Francisco Orders New “Super Pumper” Fireboat
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San Francisco is preparing to order a handsome new "super-pumper" fireboat, and if The Big One ever strikes, the new boat is likely to play a starring role in saving the city from unspeakable destruction.
The salty dogs at gCaptain carry the details:
Seattle-based Jensen Maritime Consultants, Inc.announced today they have been chosen to design a custom “super pumper” fireboat for the City of San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD) that will enhance the departments marine fire fighting an…(more)
- It's a Hemi: Meet the Army's Badass Backhoe
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While on a recent survey of the industrial waterfront in Oakland, California, Telstar Logistics spied a most unusual vehicle: A heavily armored backhoe strapped to an open-sided shipping container.
Moving in for a closer look, we observed that the vehicle was built in an unusual configuration, with four equally sized wheels on each corner. "It wants to go fast," we theorized.
Upon returning to headquarters, our reasearchers quickly identified the odd vehicle as a High Mobility Engineer Exc…(more)
- A Memorable Demonstration of Proper Tire Chain Installation Technique
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Headed to the snow? The folks at California's Bear Mountain Resort created this extremely memorable video to teach you proper tire-chain installation technique. Best viewed deadpan:
Big Bear Mountain Resorts wants all our guests to have a safe drive up the mountain when visiting. This video shows you some helpful hints for installing tire chains. This way you get on the snow safer and faster. (Always follow the chain or cable installation instruction manual that came with your specific tir…(more)
- Metaphor Alert: Sun Sets Over the California Highway Patrol's Fleet of Ford Crown Victorias
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As you may have heard, Ford has ended production of the venerable Crown Victoria, the mainstay vehicle of American police and taxi fleets for decades.
The Crown Vic assembly line shut down last September, so we found ourselves wondering: What will replace the Crown Victoria in the California Highway Patrol's fleet? Hoping to find an answer, we dropped by the CHP's Fleet Operations facility in West Sacramento, California last weekend, hoping to see what the CHP has purchased now that the Crow…(more)
- Navy Plans to Scrap Sea Shadow Stealth Warship
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Since no one seems to want to take the thing, the US Navy has announced plans to scrap its Sea Shadow stealth warship prototype, which was built during the 1980s. Until recently the ship was in mothballs at Suisun Bay, near San Francisco, but its future now looks bleak:
Navy spokesman Chris Johnson told FoxNews.com the ship's fate is all but sealed: To the junk heap it will go.
"The next disposition is dismantling and recycling," he said.
Johnson said that from 2006 until this year, the …(more)
- Today Limited theatrical release
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A while back we linked to Adam Curtis’s post, The Bitch, The Stud and The Prawn, within which he traced all sorts of merry paths through contemporary culture culminating in a strange period of deliberately low-key, almost unwatchable films made purely as a means of dodging tax on investments: ‘There appeared to be a legal loophole, under rules passed in 1997, that offered tax advantages for people willing to invest in British films, which allowed them to defer payments until after t…(more)
- Yesterday Conceptualism and product design
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Concept designs exist in that strange hinterland where desire and technology haven’t quite caught up with one another, where technolust is stoked by the technically impossible and brands are rendered down to their bare essentials. The most recent ‘idea’ to catch our eye was this concept design for a physical ‘Instagram camera‘, a splice of Polaroid aesthetics with as-yet-undiscovered technology. In the past few years, the concept design has emerged as a calling car…(more)
- Spoof cities and views from space
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Les Yeux sans Visage, a weblog / a history of photographing the Earth from space / Lightplot is described as a ‘robotic 3D light painting system’, built to make animated sculptures through a clever computer controlled moving projector / a deck of cards created by 52 illustrators / The Shard – a timelapse study, a short film by Paul Raftery and Dan Lowe. Not the turbo-charged ground-to-spire blast you might expect – these are no doubt being compiled by the developers out …(more)
- Various views of the city
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Various views of the city. George Davis is innocent still lingers on in East London. A campaign against the wrongful conviction of an armed robber (later convicted for another armed robbery…), it resulted in scattered graffiti, damaged test wickets / attention to detail: ‘I’m building a small N-gauge layout which is meant to be set in East London (somewhere between Fenchurch St and Barking); the trains run on a viaduct. It’s set in the 1970s/early 80s’ / photograp…(more)
- Sabres drawn
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Spam-erican Apparel, or how automated customisation just increased your choice to the point of utter incoherence (via MeFi, where someone notes sagely: ‘Zazzle, the Cafepress for people late to the internet’). There is something to be said about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction here, but we can’t formulate it just yet. Zazzle vendors exist to amplify the confusion by splicing public domain stock photography with Zazzle’s extensive inventory of object…(more)
- Famous mysteries and elusive archives
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A selection of Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives. In comparison, London’s digital archives seem to have a long way to go before they can match the quality and quantity of the material now available at the New York City Municipal Archives (870,000 images). The issue is largely funding. Throughout its history, there have been surveys and records of London. The London County Council Photograph Library comprises of around quarter of a million images, for example, whereas the Lon…(more)
- Up in the air
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The 1900 Summer Olympics attained a height of elegance and quirkiness that few games have managed since. Known as the Games of the II Olympiad and held in Paris. From Wikipedia: ‘Some unusual events were contested for the only time in the history of the Games including automobile and motorcycle racing‘. In this novel category, France won every single medal but two, including gold, silver and bronze in the ‘Delivery Van – 500 to 1200kg – Electric – 300km&rsquo…(more)
- So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip
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Doug Aitken’s MoMA installation ‘Sleepwalkers‘, from 2007, gets the lavish box set treatment. Someone needs to start a gallery of great box sets, from music to art and more / how to polish a car / Monolithic, a look ‘at the immensity of monolithic landscapes and architecture’ at Super Colossal / Four the Love of Art / Static in between channels, music and video / Page 1, a ‘typographic experiment in which 70 different graphic designers have responded to the s…(more)
- Interaction10: Coming Up for Air
- Interaction10 finally happened last weekend. I have barely blogged in a year. This is not a coincidence. A+B=C.
It’s hard to even know where to begin. Less than 100 hours ago, I completed the most significant accomplishment of my career (so far), a year-long project that filled all the nights and weekends outside my day job. Words fail. Holy crap, I just co-chaired a conference.
Interaction10 rocked. Our amazing team pulled off a 4 day event with over 500 people, 11 workshops, 40+ session…(more)
- Doing a Virtual Seminar for UIE
- Happy to announce that I’ll be giving a virtual seminar for UIE on the topic of Designing Humanity Into Your Products on September 9. For more info, check out UIE.
Please sign up and listen in! And hey, want a discount? Use my discount code BILLDER to save yourself some hard-earned cash. See you there.…(more)
- Check Ticket Data
- Experimenting with video…
Here’s a mini-diatribe on how simple phrasings in an interaction can confuse the interaction. Or, yet another fun example of pointing out silly technology. In this case, paying for airport parking and turning in your receipt so you can leave the parking area, and questioning what the machine says.
Plus, you can see how much my eyes wander while I’m driving. Safety first!
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- From Business to Buttons
- Earlier I in June, I was fortunate to be speaking at From Business to Buttons 09. It was a great event, hosted at Malmo University in Sweden. We got to see a lot of insightful student presentations as well as some great talks put on by the various speakers, include Garr Reynolds, Scott Berkun, Matt Jones and Dave Malouf.
Here is the video from my talk, Designing Humanity into Your Products.
I switched gears a bit from talking about buttons. I focused instead on words, writing and voice. How pro…(more)
- Why I’m Attending Interaction 09, and You Should Too!
- In February 2009, I’ll be heading up to Vancouver BC to attend Interaction’09, the annual conference organized by IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. I couldn’t be more excited. Why?
This is my tribe of people. Some call themselves interaction designers, some call themselves information architects, some have other variations. But really, they’re all intelligent, curious, kind people with a fascination for how people interact with technology, and improving it in thei…(more)
- Evolution of Symbols @CyborgCamp
- Last weekend, I attended and spoke at CyborgCamp. It was a helluva thing. It’s incredibly energizing to get a bunch of smart and thoughtful people in a room together for a day to talk about the intertwinement between people and technology. Ward Cunningham was a joy to watch and see how he visualizes massive data. Lia Hollander spoke passionately about her bond with her insulin pump. And I could watch Hideshi Hamaguchi diagram on a whiteboard all day long. The biggest thanks of all go to Am…(more)
- “The Human Button” on BBC
- BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a 40 minute audio documentary on The Human Button, (today Dec 2) including interviews with the people who would’ve lived in the underground bunker, running the British government in the event of a nuclear war.
There is also a great audio slideshow of the discarded bunker, showing the rooms and dead technology from this forgotten era, and thankfully, never used.
Hopefully we can see/hear more programs like this to show the incredible amount of money wasted on te…(more)
- Pinball and bowling alleys and flow
- Recently, I played pinball and went bowling in the same week. The two games will always be linked together for me because that’s where I first really experienced interaction design: the bowling alley.
I enjoy saying that I grew up in a bowling alley. There’s tiny me camping under stinky shoes, scrounging stale nachos for dinner, and sniping smokes from the ‘dults. But in truth, from roughly the ages 7 to 13, my mom, aunt and uncle were all in bowling leagues, so I went once or…(more)
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Product design