Valhalla Island

Lisa Nova is dead right, the bus is great. I’ve recently been catching the bus much more often and tonight I caught it to the Brisbane Web Standards Group meeting, which discussion about I will save for tomorrow’s installment. There’s certainly something about catching the bus at night, there’s a strange but very nice atmosphere.

I find it very easy to speak to people on the bus, I find it much easier than speaking to people on the train. Compared to the bus, the train feels cold and distant, the bus has a much friendlier atmosphere. The ambience each gives out is amplified at night time, they are both very similar during the day.

Brisbane’s new city busways are like futuristic space stations. Really, they’re so cool. They mean you can get anywhere in the city to anywhere around the city really quickly at almost any time. I’ve found it’s almost as efficient and conveinient as the London Underground with the amount of buses and the frequency which they arrive.

Brisbane’s new fleet of Natural Gas buses have also added to the bus riding experience. They’re so much quieter and smoother than your average older diesel bus. They’re also laid out better with more open spaces and massive windows.

I’d like to live closer to the city so I could ditch my expensive car and catch the bus more often.

Yet again, I was uncontrolably impatient when putting out a new Fightingfriends design. The black text on a brown background was difficult to read and there were many small but important details like that, that were just neglected and forgotten.

The text colour has now been changed to a dark brown as some people suggested and I think it looks much better, what do you think? The asides have also been changed to look more like asides and less like a random bit of text floating around between posts. Comments are also much easier to follow now with a little extra styling. I feel happier with the design on a whole now.

Someone asked why comment counts were prefixed with 100. Well, it’s just a joke, everyone knows how good it is to get comments and how cool you are if you have lots. I really didn’t think the number of comments was up to par with how cool I reall am, so I bumped it up artificially… you know, to suit my popularity better.

The tag cloud at the bottom of the page isn’t really working how it should. It’s supposed to be showing a weighted list with bigger links for more posts, smaller for less, but they seem all the same size to me and I think it may be because I’ve only recently began tagging. It’s not nearly as cool if the list isn’t weighted so that might be replaced by something else soon. Although I’ll continue tagging, it’s a good idea.

Also down the bottom there is a list of my recently played tracks, supplied by last.fm. Very cool I think.

Introducing Introductions. I’m not sure why I chose that name, it just came to to when I first had to choose a name for a directory to hold all of it’s stuff and it stuck. I like it, what do you think?

It has a sort of retro feel about it, especially with that choice of font. The font, by the way is Cooper Black, there is also a very similar Adobe commercial font named Goudy Heavyface, an elusive character indeed. Cooper Black was much easier to find.

The inspiration came from a t-shirt I saw a guy at university wearing. It was a Nike shirt that said “Made in Oregon”, used similar colours and Cooper Black (or Goudy Heavyface). I still can’t find a picture of the shirt which would have been nice to show you all since this entire theme originated from it.

As I was developing I didn’t test in IE until the end, and from what I saw, it looks pretty good, ceratainly nothing is broken, just a few things not looking as nice as I’d like. Also, if you’re viewing this on a non-Apple display the colours are going to be a little too saturated and may seem much too bright, if it’s a serious problem I may look at dimming everything down a few percentage points.

So I beat the start of spring and I can finally get back to writing here instead of coding all the time. I really enjoyed the last theme and was so content with it for so long, writing had become very enjoyable. I hope things work out the same way for Introductions.

This morning No, it started a couple of days ago now. I came accross the inspiration for my latest redesign, I had my laptop right there with me so work began immeadiatly and I nailed the colour and style almost straight away. It’s been through around 10 minor revisions since.

There was then one last design element. The typeface. It was a font that I’d seen often and I’m sure you’d recognise if you saw it too. It suited my design perfectly, I think it may have been made in anticipation of the latest fightingfriends design. It wasn’t on my (very limited font-carrying) computer so I had to go out looking.

Now there’s a lot of great font sites out there 1001 fonts, da font, identifont, Typophile, My Font’s What the font, etc, etc. I must have spent two days just trying to find the name of the font I was looking for, I couldn’t even find an image that uses the font so I could show and ask others if they knew. Which is crazy because I’ve seen it everywhere.

I spent hours looking through websites, torrents, P2P and IRC trying to find this font for free but it just didn’t exist. I got to the point where I was ready to fork out the $30, it was the perfect font and nothing less would do.

I made one final search and a digg result was returned. Sifting through the comments I found a link to Typophile, not just a font download site but also for discussion. There’d been people before me searching for the same font and someone suggested an alternative. Almost identical I found an alternative already on my computer, in a font pack I’d just finished torrenting, Jackpot!

So about 10 hours after my search began I found the perfect typeface and now I can die knowing… I found the font I wanted.

Waking up this morning I was greeted with an email from yet another happy Day Dream user. He makes some really cool sites and needed some help integrating Flickr images into a Day Dream blog.

His problem required a very easy fix, and I like to help out with all my Day Dream user support questions. So I explained the small amount of code he needed to change and a bit later I got this reply:

Jim � that fix worked like a charm. Can�t tell you how sweet it feels to get theme advice from the creator!

Love it. Next time I need help I�ll also click on your �donate� link. I�m really happy with this theme�and now the support!

Stay cool,
Chris

What a wonderful feeling.

Something has happened to the display on my car CD player and I can’t make it show the time anymore. I was driving to university this morning, I wanted to know what time it was, looked at my CD player and of course, the time wasn’t shown. This really bothered me, until I stopped to think about it.

Who cares what time it was? I was on my way to uni, stuck in traffic like normal, what did it matter what time it was? If it did display the time and I was able to find out, would I change my actions according to what time it was? Would it even be possible to do anything differently other than continue on my way to uni? No.

Then not knowing the time stopped bothering me and I was content driving to uni, not caring what the time was.

Fightingfriends will soon recieve a redesign, so this afternoon I went out looking for inspiration, this is what I found:

• Cabedge
• Business Logs
• Bartelme Design
• Broken Kode
• Particle Tree
• Olav
• Johnnie Manzari
• Just Kyle
• Forty Eight Design
• Fresh Branding
• M.ossy

I hate target=’_blank’ more than I hate animated gifs, the font attribute and myspace put together. I know, that’s a lot hate and maybe you’re thinking it’s a little too much, but if that’s what you’re thinking, you’re wrong.

It’s not your decision where the links I click open in my local web client. Three things, it’s mine, it’s on my computer and it’s client side software. You look after the stuff on the server and I’ll look after where my browser opens windows. Who legitimately wants to open something in a new window anyway? If anything it should create a new tab but it shouldn’t do that either, that’s also my decision.

I’d love to see browsers just stop dead supporting this, the day that happens will be the day the internet becomes a better place.

I know what a few of you might be thinking, “but Jim! I use target=’_blank’ for the ads on my site so that when people click ads they don’t leave my site”. If you have ads on your site, your visitors should be leaving.

Four Eyed Monsters is an independent feature film about Susan and Arin’s relationship. When I first heard about it from this girl, I was apprehensive (as always). I haven’t seen the film but I have seen all the video podcast episodes. They’re also all available on YouTube.

They’re brilliant, I can’t describe how good they are. It’s also very difficult to describe how they have made me feel, I know that they’re something I really needed to see. The way they capture the problems people encounter, the way the whole story covers so many problems. There’s always the theme of work vs. relationship but there’s other things always running from episode to episode, ownership, parents, not having enough money, selfishness and self sabotage, there’s more.

There’s something very organised about filing everything that happens into weekly 10 minute videos. The amazing thing is that it’s real, it’s all real but it plays out as if it’s not. It’s all cut together beautifully, they’re both very good at what they do. I don’t know, I feel like such an idiot writing a post so badly about and after I’ve just finished watching something so good.

The characters, if I can call them characters, I don’t think I can. The people in the videos, that they worked with on this movie are amazing people, all amazing in their own little way. I really like Joe and in episode eight he really takes a stand where one had to be made.

One episode shows them going to a screening in New York City where they meet people that have been following these videos and one girl in particular says that she feels like she knows them, like they’re a part of her life. I like these people a lot, I really like Arin, it’s strange that I can say I really like people I’ve only seen on a bunch of short videos.

What they’ve done is something so amazing, it amazes me that people live projects like this, working like crazy to make it work. It’s something you really wish you could have been a part of. I think they’ve gone about everything the right way, they way they have gone about the screenings and the way they sought out people to help.

I really cannot say anymore, this post isn’t doing it justice. I almost stopped watching after the first one, don’t, they progressively get much better. The latest episode, episode eight, was posted about 20 hours ago and is the best I don’t want to say it’s the best, I don’t feel comfortable calling something that’s really happening like it is, ‘the best’. It’s just, really good…

Podz recently wrote a post on the same topic. Almost every night I find myself in a situation where I am too tired to really get any more work done but I just want to get that one last thing finished that will give me one less thing to do tomorrow. I spend an hour hopelessly trying to get it done but just can’t concerntrate, I decide enough is enough and go to bed, after a lot of time wasted.

When I get up in the morning, it’s the first thing I do and it’s done in five minutes.

Realising exactly the point where you are too tired to be productive and going to bed is a good skill to have, it will save you a lot of time. The earlier you get to bed the earlier you’ll wake up in the morning, with a refreshed mind. It’s something I’ve been trying to do more often lately.

Here’s my equation - 1 hour of post midnight time is equal to 5 minutes of post 9am time, after a a good night’s sleep.

There’s going to be some big changes around here shortly. Well, maybe not shortly but eventually. I’m very busy with work at the moment but I see this as a good oppurtunity to prepare fightingfriends with a couple of weeks of the right content.

This means a culling of about 85% of the categories back to the bare minimum, most important and basic categories. From there I’ll add tags, maybe through Ultimate Tag Warrior, maybe through something with a better name. Day Dream uses UTW and that was quite a pleasant experience considering I’m not a big plugin user. All that’s running at the moment is Akismet, which, by the way, has now caught over 500 spam comments.

The other preparation excercise will include a permalink revision and manually changing post-slugs and always writing a custom excerpt. I want my permalink structure to be as clean as possible, at the moment it’s /f2/2006/post-slug/ I don’t know if I could really beat that but if I make sure to keep my post-slugs short and meaningful that will help. As for an excerpt, Ionfish uses these very nicely down the bottom of the page, it’s more than just a link to a post.

Content is very important in any design, the more information you have to work with, the better.

Recently I thought about video blogging, soon after I thought about it for more than a few seconds I wrote it off as a bad idea. I only thought of it because I now have all the tools. While I don’t have a video camera, I do have a built-in iSight, which for video blogging would be more suitable than a camcorder.

I also have the software. iMovie HD couldn’t make it much easier. And bandwidth costs? Who cares? I’d palm those off to the YouTube accounting department. I thought it’d be much easier to pull off than sitting for half an hour each post, editing spelling and punctuation. It’d just be a matter of doing a single 2 or 3 minute take of me sitting there chatting away, right?

So the main reason would be to save time, as well as possibly being more entertaining. Then I thought about it some more, to really make it entertaining it’d have to be a whole lot more than me just sitting there talking. It’d need some sort of editing and surely more than just a single take. I’d need special effects, big explosions, light sabres and I’d have to be yelling, screaming and smashing up my keyboard.

So that’s when I decided against it. I might try one and see how it goes though, see what the effort to entertainment ratio is.

The desire for good, non earbud headphones came to me when, after a very long stretch of having broken and unusable earbud headphones, I bought a new pair and put them in my ears. After a short time, my ears hurt a lot, taking them out was even more painful.

Maybe being one of those people that doesn’t need to be listening to mp3s every moment I’m not talking or listening to someone has made my ears soft and unable to take the torture that is wearing earbud headphones. There’s a few reasons I would like headphones now when I preivously did without them for a long time. I now catch the train and music can enhance that experience, I also prefer to listen to music while I am working, with a laptop now I find myself working alone at university, without the nice speaker system I have at home. So when you want headphones without torturing you ears, what are your options, this is what:

Earmuffs! While sitting in silence on the train this afternoon I weighed up the pros and cons of this headphone style.

Pros

• They don’t make your ears feel like they’re being stabbed by a knife
• They’re very comfortable
• The sound quality and bass is superb
• They cancel out all other noise
• The noise cancelling works both ways so you avoid annoying surrounding people with your horrible taste in music

Cons

• You look like a wanker
• They are difficult to transport (you can’t just wrap them around you mp3 player)
• You couldn’t wear them to the gym (unless you wanted the soft bits to soak up your sweat)
• They’re unbelievably expensive (the pair pictured are $600+)

There you have it. I’m really not sure whether they’d be worth it. While the pro list is quite good, the con list is quite a downer, especially that last point.

There was a brilliant question on my Macbook Returned post from a man named Harry D. So good I think that it warrants it’s own post. Here’s the question:

After using your macbook and macosx for one month and been through the way os and hardware works, taking into account your �shutdown adventure�, would you recommend macbook for win users that wish to take a look into the world of mac? (and probably never go back)

This was a question I was always planning on answering. I just wanted to get sufficient time under my belt using OS X and using the Macbook, getting a chance to perform all the usual tasks, before I made a judgement. It’s been well over a month now and I’ve had a chance to do nearly every day-to-day task and more unusual tasks I can think of. I’ve even been through it breaking down and had the experience of getting it repaired.

It’s strange to think that the thought of swtiching from Windows to OS X never really crossed my mind when I made the decision to buy a Macbook. The decision was made much more on the basis of needing a laptop and the Macbook was a very good looking laptop at a great price. Of course I’d used Macs before, while never owning one, and knew they were good computers. But price had always been the one (and only) downfall of the Mac, this changed with the Macbook. I still think every other Mac is over priced. Maybe it’s unfair to expect a much better system for the same price as a PC, but I do.

While the shutdown problem was extremely frustrating and shouldn’t have happened at all, a repair time of around 40 hours is not something I can complain about. A conversation with my friend Nathan really cleared the air:

Nathan: That’s an amazing repair time, I’m really impressed.
Me: It would have been even more amazing if it didn’t break at all.
Nathan: Nothing’s perfect, something is always going to break no matter what it is. It’s good to know that when it does, as it inevitably is going to do, you can get it fixed extremely quickly.

OS X. OS X is so great that I don’t know how I lived without it. Whenever I go back to Windows to test something in IE or whatever, doing things is really hard and laborous. It’s difficult to find where you should be, in OS X you’re where you’re looking for before you have to think about it. It’s the thousands of tiny details that make Mac OS just so much better. I could not live without expos� now. In fact that’s the whole feeling I get. Having to go back to Windows now would be upsetting.

I would much rather speak about how great the OS is over talking down Windows. The best way to sum it up is: Mac OS does the bad things you’ve come to accept in Windows the right way. That doesn’t sound entirely right but here’s an example. Lost a file in Windows? Open up the (hidden in a few menus) search box, fill out a couple of fields, click search, wait over 10 minutes for it to find a million system files. Lost a file in OS X? Hit command+space, start typing the name of the file, the file appears before you finish typing a whole word.

OS X just makes my life easier. I have pretty large file structures to oganise work files, this means that if the working directory in Illustrator is Web folder, it takes a lot of navigation to open a file in my Originals folder. Lucky there’s a search right there in the Open dialog, type a few characters and it’s there, maybe 10 seconds saved each time. When I do this hundreds of times each week, it saves a lot of time.

Something else that’s a brilliant timesaver is Quicksilver, while it’s not something already built into OS X, it’s a tribute to OS X that something like this can exist and work so well. Quicksilver allows complete and intuitive control of everything from your keyboard. It’s an inbetween between the finder and command line. I mainly use it as a launcher, say I want to open Camino, I press option+space, type c a m, press enter and Camino’s open in front of me. When you get used to it, it’s very very fast. You can also use it for things like controlling iTunes.

I haven’t spoken about the learnability of it all, how a lifetime Windows user would cope switching to OS X. I almost forgot to speak about it because I don’t see it as a hurdle, you will learn how to use a Mac quickly, no matter what, I guarantee it. Like I’ve said before, there’s a reason they use Macs in primary schools, it’s because a six year old would have no trouble at all. As for having to ‘unlearn’ Windows habits, that will happen but it’s more a case of everything Windows does badly, OS X does right. Using OS X is refreshing after a long period of Windows.

There are things such as not being able to make windows full screen that initially bothered me but I have now come to love. Going back to Windows now I dislike having windows at full screen, it feels like they’re taking over.

As for the harware. It’s just a nice piece of machinery. The profile of the Macbook is brilliantly thin and simplistic. The magnetic latch is great, the body feels solid and robust. I stand by this keyboard being the absolute best I have ever used, laptop or desktop. Built in iSight, brilliant, Front Row, brilliant. There is no way you could complain about this hardware, it’s perfect in my opinion and as for 13 inches, I wouldn’t have it any other way, any smaller would be too small, any bigger and it’d lose portability and battery life, it’s perfect, again.

So as for my recommendation. For your normal, everyday, email, web browsing, music listening user the Macbook is ideal and it will make your life as a computer user that much better. I hear a lot of everyday PC users saying ‘I hate computers’. All they’re doing is checking email, browsing the web, organising their music and photos, things like that shouldn’t be hard and they certainly shouldn’t make you hate computers. You won’t hate a Macbook or OS X.

Names are the most important thing for anything. A name can make or break a business or in this case, a piece of software. The majority of my Mum’s bookkeeping business has come from clients seeing and liking the name ‘Tidy Books’. Here’s my list of what I think are the best software names:

• Web Browsing - Internet Explorer
• Email - Mail (or Mail.app, whatever)
• Media - Media Player
• Bittorrent - Transmission
• P2P - Acquisition
• Blogging - Movable Type
• Online Photo Gallery - Gallery 2 (yes, better than Flickr)
• IRC - Colloquy
• Burning Tool - Toast
• Text Editior - Note Pad
• Archiving / Compression - Stuffit Expander
• FTP - Transmit

Do you disagree? Tell me.

I have to hand it to Next Byte, less than 48 hours after taking it in I got the message to tell me it was done and I could pick it up. Extremely impressive service. So it should be too, the computer is only a month old and random shutdowns is a serious problem.

It was the logic board, just as it says in was on Apple’s disscusion board. So a new logic board and that’s that, no more shutdowns and the Macbook is back to it’s brilliant best.

While it was gone I thought it’d be a really good oppurtunity to give the Ubuntu machine a bit of a go for normal day to day things. That was only after using Windows for a night. The massive thing I noticed was how crappy Outlook is. On a Mac, genuine Mac programs, like Mail.app tend to run very, very quickly. There is literally no gap between clicking Mail, Safari or any other OS X program in the dock and it opening. Where as Outlook, a Micrsoft program, is tediously slow, even on quite a fast computer.

Anyway, my one night with Ubuntu. It was on the slowest computer in the house, 500mhz, not even sure how much RAM, not much probably. While it wasn’t snappy, it wasn’t real slow at all. I got used to it, it’s much closer to Windows than what OS X is to Windows.

It was pretty funny, I wanted to install Flash Player so I downloaded it. Tried to run it, got a few options, just clicked ‘Run’ and it didn’t work. So I chose another option, view source code or something similar to that. It actually showed me the installers source code, if statements, while loops, the whole thing. Pretty snazzy. That didn’t help me install the program though, so I chose ‘Run in terminal’ and within about 10 seconds, it was done.

The software installer was pretty nice but I’m not sold on mouseover effects on files and folders.

It’s upsetting that not been able to find one person in an entire university IT, Multimedia and IT/Multimedia degree with any interest in or experience with web standards. I would just love to have someone to talk to about how wonderful full XML support in IE would be or about how htaccess really makes my life much more organised. I would just love to find someone willing to talk to me about text editors!

More specifically I wanted to meet someone that may inspire me or have the ambition to take on a project together. Like so many other friends have done at University before, how about Facebook, Google Or Microsoft? Bill Gates and Paul Allen actually dropped out of Harvard to continue Microsoft.

Um, what am I getting at? Oh yeah, we have a faculty forum, the School of ICT message board where there’s thousands of posts. So I think, “yeah, this is the perfect place to find out if there’s any passionate internet developers out there”. So I post a topic asking if anyone would be interested in a university web standards group and if that was a bit much just someone interested that I could chat with. I got plently of responses from people telling me that they kind of liked a course they did on web standards last semester. So yeah, I don’t think anyone really understood what I was asking there.

I’ve been really busy lately and it’s sad to see my obviously loyal readership drop to about half when I don’t write for a couple of days. Because of this, I’m considering opening a position for a part-time writer on fightingfriends. I know what you’re thinking, “You’ve done this before Jim, it didn’t work, it ended in broken friendships”. Yeah, I know, that’s why the rules have changed this time. The problem last time was that it was a partnership, 50/50, this time I’m in charge.

These are the qualities I’m looking for in a writer:

1. A sense of pride in what you do
2. Quality, jovial, conversation style writing
3. A well rounded point of view
4. Open mindedness
5. The ability to proof read, and
6. Perfect spelling and grammar
7. A great sense of good design

Now, I am going to be extremely picky and I don’t care if no one applies because the ability to actually apply is part of the screening process. You may wonder, “What would I get out of writing on fightingfriends?” And I would answer that with an international audience of over 100 people a day. As well as other amazing perks that come from being a good friend of Jim Whimpey and fightingfriends.

I know what your next question is going to be “How do I apply to be the recipient of this great honor?” Well, you send me an email. You can use my email address, or you can use the contact form. I’m not going to link either, you can find them if you take half a second to look. Applications failing to use a subject line of “Fightingfriends Application” (with the correct casing) will be immeadiately considered inappropriate.

So, what do you actually put in the email? Whatever you think might impress me, whatever might display the right qualities most effectively. This position only exists for the right person. It’s more me trying to find someone brilliant than fill an empty position.

Note: Writing is unpaid, sorry.

Stupid Macbook. Starting about two weeks ago it’s been shutting down at random. It really was at complete random for a little while and was very frustrating. Then, if it shut down at random once and I pressed the power button straight away, it would switch off again within a few seconds.

Calling Applecare didn’t do anything at all, they told me do reset the power managment unit, a pretty standard trouble shooting thing to do. That didn’t work. They told me to contact a Apple serviceman. I did, he was rude, I hung up on him.

At first I assumed it would be an overheating CPU, as shutting down without warning is what Intel processors do when they get too hot, but when it happens it’s actually much less hot to the touch than when I’ve touched it at other times. Then I assume it’s maybe a power problem, the battery cutting out for some reason so I run it directly off the power, no battery attached and it still happens.

So recently, after a random shutdown, I decide to hold the power button in, it doesn’t shut down while my finger is still on the power button, so I keep holding it. Then the LED on the front starts flashing and there’s a huge, loud beeeeeeeeeeeep. I immeadiatly think “fuck, I’ve just formatted the computer”. But nope, it boots up, I login and it stays on all day.

Now the problem has become a lot less random, if I leave the computer shut down or asleep for a long period of time, when I turn it on or wake it up, within five minutes it will shut down. That’s when I press the power button, hold it in, it beeps really loudly and it stays on, problem free for the rest of the day. Wierd, huh?

That’s why I’ve resisted taking it in and being computerless for a week, because, really it stays on all day. It’s still not good enough though, it’s only one month old and I treat it with the upmost care. Something else strange is that it only started after about two weeks use.

Many, many other people have been having this problem. Some have gotten complete new computers, some have gotten new logic boards. Others haven’t been able to make it randomly shut off in front of an Apple service person, which is really unlucky. Tomorrow I’m taking it in to get fixed and will be Macless for a about a week (but I bet it’ll be much longer). I’ll be back on the clumsy and slow Windows for a week.

It’s this problem that made me realise what I really value in a computer, reliability. I used to love this Macbook, it was the best, just everything about it was perfect but shutting down randomly and me losing work or not being able to keep it on at all completely overides everything I like. When looking for a computer I guess it’s a given that it’s able to stay on. No one ever asks ‘is this computer going to stay on when I’m using it?’

In conclusion, I’m not real impressed with Apple.

Well, well, well, it’s funny that I came accross Agency.com’s ‘viral’ video after first seeing the parody by Coudal Partners. The funniest thing about the Agency.com video is the CP parody, oh and a few of the comments on You Tube, I like this one:

he3ter (3 hours ago):
why do I hate advertising? oh yeah, that’s why.

Their video made me sick, I just can’t stand people like that. This is the back story (you could also get this by watching the video): Subway need some stuff done because their site sucks. Agency.com hears about it and decides that instead of pitching directly at Subway they’d make a video, put it out on the internet and because it’d just be sooo funny and so fresh and new and on the bleeding edge, Subway would find it and they’d get the job.

So they decided they were going to make a viral video, they actually decided that. You see, normally an advertising company will just make something really good and it spreads everywhere because it’s good, not because the advertising agency has really pushed it. Something becoming viral is usually just a by-product of something being really good. No one decides something is going to be ‘viral’, unless you’re an idiot, or a team of idiots, as the case is with Agency.com.
Being the super suave company that Agency.com is they decide they’re going to make the video viral and the video is of them actually making the video. One of the ideas that came up in their big brainstorming session was “it has to be funny”, I guess that requirement got taken out after further idea creation.

Agency.com really wanted to get inside the business. So they physically did that, a couple of their many directors got jobs at Subway, they went through the interview, training, everything. I don’t know about Subway or if the Agency.com directors planned on staying at Subway but I’d be pissed off about wasting a lot of time hiring and training people that were only going to be there a couple of days.

They even got an employee into the office to ask stupid questions like “why do you love working at Subway?” What shit. I bet no one loves working at Subway, they just do it for a little money, that’s all. And what’s going to be the result of that question anyway? How could his answer work it’s way into a website?

Coudal’s video is brilliant. Anything anyone does to trend away from this whole bullshit, getting inside facade is for the better of the human race. Do Agency.com even know how to make a website? Do they actually do anything? Or do they spend their days asking people on the street why they like Subway? I hope Subway didn’t fall for their bullshit and Agency.com missed the contract.

I went to Agency.com for the first time today, just to see what it was like. I clicked ‘Beliefs’. How their first belief was displayed contradicted their first belief, it was “We believe in making the complex simple”, you know what, how about “We believe in simplicity” or even better, “Simplicity” under the heading “Beliefs”. I didn’t read anymore, I left, to throw up.