Eschewing the faddish, Scroll features in depth articles by deeply experienced practitioners in the fields of user experience design, web design, web development, information architecture, accessibility and more.
If you want to go beyond the hype and the hip, and to the heart and mind of the web, Scroll is your magazine.
Looks nice; pity their "Buy as a PDF" option doesn't work yet buy it here.
Seems to have gone okay.
I've got 65 tabs open in Firefox right now. Five years from now, that will seem like a light sprinkling of web dust. Right now, it's excessive. Time to dump some links:
(With all the improvements going into JavaScript and browsers, client-side development is a great and interesting place to be right now, and the future is looking even better.)
Note: this is one of my hot buttons. When it comes to gender equality, software development is struggling to come out of the dark ages. What's worse, though, is that with a few notable exceptions (see below) it isn't struggling very hard.
Phew.
It was one year ago yesterday—Thursday 2nd August 2007—that we arrived here in Oostzaan.
I had taken the overnight ferry from Newcastle to Ijmuiden with a van full of our stuff. I was due to meet our landlord and the rental agent at 11:00, but the boat was delayed, there were roadworks and detours around the ferry terminal, and I got lost twice on the way. It was about 11:40 by the time I got to the house, apologetic and stressed. We took the tour of the house, noted meter readings, and the landlord explained the workings of the gas fire and the digital TV receiver. They gave me the keys, and left.
Abi and the kids, who had taken the plane from Edinburgh to Amsterdam that morning, showed up a little later, around 12:30. We briefly revelled in the sheer size of the house, and then started unpacking quickly, because I had to be back on the road again later that afternoon to catch the overnight ferry back to the UK. I was returning the van in Edinburgh around mid-day on Friday, and then jumping on a plane back to Amsterdam that evening.
That final round-trip might sound like a rush, but for me it was the exact opposite. The months leading up to the move had been a frenzy of work, packing, worry, and pressure. But when I drove off again on that Thursday afternoon, we had made it. All of the timing had worked out. Even if the ferry was delayed, or if I somehow missed my flight on the Friday, it didn't matter, because I only had me to deal with—no posessions, no nappy panics, no travel sickness.
There was a cinema on board the ship, but the only films that interested me were ones I had seen before. There was no TV in the cabin. I didn't have a laptop. I was on a boat in the middle of the North Sea, with nowhere to go, and even if I had wanted to do something, I couldn't have.
I didn't fancy a meal in the ship's restaurant, so I bought myself some sweets and some drinks, and retreated to my cabin. I had a book to read: World War Z by Max Brooks. So I lay there on my bed, munched M&Ms, listened to my iPod, and just read. I grew sleepy half-way through, dozed for a while, woke up and read some more. Finished it, and lay for a while contemplating just how damn good it was.
That is my happiest memory of 2007. 2007 sucked massively.
We knew it would be tough, moving abroad. In 2006, we had reached a local maximum in our lives. On the one hand, a local maximum is great, because life is good. The flip side, however, is that almost every move you make leads away from that maximum, which is scary as hell.
But we have taken that hit now, and we're climbing the up slope again. At the end of 2007, we sold our house in Edinburgh. In January, we made the decision to buy a house here in Oostzaan, and we started viewing properties. In March we signed a deal, and in the last week of June we set foot in a house of our own again. We even have curtains!
Now, exactly one year on, the annual village events that seemed magical and strange to us then are coming around again: the cycle race, the music festival, the kermis (fair). We've made friends. Next week, Alex and Fiona will be starting school again, only this time both of them will be at the same school, and this time they both know enough Dutch to speak to the teachers and their classmates. No more day care, no more specialist language tuition. Somewhere in there, Abi and I celebrated our 15-year wedding anniversary. (Crystal. Not much fanfare.)
It was a bad year. One of the worst. No denying that. And the last few weeks, trying to get settled into the house and a new routine, have been pretty tough.
But on the good days, I can let myself hope that we're back on our way to awesome.
One and a half stars. More than just disappointing: actively bad.
I took two attempts to get through Rainbows End, and it took me a while after finishing it to figure out why I didn't like it: it doesn't deliver on its promises. In the prologue, European intelligence services have detected someone experimenting with a highly advanced and incredibly subtle form of mass mind-control. The opening chapter follows this up with a meeting between other intelligence agencies as they decide what action to take, and reveals some of the secrets behind the threat.
It's a great teaser opening...to a different book.
The rest of Rainbows End is a moderately interesting treatise on the future of education, learning, and knowledge management, fronted by an unlikeable protagonist, and ending with a fist-shaking "I would have got away with it if it hadn't been for you pesky kids" moment. The unlikeable protagonist mellows, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about love and understanding.
Not Vinge's finest hour.
Four stars. Recommended.
Although it is not immediately obvious, The Intruders is set in the same world as Marshall's Straw Men series—there's a tiny reference to the events at the end of Blood Of Angels, but it's easy to miss. The Straw Men don't play any part in this book; instead, there's an entirely different shadowy ancient organization pulling strings and manipulating events. Michael Marshall has always had a knack for evoking the unseen and the unsettling. If you like your thrillers with a dose of the supernatural thrown in, this will be up your street.
One of the things I liked most about The Intruders was the way Marshall ends the book: rather than leave you breathless with an explosive climax and an abrupt finale, he takes the time to explore the aftermath, and tie up some loose ends while unravelling certain others. There is something very finely judged about it, and it left me with a lasting sense of depth to the world just at the point when I was ready to leave it behind.
Legends of the Sun Pig is Martin Sutherland's little corner of the web. I'm a web developer operating out of an abandoned underground nuclear bunker somewhere in Northern Europe.
Although Jump in the pool is currently my favourite track from Friendly Fires' debut album, I'm not sure about the video. It's filmed almost entirely in slow-motion, and it seems to resist the up-tempo drums that form the bouncy heartbeat of the song. But the chorus is a lot more soft-flowing and dreamy than it first appears, and the languorous background harmonies do match the visuals. Anyway - watch it and see for yourself. If you like the song, you'll love the album. (Myspace: FriendlyFires)