Above is one of my favourite album covers, the space station from ELO’s Out of the Blue. It was painted by Shusei Nagaoka.

James White seems to agree

Left to right: The standard western cover, the limited edition western cover and the standard Japanese cover.

They are all pretty  good. Sheperd in first two is a bit butterfaced and indistinct. However the first is much more space opera like and evokes a bit of Star Wars. The special edition, looks a bit more hacked together, like its made from bits of the first and the mono-orange tone is a bit bland. The Japanese cover is a much cleaner design and evokes more of an alien style hard hitting form of sci-fi. I think I prefer the first one on balance, but Saren does look lost and cramped up there, like he is peaking over the top in the cheap seats. The last is next best, OMHO, and is far more striking from a distance. The middle is just meh and looks a tad unprofessional compared to the others, it does at least try.

Car Front

I purchased my Sister’s old Mazda 323. It is a nice car, though finding an unschuffed panel is pretty hard I wanted to do it up a bit, but none of the mechanically minded friends seem to think it is worth doing. Shame as tidied up they are nice looking cars. It is good to drive, better still when I swap the tyres around. The fronts are a bad mix of non-brands and treads, the backs are nice Pirelli P6000s. Joined the 323F forums they seem like a nice lot. Also mailed off my old Puma mats to a deserving member of the Puma Project forums.

Me

My boss of 10 years left recently, it’s a real shame. I’ll miss David, but I am sure I will get on just fine with my new one. I tend not to talk work here as I keep my client’s and company’s info in confidence.

Computing

Windows 7 still rocks and I think it is the best Windows yet or at least since the XP SP2 release. Vista bashing still gets on my nerves, but as crappy security software falls by the wayside I hope 7 get the chance Vista didn’t.

Someone hit the nail on the head with the iPhone, I never quite understood why I didn’t want a StarTrek:NG level device and it all comes down to its absolute ‘I know better than you’ text prediction. This why I can type pretty much easier on my old keypad SE K800i T9 than it’s virtual keyboard. It’s all about prediction, thats why I stuck with SE over Nokia and Windows Mobile. In SE it assumes you are correct and helpfully suggests a few options. In iPhone it auto corrects you with one option which you can turn it off to get what you typed. Everything else is ok or learnable.

Games

Looking forward to a few games, really enjoyed Mass Effect on my mate’s 360. Frankly I can see myself buying one as a Mass Effect player. he he

Tunes

La Roux, nice music, but her voice is a bit weak. I Come To Shanghai, good music, but often depressing, cheer up dudes. Trance Around The World with Above and Beyond, free trance music, ta chaps.

Procrastination

A+! I have failed to: Buy a bike, work on the house, ask anyone on a date, buy a laptop.

Weddings

Congrats to: Dave & Rosie, Jo & Chris, Neil & Gwen and David & Lorna. Woot!

John Gilmour

An awesome friend and now officially an awesome designer, congrats on the Degree Dude!

This is terrible www.smileysid.co.uk, we just got one in Dalgety Bay. What next road signs in Comic Sans? 50 Foot “little person onboard” signs next to schools?

This country is hoofed.

I recently purchased an Aiwa AM-NX9 from Ebay. It’s a Net MiniDisc from the brief period that Aiwa was branch of Sony before being shut down.

Sony had hoped that AIWA could become their new youth orientated brand to combat Apple and its own fading brand name. Sony at this time was serious limited by its music and movie departments demands. They couldn’t easily get MP3 support for MiniDisc let alone launch their own. Aiwa seemed to be a nice backdoor around this. So by launching some re-branded Sony kit with some funky designs they could get the ball rolling. Unfortunately AIWA was much more of an budget and older person’s brand far from the young and luxurious Apple brand they were hoping to compete with. For example my parents own a lovely dark green AIWA Mini HiFi the same colour as the oldies’ favourite the Nissan Micra.

It is a shame as I think the styling on the AIWA youth MDs were very nice. I purchased the mass market AM-NX9, although in nice Black and Red combo instead of the more common Silver and Green. Rarer models are even more impressive looking like the AM-NX1. The NX9 is a very feature starved unit, next to the MZ-N710 it looks particularly weak and no amount of styling can hide this. It is a shame that Sony didn’t keep up a AIWA or another youth brand as some of their later designs look incredibly bland and stodgy being neither the Minimalistic Apple or Maximalistic AIWA.

I recently used a Mac for testing purposes and found the multi platform browsers to be seriously wanting. After a bit of testing I decided that I liked Shiira, it is the nearest thing to Opera or Maxthon I could find that ran like a real Mac app. Safari is too light for me and few people will pay for Omniweb. Shiira uses the same webkit engine as Safari, but with a vastly better interface.

IE6 or below is not supported by this website, MS promised PNG Alpha support for years and only IE7 now supports it so if you see my banner with a gray background you have a duff browser.