Ever needed answers and inspiration of what to do for lunch near Team Rubber’s HQ on King St? There’ll be no unanswered questions floating round at 1:10pm any longer, the results are in:
Yup, so if you do see a poor soul trudging towards Sainsbury’s for a “free packet of crisps” with their “£2.85″ sandwich, please do send them to this post.
Lunchometer was made by our lovely local friends at Thought Den who will also let you create your own.
A very cool idea from local agency Pixillion led to them making the lovely site The Work Cycle. They have some pretty big agencies on there and some really nice photos of pretty bikes in proper use. An early morning start with Matt, Corwin, Ben, Tom and Ally polished our submission which today has gone into the site. Lovely.
A topical HTKB, with today’s launch of the latest Modern Warfare game.
When Ally announced that everyone should go to drawastickman.com this morning.. and we all did (even if Tiffany did get a bit told off for it!) it reminded me of an awesome animation I stumbled across AGES ago and had pretty much forgotten about… thought it would be nice to share 
Even if everyone else in the office has already seen it as usual!
So here is the Draw a stick man site – the worse your drawing skills, the better it is…
And here is the video I was chatting about, it’s called Animator Vs Animation by Alan Becker… well worth a watch in my opinion!
At the time I was tearing my hair out over my final year flash project that I was having some ‘issues’ with and praying that Google would have all the answers (as usual). When I came across this video, it was obvious this did not hold the answers to all my problems or even come anywhere close to solving anything really… but it did put a massive smile on my face. Seeing as stress and panic formed the foundations of my final year project experience, actually feeling happy to see something flash related made a very nice change!
To celebrate ten years of Team Rubber this weekend we are off to a nearby site to burn some rubber but where will it be held exactly? Not sure Beccy knows yet that’s for sure…..
So I went on to Google just now to look for an image, and I discovered that they now let you drag and drop images into the image search bar!
Now this is impressive. It’s like TinEye + DropBox + Googles own similar images functionality.
So I played around for a bit, and it turns out it’s even smarter than that! I dragged an image of me playing a gig into the search box, and it identified my bass!
Google scares me sometimes.
WordPress 3.1 has been released and is named Reinhardt after legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Some of the notable new features include:
This update certainly moves WordPress on from a simple blogging engine to a fully fledged CMS. Go download the latest update NOW! In honour of the release here’s Django at his best:
Now competitive blogging is not really something I have encountered before, until I saw a report compiled by the Ministry of Insights entitled ‘Who are the Best Agency Bloggers in Bristol – 2010?’.
Our Team Rubber blog has been ranked #1 out of 152 of the Bristol Media companies included! Now we need to note that this is only part one of the report and is the quantity based section (we had 109 posts), but it’s still good to win when you didn’t know you were competing!
This started a little inter-agency rivalry with Gez (from Delib) noticing that they had posted 140 times in 2010, so could actually have beaten Team Rubber. Over at the Viral Ad Network we managed a lowly 101 posts, and Rubber Republic is yet to comment 
Personally I find that regular blogging is a tough task to maintain – client work always seems to get in the way! But I do think its worth trying to be disciplined. At VAN we find that blogging, alongside other social outreach, is a great way of generating new business and attracting relevant people to our site.
I’ll leave it at that before I type myself into a New Years Resolution!
This morning we had a room full of multi-talented front-end developers, back-end developers, designers, journalists, bloggers, tweeters and publishers, all ready to share their ideas and get making…..
So why have a Hack Day?
“Because it’s fun to make stuff, good to work with the council and talk, tweet and blog about it”. Mr Andy P.
Hack day can explore opening up data the council has and doing more with it, Hack Day is about using data in ways that can benefit people in the city. Bristol City Council.
There has been no shortage of great ideas so far today around different data sets and the creative ways to utilize and represent information.
Teams have been formed and are currently scattered around Colston Hall to work on and develop ideas and digital tools.
Some of the main ideas so far include:
Doing more with the ‘Your Freedom’ Dialogue data the government has now released
Ideas include making the data simpler to understand, running an analysis to discover the most discussed ideas and even condensing these down into poetry.
Mapping out the creative hot spots in Bristol
Looking at Bristol City Council environmental data on shopping trolleys being dumped in rivers and water quality data
Or even a rather unique idea which combines the two, such as creating a mobile game involving getting a shopping trolley home without it going into the river (including info on water quality of course!).
Using Bristol bus data and developing a web app that draws upon live Bristol Bus information
This would allow users to discover where the nearest bus is and when it’s due. Ideas have even been discussed about creating a ‘hyper-local’ bus route newspaper.
We will re-gather at 5 to review the demo’s and prototypes of all the ideas being discussed. Exciting stuff!
We’re here in the Colston Hall
all day, so feel free to drop by and see what’s going on.
If not, then we’re tweeting under #bristolhackday, and will be blogging more too…
Last night Alan and I went to see Tim Minchin (comedian) and DC Turner (animator and director) talk about their 9 minute animated film created to accompany Tim’s well known beat poem called ‘Storm’. Minchin explained that his poem was based on a real life dinner party he attended where he sat through a conversation covering various ‘alternative’ views with an irritating woman. While he did not verbally express his frustrations out loud during the night he did inevitably have much to say; and so ‘Storm’ was born. He had found himself ranting so much about subjects such as homeopathy and physics, that ‘Storm’ was his way of having one last big vent.
Turner then continued by showing the audience 5 clips that inspired the end result of his beloved hard work, including South Park, Power Puff Girls and Ren and Stimpy’s ‘Powered Toast Man’. He also expressed the overwhelming response he received from fellow animators offering their help on the project for nothing in return, showing how people will create for the sake of producing excellent work.
We then got to be the first audience to see the first ever official festival screening on the short animated film and it did not disappoint.
Encounters Short Film Festival 2010
Tim Minchin and DC Turner @ The Arnolfini for Encounters Short Film Festival
