Vostok Theme – Black

If you do the rounds of cities in the UK who struggle to compete with London as a magnet for “creatives”, they’ll all have a creative hub, space or whatever. I remain unconvinced that the Eames furniture, lime green carpets and post-it friendly walls with clever graphics achieve that. To me, it’s like suggesting creative people like living in an IKEA catalogue.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on innovation hubs (and coffee)

There is beauty in everything, even in the most awful catastrophes. You just have to know the right angle to look from:

Timelapse – Los Angeles Wildfire from Dan Blank on Vimeo.

(vía Feroxlogos)

Last week we made a cosmodrinks edition of our weekly lunch with Stuart Robinson, aka sturob, who was visiting from London. Stu is a very talented freelance programmer/interaction designer who develops iPhone applications in his free time. The width and breadth of Stu’s knowledge in both design and programming fields impressed us, and we’re sure the music app that Stu is developing for the iPhone will rock. Some of the stuff we talked about:

• Sam and Stu shared their impressions on programming for the iPhone: it’s hard, unfamiliar, and sometimes you hit against walls that seem impossible to overcome, but eventually you find your way around. It’s an interesting learning experience.
• Train ticket web interfaces suck here and in the UK too. We’re wondering if it is a world wide phenomenon. Solution: hire good designers, or develop an open API.
• Stu posed an interesting dilemma: if you had to choose between saying no to features and saying no to clients, which one would you choose?
• Another thought provoking question by Stu: if design makes things simple, will we come to an age where things just can’t be made any simpler?.

Vostok is also eternally indebted with Stu for introducing our own Sam Lown into the Ruby on Rails world a couple of years ago. The rest of the team is mostly back-end ignorant agnostic, but we sure are glad Sam can bang out impressive stuff in record time.

This week’s lunch was with JJ of Tecnilógica. JJ broke the geekiest t-shirt ever seen in a Cosmomeal record (no small feat) with an xkcd t-shirt about the Cosmic Background Explorer.

But don’t let the geekiness deceive you: when not whiplashing servers, daemons, and minions; JJ navigates death-defying rallies in a 1982 Porsche 911 SC Targa. He also has an incisive sense of humor, saying that we all have faults when he found out I’m vegetarian. We also suspect he eats rocks and shits gunpowder, but this is not confirmed (yet).

Being such a badass and all, we decided to organize together next year’s Yuri’s Night, an annual worldwide party celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. Music, rockets and gunpowder, a winning combination.

There was a time when this disk was something important and had to be kept in a safe place.

(seen near the Vostok office)

This is sooo colorful beautiful:

Felicidades a la gente de vi.vu por la reciente apertura de su web. Para quienes no lo conozcan, vi.vu es una comunidad en la que compartir información sanitaria, de doctores y esas cosas tan poco divertidas pero tan importantes.

Soy un empresario. Es decir, realizo operaciones empresariales. Esta actividad la desarrollo sobre todo con la ayuda de mi secretaria, que se encarga de las relaciones comerciales. Ella lleva la cuenta de mis plazos, contesta las llamadas telefónicas y se encarga del correo. Sus instrumentos de trabajo son el teléfono, la calculadora y los objetos de escritorio. Incluso necesito tenerla a la vista. Si oigo que de nuevo un periodista quiere una entrevista o alguien quiere hacer una película o me pide una conferencia, en todos los casos para alimentar a una empresa de comunicaciones estúpida, puede bastar un gesto par indicarle la respuesta exacta. También podría suceder que Tom Wolfe deseara visitarme. 

Otl Aicher en “Mi lugar de trabajo aún no existe”

Buenos consejos sobre la , dados por alguien que sabe de lo que habla.