Just like the toys and gadgets that litter our desks at the office, Spaced will gleefully litter your creative brain with clever and unhinged plots, quirky direction (by Edgar Wright), twisted acting, and an occasional zombie thrown in for good measure.

Margaret, now residing at the London office, turned the American creative bunker on to the show long before it was available in the states, and I couldn’t be more happy that I’ll not only be able to pick up a copy of the DVD later today (with a wry nod to the poster art of Star Wars on its cover), but I’ll also get to have a copy signed at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square by Simon, Jessica and Edgar – all who were in the East Village a few hours ago (that’s Sharon with Simon before the screening) – treating us all to three episodes on the big screen, and some interesting insight afterward.

Dave Fletcher is a self-admitted Spaced junkie and Founder / Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Google I/O was a two day developer gathering in San Francisco, 28–28 May 2008, which covered building the next generation of Web applications with Google and open technologies.

Jeffrey Barke, senior developer and information architect at theMechanism - New York, attended and will talk about what he learned there, specifically focusing on Gears, Google App Engine and the Google Ajax APIs. Prior to the meetup, you can read a bit about his experience here and watch some of the videos he's gathered at JeffreyBarke.net.

24 July 2008 . 7:00 pm
theMechanism
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

RSVP now!

Please contact us if you'd like to present at the September or October meetup.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. He prefers his dumplings with a side-effect of lycanthropy.

I was perplexed to see that they are using “RAG,” printed in their corporate typeface without further explanation.

My initial inclination was that they were promoting a clothing drive or other means of donating to the poor. Later I realized this wasn’t a GAP store at all, but a company that has been around longer than the GAP called RAG New York.

Regardless, this is a perplexing use of corporate branding of a clothing store without necessary explanation for a couple reasons:

1. considering the short attention span of the average out of town subway traveler in New York City;
2. considering that human fashion trends don’t yet dictate that we should be wearing rags.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. After posting this entry, he’s fairly certain that either GAP or RAG will not be knocking at theMechanism’s door any time in the near future.

Date: Thursday, 17 Jul 2008
Time: 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Location: Room 317, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner of West 4th)
Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the Mercer Street entrance. Must bring photo ID.

Agenda

• Meet new members. We expect and welcome new faces!
• By-laws reform. Needed but a drudge! How can we set about it?
• Planning future meetings and events. Good news is we have just received a sizable grant from ISOC-NY for our Fall program.
• ISXubuntu Linux project progress report. News from our trusty coders.
• OneWebDay planning progress report. Washington Square Sep 22 event taking shape
• Access advocacy program. Just an idea at present—the city needs some kind of central resource for those with connection difficulties.
• ICANN. Tom Lowenhaupt will report on his experiences at the ICANN Paris meet in June.
• Web standards. How can we make our own & OneWebDay sites W3C compliant?

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Version 2.6 "Tyner," named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Read about all the updates at the WordPress blog and download 2.6 here.

I stumbled on a 1991 interview with Rand conducted by Miggs B, producer/host of “Miggs B On TV,” a public access TV show in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 of the interview features an idiot known as “Art Mann,” – a bit of a ghoul – and obviously a bi-product of early 90’s baboonery. Rand doesn’t fully grasp the intended humor of a segment where Art claims that Westinghouse came to him to simplify their logo (one of Rand’s logo designs), which added uncomfortability to the hearty porridge of nonsense that was being served up to Rand in heaping spoonfuls.

Part 3

However out of date the interview segment is, it is full of great nuggets from one of the “design greats.” One of Rand’s quotes that particularly impressed me was, “A good logo is meaningless until it is used.” Good food for thought, indeed.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director at theMechanism, a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you—or don't you—support a given browser? When the answer was "No," user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5's release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, "Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?"

By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a "Graded Browser Support" strategy, unnecessary.

The two principal concepts of GBS are a broader and more reasonable definition of "support" and the notion of "grades" of support.

Definition of support

Support does not mean that everybody gets the same thing. Expecting two users using different browser software to have an identical experience fails to embrace or acknowledge the heterogeneous essence of the Web. In fact, requiring the same experience for all users creates a barrier to participation. Availability and accessibility of content should be our key priority.

Progressive enhancement is the method used to provide different experiences to different browsers: the rich, interactive experience is built on an accessible core.

Grades of support

Per Yahoo!:

C-grade

C-grade browsers are identified, incapable, antiquated and rare. QA tests a sampling of C-grade browsers, and bugs are addressed with high priority.

A-grade

A-grade browsers are identified, capable, modern and common. QA tests all A-grade browsers, and bugs are addressed with high priority.

X-grade

X-grade browsers are generally unknown, assumed to be capable, modern, and rare or fringe. QA does not test, and bugs are not opened against X-grade browsers.

The one difference between theMechanism and Yahoo! is that theMechanism does not test or open bugs against C-grade browsers.

Read the entire Graded Browser Support document at Yahoo!: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

The similarities in the graphics and toys from the two movies are striking.

Besides the obvious visual examples, there are notable common elements regarding the characters and actors. Although the characters are on opposite ends of the “good vs. evil” spectrum, they were both profoundly affected by losing someone they loved, resulting in the need to transform their appearances and seek revenge. The most startling similarity, of course, is the shocking deaths of both movies’ stars. Neither Brandon Lee nor Heath Ledger lived to see their films released. Both died tragically at age 28.

So what do you think? Did Batman’s marketing department intentionally mirror the graphics with the goal of subliminally tapping into the cult phenomenon of Brandon Lee’s Crow? Or is it just an eerie coincidence?

Sharon Terry is a marketing and public relations consultant at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa. She’s partial to Batman even though she married a joker.

Christy Gurga is junior designer and programmer at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.