Tim Keller

TIMoKELLER dot net has uncovered a rare species of Dinosaur known as Projectoris-Dataoris in Sci-lab Computer Room B on the Ground Floor of the Computer Science building at UCT.

It’s that time of year… The brightly coloured A3 posters have been pinned to every possible surface, the overly chipper candidates are striding around campus like the politicians they’re hoping to emulate. Yes, its UCT SRC Election time! Now, excuse me if I sound a bit pedantic but I cannot understand the point of it all.

80-90% of the Student Body have never, and probably will never, meet these bright-eyed candidates. How on earth can we as the “little fish” in this UCT-Shaped-Pond hope to elect the best people for the job?

The answer is we can’t, and as a result the University gets a group of people who are elected primarily based on how good their photograph is! These people go on to supposedly take the students’ concerns to the powers-that-be. How do they figure out what our concerns are?

The truth is that I don’t really care: I just go about my day to day life at UCT and generally forget that we even have an SRC. What I do care about are these stupid posters that are covering our normally beautiful campus. There is absolutely no way that their presence is going to make me vote (or not vote) for a particular candidate… especially because I’m faced with a wall of 2 of these photos!

I’m not sure I have words for how beautiful the above is. My goodness!

We’re on the island! It is just beautiful. Unfortunately the “free” internet leaves a bit to be desired. I’ve finally got some more photos up on Facebook and the links are included below.

Day 3 in KL
http://uctac.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33681&l=3a593&id=538980025

Day 4 and Day 5 in Perhentian Besar
http://uctac.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33485&l=93ccd&id=538980025

-Tim & Amy

Photos of Day 2 are up!
http://uctac.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32578&l=c199b&id=538980025 

I’ll be posting the story of the awful plane flight, awesome city, boiling and humid temperatures, and awe-inspiring shopping opportunities that was Day 1 a bit later… In the meantime, here are some photos of the day on Facebook Photos

http://uctac.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32357&l=0c7b4&id=538980025

Farewell! I’m off to Malaysia for two weeks. We fly at 11:30am tomorrow (friday) morning and will be back 12 July. Can’t wait… it been two years since my last real holiday, and Amy & My first trip together (albei it with parentals)

I’ll be posting as many photos as the Island Internet will allow.

Its a fairly old article, but I found it on IGN.com and thought it interesting how verbal Rand was on how Ubisoft ditched Cyan without even giving them a chance to success… or fail for that matter.

IGNPC:How have you handled the transition from the cancellation of the project to its resurrection under GameTap?

Rand Miller: We poured everything we had into Uru back in the day. We worked on Riven and consulted on other projects but our main focus was Uru. We were convinced that providing content on a regular basis would keep people coming back. It took a lot of time and money to make that happen. We didn’t have enough to do it by ourselves so we had to hook up with somebody bigger.

So we partnered. Whenever you partner, there are risks. Companies’ directions change. We ran up against one of those. At one point there was a great partnership and then just prior to our launch, directions changed and things fell apart. Failure doesn’t crush us. It’s not getting a chance to fail that demoralizes you. If you’ve got a great idea and you get it out there and it doesn’t fly, you gain some insight from that and can move on. It helps a lot of people including yourself. But when you don’t even get a chance to launch, that’s tough, especially when you’re so close. 40,000 people signed up for beta and we’re ready to go and we don’t take a dime from anyone. That just hurts.

It’s not what you know; it’s who you know. We had a relationship with Turner for years. Never did anything with them but there were people we knew there. Oddly enough, the failure of Uru and the launch of GameTap by Turner seemed like an interesting combination. Talks began. They started getting smaller games and began toying with the idea of doing something larger and more exclusive. We fit into that very nicely, filling holes in both the MMO category, the exclusive category and the episodic category. It seems like a perfect match.

[Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/747/747605p3.html]

Woohoo! Amy’s got a nice new, very fast, DSL connection at her house! I can now move in a fluid and very geekful manner between internet locations hehe! Terrible I know!

A lot of things in this world have become “cheapened” over the past hundred years, but the Olympics symbol has remained clear, elegant and professional despite changing and modernising theories of design.

You can imagine my shock when I found London’s absolutely disgusting attempt at a youth-relevant, internet-trendy, modern-day-ready logo for their 2012 games. Above is the logo which has been accepted and published on the official site at www.london2012.com.
Oh, and by the way, London paid the logo designer a cool £400 000 to create this monstrosity.

I know… I was surprised as well… because it looks as if it was drawn by the Head of the Olympics two-year-old daughter!

Flip London, you can do better than this.