I was walking to work this morning and spotted a poster on the back of a Glasgow bus.   What caught my eye is that it had the Twitter.com bird on it.   I thought “Twitter… advertising in Glasgow… on a bus?  Pretty cool!”.   Then I noticed the ad was for something completely different — the Greater Glasgow anti-smoking campaign.  I’ve overlaid the two illustrations for your amusement…

Here are links to the originals:

Today sees the launch of s1’s first five ‘local’ sites, serving individual communities in Scotland. 

We hope to offer these sites to many more communities in future, but for now we’re focussing our attention on Bo’ness, Craigmillar, Culross, Galashiels and Millport. 

We hope the sites will become a place for people to discuss issues important to them, to share their news, to upload their photos and video clips.  The sites are based on an innovative new platform, designed and built by our in-house team, which allows all types of content, whether text, photos, video or graphical ‘noticeboard’ items to be moderated before publication.  We’ll be extending the platform in future to bring new features, both planned and in response to user feedback.

I’ve been working on the concept since March, so it’s great to reach this point and be able to talk about what I’ve been working on all this time.  Take a look, and let me know what you think of them.

The Simpsons Movie website allows you to make your own Simpsons character.  Here’s my attempt at me…

You can make your own here.  A couple more of my attempts are below the jump… (more…)

I recently received an email from John Marshall pointing out that everyone was reporting sequential write performance on my ReadyBoost compatibility chart, whilst the official requirements were for random write performance.

I couldn’t get to the bottom of it on the web, so I emailed Matt Ayers at Microsoft, the Program Manager who’s in charge of the ReadyBoost feature.  He explained that early beta versions of Vista measured sequential writes, but that the release version measures random writes.  Everything has been updated in the release version apart from the EventLog entry. 

Matt has filed a bug, so expect that to be fixed in future updates.  Thanks for pointing that out John!

Sony published their follow up to the San Francisco ‘Balls’ ad today.  Filmed in Glasgow, the new ad features a tower block getting blasted with coloured paint.  It’ll be shown on TV tonight, but you can see it online now at: http://www.bravia-advert.com/paint/thead/

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with the end result.  When they were filming it all looked quite impressive, but it was a dull grey day and didn’t have anything like the intensity of the SF balls ad.  I thought they might’ve had a plan to sort that out in post production, but evidently they didn’t.  It was a bit of a shame really - we had a summer of brilliant blue skies and sunshine in Glasgow and they just happened to film on some of the dullest afternoons of the year.

I was there at the original filming of the ad back in July - here are some of my pics from the day…

All of my photos from the filming are online at high res here