Now that the clocks are back and the evenings are drawing in, my habitual evening pass-time of watching trains brush past my window is getting more difficult. So, after some head-scratching, I’ve come up with a few ways of keeping myself busy until it’s a reasonable time for me to get excited about Christmas again.

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Khoi Vinh nails it:

I recently came to this conclusion: as an interaction designer, if I’m not actively using social networks, then I’m just not doing my job. It’s obvious to say, but social media is the evolving, messy, inexorable and probably bright future of this business. Its all-comers approach to the creation of content and value is exactly in line with my philosophy for how design needs to change in order to matter in the coming decades. Still, that inevitability hasn’t stopped me from more or less ignoring these networks for too long

I’m not normally a fan of 3D interfaces, but this I like. If it would just broaden out from MSNBC feeds to something I’d actually want to read, I could look at it forever.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this news before:

Putting the clocks back on Sunday morning will cause hundreds of road crashes during the darker evening peak and result in a surge in electricity consumption, a study has found.

Oh, that’s right. There was a survey on this last year. I’m changing professions; there’s clearly a lot of cash to throw at these survey things.

Anyone who’s ever worked on anything involving other people will have experienced the demon named Changing Requirements. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll be on first name terms. Maybe your kids play together on the weekends.

At some point in the distant past, I started wondering if the whole business wasn’t just too easy. Your wife sees a wonderful new cupholder design. You don’t even have a cupholder in your project. HyperGlobalMegaCorp has buckets of cash to throw at this, and it’s your job to disrupt the market, right? So in the end, you add your cupholder, and maybe a toaster and a kettle by the time you’re done, and HyperGlobalMegaCorp foots the bill. There’s no risk to you in throwing all that stuff in there. There’s no pain.

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It’s good to see that, even in the face of global financial collapse, looming US elections, and increasingly aggressive behaviour from Russia, there’s a place for news like this:

More than one in four commuters has bacteria which come from faeces on their hands, an investigation finds.

It’s all the more comforting because I’m not in the country right now.

I have to admit that I’m not wowed by the new G1. In a world where the iPhone has hoisted aesthetic expectations to another level, this phone’s appearance flops. Hard.

To my mind, a big factor in its ass-ugliness is the slide-out keyboard. This is a touch-screen phone. As the iPhone and a whole range of Samsung touch-screens have shown, virtual keyboards make fine replacements for their physical counterparts. Aside from its nannying prevention of some particularly ripe cursing aside, I’ve never had any major problems getting through an SMS or email with my iPhone.

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… to my girlfriend who is, round about now, being sworn in as a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Well done, Dr Trinity Fellow Beci Carver.

I say awesome too much. I don’t care. This is awesome. If there’s a wedding in your future, read this and marvel.

Lovers of Grid, rejoice! If only I’d known about this when I started working on this redesign.