Alexia Golez

Some folks need to watch more Superman IV. The BBC reports:

A single strand of hair from the late Elvis Presley is expected to fetch £600 at an auction in Gloucestershire.

The hair is mounted in the centre of a gold disc, which is inscribed with “The King’s Authentic Hair”. The item includes a certificate of authenticity.

If ever there was a warning signal:

It is being sold by a Gloucestershire music fan who bought the strand “on a whim” through a television auction.

This lunchtime, Microsoft showed off their new Windows Mobile 7 operating system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Font and UI-wise, its DNA is firmly in Camp Zune. I’d love to play with one to see if I will jump from iPhone. Oh yes.. More details at Windows Phone 7 Series site.

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft)

Quick reminder – the Dublin Tweasure hunt is happening tomorrow. It starts at the Spire at 2pm in Dublin city centre.

To participate you need a phone with Internet access and a camera and a Twitter account. Form a team with some mates and elect a captain to communicate back to the @dublintweasure account. The rest is up to you.

Follow the @dublintweasure account for all the details. The Twitter hashtag is #tweasurehunt. Have fun!

Photo owned by katerha (cc)

Many years ago, I was a printmaker. I’d spend time agonising over the weight, grain, weave and composition of paper. Reversing the design on tracing the design and staying true to the outline, hatching and colour-whitespace balence, all vital. The ritual of spread, mask and swipe was hypnotic. At the end of the day, you hoped that your end result somehow paid tribute to your sketches.

And lo, the variety of the pieces were a testament to the process and to their individuality. At the back of your mind, though, was the clear and present truth – that your work needed to be scarce and transigent.

Prints, whatever their process or medium are defined by their exclusivity. A print off a run of 10 is far more precious than one of equal quality from a run of 10,000. Buy a print from a printmaker and look close, you’ll notice that it’s numbered. That number a maker in time, space and effort. A footprint of scarcity.

Ask a printmaker what they do with print 11 in 10 print run, and they’ll tell you they hollow out the centre of the surface and produce a ruined print. The end result is numbered to prove that the run has hit its limit.

The other day, I was reminded of the hyperlocal newspaper project in the UK. The project took London boroughs and took data on local services and packaged them into a handy paper. Taking that information that lives in the abstract and transposing onto a format that New Media gurus say is dead – paper.

Paper has been our message boy for centuries. To copy what the UK project has done wouldn’t really push us into new territory. But it might kick off ideas about the sharing the lazy neighbour chats that would have sang over the wall of the back garden fifty years ago.

I wonder if we took are news, our art and everything else we churn out just like the printer limiting his run, applied a best before date to it before publishing it on paper, web  (a dissolving page after X hits) or whatever medium took our fancy – how this would change the consumption and dissemination of the news?

And just like spreading ink over each mask aims to repeat our initial design, but physical factors like pressure, temperature, materials and human factor make each one unique – what would automated faults, specialisation and just-in-time updates do for limited publications?

Since before Christmas, my iPhone has failed to sync photos to my Mac and this morning I fixed the issue. On attempting to sync my iPhone to iTunes, a dialog box would pop up complaining with the message:

iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone “Alexia’s iPhone” because the folder “iphone” cannot be found

The message was driving me batty and no amount of disabling and reenabling photo syncing seemed to work. This morning, though, I deleted the Photo Cache and it fixed the issue. This issue can repro on iPods too.

If you’re on a Mac like me then you can:

1. Make sure you disconnect your iPod/iPhone
2. Open the Pictures folder – /Pictures
3. Holding down Control, right-click on “iPhoto Library”. (I use right-click, can’t shake Windows habits!)
4. Select “Show Package Contents”
5. Delete the “iPod Photo Cache”
6. Connect your iPod/iPhone and sync like usual

New US spot for the Palm Pixi. It may be a Pre-lite with no wifi, but damn does the advert have a stomping mix of music, imagery, movement and editing.

Passion Pit’s Sleepyhead really works here. Nice work by Modernista!

This started as a Facebook status..

The whole Twitter thing has turned into a pile of BS. Cliquely-political-campfires, post-modern-intellectual-nihilism, buy-my-shitism, listen-to-my-podcastism, I-have-a-nice-new-blogposttastic, here’s-a-link-via-a-PR-firm-hello.

It’s not as simple as saying unfollow. Because it’s game. Some say it’s a performance art. There’s nothing I say on that outlet, that I wouldn’t say in real-life to someone.

I guess the real question is, would you address a group or a single person in real-life like you do on Twitter? Would open up your notebook and point repeatedly at the real-life equivalent of a blog post? Would you repeat things incessantly (in effect retweet) that you heard from people you want ingratiate yourself with?

Those College Humour videos of Twitter in Real Life are trite reflections on the medium, but would you act like you do on Twitter and would you tolerate it?