planner meeting

Apparently, out small APG Romania is starting to have a legal shape as well. I guess this means we'll gather every once in a while to discuss "serious" stuff like how to turn this into something meaningful and helpful and worthwhile. However, this seems to be fairly impossible every two weeks.

So, in the mean time, the Amsterdam series of planner meetings goes on with a brand new edition tonight, at 8 pm :). In case there are people still interested :).

if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left", said Einstein

The feeling of getting back in mental shape is a very pleasant feeling - just like waking up from a very long, disturbing and torturing bad dream and realising that not everything is lost.

Anyway, i spent some time today reading various research studies, some of which revealed some really interesting or thought-provoking points (such as that search engines dominate modern epistemology, and that we suck at judging the quantity of food we're eating, because we're regularly tricked by size illusions).

One of the most interesting i've read, however, is related to mobile phones and a weird effect that the latter might actually have. I mean everybody keeps on having endless discussions with no clear result about mobile phones affecting people's health one way or another. But while most such human effect-related research remains inconclusive, another very interesting (movie-like) possibility is beginning to be taken into account: mobile phones might have something to do with the mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees. The Independent article talks about the results of a small study carried out in Landau University, which shows that "bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby". These conclusions have also been supported by other researchers who think that "radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops".

i'm getting boring

what my weekend contained:

• more cases in the "The Mummy at the Dining Room Table" collection
• Last Tango in Paris (or how Italian cinema can sometimes ruin my appetite for French movies)
• Hitchcock - the book, The Wrong Man, The 39 Steps
• more on the 39 steps, by reading John Buchan' book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, available at Project Gutenberg (spy stories soooooo rule).
• physics, as brilliantly simplified and explained by Richard Feynman, in The Feynman Lectures on Physics (i fear physics is finally starting to make some sense in my small brain)
• Ikea food
• lots of Bernard Herrmann (i've always been crazy about The Wrong Man score), and lots of Noir Desir (i think i'm finnaly starting to listen to music the way i used to)
• lots of thinking about old times.
• and i nearly forgot - Howard Hawks' screwball comedy His Girl Friday, which i've watched on Friday. And speaking of Cary Grant, it was also nice catching parts of The Philadelphia Story on TCM on Saturday (although i've watched that movie quite some times before), and it was even nicer to watch the Katharine Hepburn documentary which followed (she looked so vivid, i even had to double-check that she had died in the mean time :) )

All this cause i've been really sick, and thus couldn't join my friends in Sibiu Jazz fest. But next week i'm off to Bran again. Unless i break something until then.

we introduce....

McCann Creative Mentorship is a program i'm very excited about. It's an open-source education experiment which invites all aspiring creatives to solve briefs given by our creative directors, get feedback, improve their skills, and make the most of their chance to prove that they belong in a creative department. The website is due May 20th, and until then we launched a blog which will have all sorts of tips and tricks, inside details, valuable resources, and hopefully some surprises. And yes, it is for real.

Goodbye, master !

fooling around

I have been going number and number in the last couple of weeks. Until i figure out a solution to escape this horrid, mental-blocking mood, i felt like filling my time with continuous reading, movie-watching and attending dance shows. And not only. I've also bought a bagpipe (a Romanian beginner's bagpipe, obviously) and have been trying to learn playing it ever since. Of course, actually learning how to play will take me forever, but that's irrelevant :). What i've discovered browsing the net about bagpipes, however, is Expert Village - World's Largest How To Video Site. And while i'm sure everybody knows about the site already, it was really funny and fascinating for me to browse dozens of funny video tutorials from passionate people. This actually gives you a nice, cosy feeling, that there's nothing on this world you couldn't learn how to do yourself.

Click here for more on "Learn How to Play the Bagpipes : Beginner Lessons"

bran, predelut, dambovicioara

I eventually had the break that i've been craving for for quite some time now. And instead of going to Paltinis, as i initially intended to, i accidentally ended up in Bran. The funny thing is that i thought i hated Bran, cause i felt like i knew it by heart, like it was a very visitor-crowded place and so on, but discovered something totally different from what i was expecting.

I stayed in a beautiful house far away from the madding center of Bran, in a small village called Predelut. The room had this splendid view of snowy mountains, combined with impecably green fields. I loved the air and the fresh smell of the place, the amazing silence, as well as relaxing nature sounds. I loved the farm animals playing freely all day long. And i loved to enjoy small details of nature, stare at these details for hours and focus on their simplicity and beauty. I only ate fresh traditional food and i walked for hours and hours (i also went to Piatra Craiului). It's amazing how alive i feel in such instances, how much i believe in living and in doing meaningful things, things that actually make a difference. Coming back to Bucharest was even more depressing than it usually is.

planning department's door sign

pic from here.

another quote

I'm in the slightly alarming position of hosting weekly so-called "creative meetings" for my colleagues at Oricum (as part of the brand new organization that we've more or less started to implement). Since this position is more than challenging, i've been spending some time lately thinking about how to develop the meetings. And then i came across this, and realised that it might actually be far easier than i anticipated :).

pic from here.

quote

pic from here.

snapshot

is shiny, shiny actually a trap ?

i am a huge fan of Sharon Sarmiento's blog, because it's not only one of the most inspirational blogs i know, but also one of those blogs that really brighten your day, no matter how badly you thought things were going.

One of her latest posts advises us to avoid the "shiny, shiny trap" when it comes to productivity tools and not lie to ourselves that the prettiness of our organizational tools is going to make us more productive. But the truth is that i have been thinking about this and i tend to disagree, at least as far as i am concerned.

Both my office desk and my home desk are usually full of colourful, maybe silly stuff and experience tells me that they're not there just to make sure that my sight is happy, but they also help me get more ideas. I choose most of them for their story, or for their potential of becoming inspiration enhancers.

For example, i have a National Geographic pencil holder, because i read and watch very many things developed by National Geographic. And it happened many times, while thinking about work projects, to get a glimpse of the small giraffe pencil holder and remember a very interesting fact i had previously came across on NG, and twist and turn it into an idea for the precise work project. It fairly works like the famous Proust cake. And so does my current Justice League pencilbox, also enhanced with astronomy data for kids.

Then, I always choose my notebooks, not only according to cuteness, but also according to what they stand for, and the story behind them. Just for fun, i might say that whoever read books such as Paul Auster's Oracle Night knows that a lot of intricate ideas can come from the story of a particular notebook. I currently write in a Kukuxumusu notebook. Kukuxumusu is a very cool company from Spain, which specialises in a particular type of product and shirts design, and whose name means "flea's kiss" in Basque. The company was actually started by three friends who made t-shirts as souvenirs of the bull-running and bull fights at Pamplona's San Fermín festival of 1989. It further grew sticking to a very attracting and funny design. If i buy a pencil with random stickers/images on it, i try to figure out the story linking the images, and that's a creative exercise and so on. I have a Perfect Cows desk wardrobe, and the cows' faces are so cute, that they inevitably make me smile, and i am obviously more productive when confronted with good mood inducers. And the list could go on with many other examples, but i think you got the picture.

What i'm trying to say is that inspirational objects around me actually make a difference when it comes to my productivity, and while i cannot extend this as a fact to the others, i sure think that being surrounded by such stimuli will help one's creativity in ways in which simple, common blank stationery and accessories will not. In the same way in which the smallest detail or idea can sometimes make the biggest difference.

pic from here.

the first two weeks

the first two weeks in a new place are simply horrible for me. i wake up full of life, and i whistle happily on my way to work, cause i have that feeling of fresh challenge. but as soon as i get there, i get a sort of an "adapting fobia" - i'm almost terrified of opening my mouth in public, i feel numb and stupid, i make silly mistakes that make me hate myself, and, on the overall, i look at everything with awe, while i feel good for nothing. all i want is for the dreaful first two weeks to pass. If i had a little bit more talent, i'd probably draw what's going on, just like Gwen brilliantly does. But when i get home and think about the day, what turns up on my sketch notebook is more like in a Czech animation that i totally love - Maria Prochazkova's „Oreion“, where a little girl is trapped in bed, cause she's sick, and she looks at the world in a cute manner and develops a collage-diary. And the only constant thought that i get while playing with images and sticking them in notebooks is that i should simply blog more.

Image taken from this great site, found via Gavin.

design conspiracy podcast

Doercast episode 6 out now with Ben and Kingsley about whom i've spoken a lot recently. An enticing talk about design in general and The Design Conspiracy in particular. I hope you enjoy it !

old times

I've always been fascinated by history (especially ancient history), but, unfortunately, when highschool ended, for one reason or another, i kind of stopped reading history books or watching too many history documentaries. Of course, watching movies took me to historical references more than once, and so did plenty of articles related to politics or anthropology. It's just that i didn't feel like i had a coherent contact with the subject anymore, i felt like i was gathering more random information than gaining actual knowledge and i forgot significant dates and details, and it was overall frustrating to feel like i'm losing touch with something i love so much.

That was until recently, when i came across a Pierre Boulle book called "L'archéologue et le mystère de Nefertiti" and i started reading it. Being pure fiction, the book made me angry enough at myself to realise that it would have been much more indicated to read a Zahi Hawass book on the matter instead, just as it would be much more appropriate to start reading serious history books like i used to. Said and done. And i'm so happy cause all the passion came back. I'm currently reading a National Geographic book called "Visual History of the World", which is a very good guideline, a perfect reminder and refresher of previuos knowledge, as well as a very enticing invitation to find out more and more interesting aspects of each period. Discovery Civilization also provides some nice daily insight, especially due to the links between modern methods and old mysteries. And there are also history and archaeology blogs, something i've been only recently emerging into.

Well, and since everybody says i cannot say anything without referring to some animations as well, here's one i particularly liked, because it gives life to the Bayeux Tapestry (via bread and circuses):