While budding actors dream of seeing their name in lights, would-be developers envisage their name on the pages of .NET magazine. So it was with a big smile that I sat down to write a tutorial for the latest edition of the industry-leading publication. My piece, entitled Infinite Scroll and Filtering, shows readers how to combine both features while displaying content in a masonry layout. The solution makes use of two excellent jQuery plugins: Infinite Scroll, written by Paul Irish; and Metafizzy’s Isotope, written by Twitter’s Dave DeSandro. Dave kindly peer-reviewed my tutorial, which was inspired by our work on relentlessenergy.com.

Relentless Energy Drink is an extreme sports-loving, music-blaring, No Half Measures can of action fizz. When Zone’s head of design, Rich Dean, was given the task of reskinning the brand’s website, he wanted to reflect this philosophy online. The resulting design promised a website that would push the boundaries of front-end technologies. It features a homepage that displays the website’s vast array of categorised articles in a masonry layout, with in-page filtering by category and infinite scroll in place of pagination. To our knowledge, these three elements have not been successfully combined before.

We developed a solution using the two aforementioned plugins in combination with some custom javascript code to perform the filtering. We also implemented a full-screen background video using YouTube’s Chromeless player and we used regular expressions to split article content (entered through the CMS via a single Wysiwyg editor) into ‘blocks’ to continue the masonry theme throughout the site.

The technical challenge was immense, but the reward was a website that is as exciting and adventurous as the brand itself.

As a child I had several female icons, Kylie Minogue for one (although that was mostly just because I had a massive crush on Jason Donovan), however there was one woman who topped them all and that woman was Michelle Pfeifer, specifically Michelle Pfeifer as Stephanie Zinone in the 1982 classic, Grease 2.  I mean, just LOOK AT HER:

Ain’t she the coolest thing you ever seen?

As I woke up this morning I found myself singing Cool Rider (see below), as I do once in a while.  It got me thinking about something that confused me as a child, something that I’ve never resolved since and I was hoping that you, the internet, might be able to help me.

Now just in case you’ve been living in the dark ages, let me bring you up to speed with the plot. English exchange student Michael Carrington starts at Pink Lady Stephanie’s school (Rydell High, you may remember it) and (obviously) develops a crush on Steph.  She makes it quite clear that she’s not interested in nice boys, she’s outgrown those T-Bird fools and she wants to bag herself a ‘cool rider’.

If you don’t get it by now you’re dead to me.

Michael decides there’s only one thing for it and sets about becoming the hottest motorcyclist around.  His alter-ego identity is protected via the employment of dark goggles and a husky whisper:

It’s handy that his name is Michael, being that it rhymes with motorcycle ‘n all.  (Although they missed a trick – what about Mike and motorbike?)

Steph starts to hit it off with both Michaels – a whirlwind romance with the dark stranger is interspersed by witty, intellectual discussions with the scholarly schoolboy (‘Shakespeare’), however Michael is becoming concerned that Steph can’t see beyond his charade:

Around this time, the T-Birds decide that something must be done about the smooth, leather-clad imposter.  After all, Stephanie is a Pink Lady and we all know that the Pink Ladies belong to the T-Birds (by going against this Stephanie is pretty much securing her place in feminist history, so long as we overlook the end of the movie when the boys make Michael a T-Bird so that he is ‘allowed’ to legitimately date her).  The boys decide to pursue Michael in a dangerously thrilling motorcycle chase, making Stephie hysterical.  Finally the chase is brought to an abrupt end as Michael leaps into the darkness across a deep chasm.  The boys conclude that he cannot have survived the fall and Stephanie is heartbroken.  As fate would have it their grieving is cut short; it’s the night of the Rydell High Talent Show and THE SHOW MUST GO ON.

The Pink Ladies begin their beautiful rendition of Girl for All Seasons, complete with costumes and choreography.  The final verse, winter, belongs to Stephanie, and as dressing up as a Christmas Tree goes, she looks pretty damn good.  She makes it to the stage, shattered and shocked.  As she falls to her knees she begins to sing a new song, much to the confusion of the audience as well as her fellow competitors.  Quickly we are transported to what I can only presume is Stephanie’s mind – a world consisting of only her and Michael (plus a motorbike and lots of clouds). Michael’s black attire has been transformed to gold – it must be heaven. The pair sing a beautiful duet.  The song ends and Stephanie is thrown back into reality.  The crowd are cheering – they loved it!

Here is my problem: in Stephanie’s head she was singing with Michael, but for everybody else in the room, who was singing his part? Did Stephanie somehow channel his voice through her own?  Having seen the rest of the movie, it is entirely plausible that they just cut the side-plot where Steph was learning to become a medium, but (as we are soon to find out) Michael is actually alive so this cannot be the case. Did she do an impression? Surely not. The applause was rapturous, it was obviously a spectacular and sincere performance.  Perhaps Michael himself was backstage providing the vocals, but were that to be the case it was incredibly cruel for nobody to tell Stephanie. More importantly, how would he have known the words? This question has been tormenting me for 20 years.

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there’s a serious lack of high quality Grease 2 videos on YouTube. I can’t even find a complete audio-visual combo of the song in question. Can somebody please rectify that right away?  In the meantime, I leave you with this:

Oh and if you haven’t guessed, Mike made the jump, Stephanie loves him even more when she finds out who he is, and they’ll all be together for ever and ever.

The enlightened amongst you will know that the series follows the lives of 14 people in Britain, starting at the age of 7 and revisiting them every 7 years. We’re now up to age 56 which finished airing on ITV on Monday.  Originally a social-economic experiment, based on the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”, the programme aimed to highlight class immobility (*high 5!*).  It served this purpose so easily (obviously) that the programme actually became more interesting as it transformed into an existential study of humanity.

I don’t want to say much about any individuals, mostly because I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I do want to encourage everyone to watch it and here’s why:

1) The series has made me feel more than any other programme has for a very long time.  In a single episode I’ve felt anger, joy, utter sadness and I’ve laughed so hard that it hurt.

2) You get a whole new family to love and root for (and you will – even for the participants that you don’t like).  Of course you don’t really know them - the participants are all keen to point out grievances about the ways in which they have been portrayed and Neil in particular discusses letters that he has received from viewers mistakenly claiming to understand him – but you do learn a whole lot about people.  The lovely Nick makes this point very nicely in 56 Up:

“The idea of looking at a bunch of people over time and how they evolve – that was a really nifty idea.  It isn’t the picture really of the essence of Nick or Suzy; it’s a picture of every man.  It’s how a person, any person, how they change… It’s not an absolute accurate picture of me, but it’s a picture of somebody.  And that’s the value of it.“

3) In a weird way the series is really comforting.  Realising how much these people’s lives change in 7 years makes me realise that I really don’t need to be worried about what I have or haven’t done by the age of 26 (but maybe you’ve all worked that out already).  There’s something extraordinarily uplifting about a 56 year old lady, sitting in her flat in Motherwell shortly after the birth of her first grandchild, saying “I think my life’s gonna be good“.

The keynote talk came from the talented Peter Gregson, a classically trained cellist who is attempting to bring chamber music into the 21st century. Fed up with playing “300-year-old music on a 200-year-old instrument to a 100-year-old audience”, Peter set about finding a way to incorporate digital into his performances without compromising his musicianship.

The result is goPlay – an app developed in conjunction with Reactify Music which simply “listens and responds”. We were treated to a stunningly beautiful demonstration and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Another highlight was Seb Lee-Delisle’s demonstration of his PixelPhones project, where the audience became the stars of the show. We all enthusiastically raised our phones as Seb converted each display to one individual pixel of colour; he then used the resulting audience screen to display images and animations (accompanied by an audience soundtrack of oohs and aahs). We even got a chance to try to catch Nyan Cat as he ran across each of our screens.

The day was rounded off perfectly by Brendan Dawes’ impassioned plea to “escape Flatland” and add texture to digital. There was a huge range of content discussed throughout the day, but listening to Brendan helped me to reflect on a theme that kept popping up throughout: stop reaching for perfection and learn to embrace accidents and flaws – make digital human.

Last September, after graduating from my Master’s degree in Design and Digital Media from Edinburgh College of Art, I was fortunate to spend 5 weeks on TRC Media‘s Gen Up Scotland training programme for ‘emerging digital talent’.  Having heard that the programme has just re-opened for applications, I decided to take the opportunity to write about my experience and give potential applicants an idea of what they might expect.

There we are: the beautiful, talented class of Autumn 2011.  Designers, developers, animators, illustrators, a comedian and a sound guy.  In previous intakes I believe there were also writers and journalists.  The point is that Gen Up is not discipline specific.  It isn’t going to transform you into Scotland’s number one digital *insert job title here*.  Instead it focusses on developing your understanding of the media, building a network of contacts in your chosen field and beyond, and equipping you with key skills to improve your employment prospects.

So what do you actually do? Gen Up comprises of talks, workshops, immersion days and an internship.  Some days you will hear from up to 5 experts in their field about what they do – CEOs, Creative Directors, Producers…, from sectors including TV, Games, Digital, Design, Development and more (these tend to be tailored to suit your cohort);  people who are willing to give up their (extremely valuable) time and answer all of your questions.  These really are extraordinary opportunities to get unprecedented access to senior figures.  Other days you will take part in day-long workshops under the guidance of an industry professional.  These hands-on days cover topics including presenting, interview skills, pitching, creative brainstorming and internet research.

The immersion days at BBC Scotland and Channel 4 provide an opportunity discover how large media organisations work and you’ll even get an opportunity to contribute your ideas for potential output.  You get to meet people from all over the organisations, some of whom choose to talk to you about their work, whilst others set you tasks or ask you to critique their output.

You also get to undertake a week-long internship at a specially selected organisation, matched to your skills and ambitions.  I was incredibly lucky to spend a week at the digital arm of Tern Television, working on their stunning Digital Adaptations project.  Others from our group spent time at Raise the Roof, Leith, Axis Animation, the BBC, the Comedy Unit, Realise and Proper Games.  The internship is a great chance for you to prove your skill, enthusiasm and dedication; several of our cohort were invited to extend their stays.

Gen Up is an amazing programme, ran by a really supportive team at TRC (Marie-Claire, the amazing programme coordinator will become your hero) and you will emerge with excellent contacts, a stronger CV, awesome things to talk about at interview and oodles of confidence.  Apply here, and be sure to make the most of every last minute.

I remember studying a maths module during my degree, in which we learnt about Einstein notation.  Albert Einstein (you may have heard of him) was using maths that had been around for years, when he decided to start writing things in a new way.  His new method was so elegant and condensed that it drastically simplified calculations and made patterns much easier to spot.  Such an elegant solution, I was simultaneously asking myself two very contradictory questions: 1) why on earth had nobody thought of it before? 2) how on earth did anyone come up with it?  Safe to say, it blew my mind.

Maths is almost entirely made up – whilst it is easy to conceive how the basics of numbers, addition and subtraction came into being, concepts of integration, percentages, trigonometry and many, many more are entirely unintuitive techniques, that at their conceptions were as original and imaginative as any novel, poem, lyric or artwork.  And yet these made-up mathematical theories can be irrevocably proven to be correct in relation to other made-up mathematical theories.  And together they just so happen to describe exactly how a large chunk of the world works. I struggle to think of any other field in which there is such scope for imagination alongside an absolute, gratifying truth.  And what’s more it can be used for a whole load of good.

I’m currently reading the brilliant Marcus Du Sautoy’s The Music of the Primes, a book about the ongoing struggle of mathematicians through the centuries to discover the secret pattern of prime numbers.  I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a teeeeeeeeeeny, weeeeeeeeny, tiny little miniscule egotistical part of me that thinks, just for a fraction of a fraction of a second, that maybe, in a moment of unrivalled inspiration, I might come up with the solution myself!  But that’s what maths is all about – seeing new ways of looking at things, coming up with your own, make-believe tools in the hope that they might just reveal the answer to something very real.  I implore you to do it right now.  Go do some maths.  It’s fun!  And if you really need another incentive, how does $1 million dollars sound?

The internet tells me that my first task is to find my voice.  If anything I think I know my voice all too well.  I conceive a thought and before it has had time to develop, even internally, I’ve understood its intention and moved on to something else.  A (weirdly telepathic) brain scan would reveal at best a string of abstract keywords attached to vague, often mixed, emotions.  My biggest challenge as I see it is to slow down my internal dialogue to a pace at which it can be decoded and transported to my fingertips.  That and to learn once and for all how to use a comma.