(These three were taken in Oman last July)

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I'm not an early adopter. I'm not even a late adopter. So I'm probably the last person on the entire interwub who's signed up to Twitter, but now I have!

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Right, so usually I'd just link to this in my Google Reader Shared Items blog, but one particular picture in this set was too good not to highlight. Just look at it. I want it blown up and put on my wall.

The rest of the set is here

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Ever since stone-age man first propped up a palm-leaf awning between two commercial mud huts, stuck a fountain in the centre and posted a sign for ‘toilet’ and ‘food court’ next to it, mankind has had malls to go to. A civic space that provides some place for Madame to shop, Sir to ogle, Young Master to gorge and fourteen-year-olds to stand around in groups trying to look cool (and failing en masse to do so).

And, like most things we’ve invented, over the subsequent thousands of years we have been attempting to make ever greater, more elaborate versions of the two-shop-fountain-and-food-court model we know as the shopping mall. Take the great pyramids of Giza, for instance; a quirky design whose unique architecture and indecipherable signage had led to it long being mislabeled as a place of worship, and even a tomb! Well let me tell you, the pyramids now have serious competition.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been to the Dubai Mall, and I have lived to tell the tale -- with pictures!

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that I'm now using the Share With Note feature on my Google Reader Shared Items, so in addition to the widget in the sidebar providing you with the latest links on stuff I'm browsing, you can now check the blog itself (or subscribe to its own Atom feed) for little notes by me on each item (I'll try to write more than just, "Cool, lookit!" -- I swear!). I generally share things that I hope readers of this blog will like, so lots of stuff on design of all kinds, illustration, photography and of course, lots and lots of weird stuff.

You can access my Google Reader Shared Items Blog by clicking here.

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You know, it's been forever since I just posted a couple of photos on this site. I should probably hunt around for some more.

So a few thousand years ago a guy and his wife set out for home after fourteen years of exile in the spiffy jungles of peninsular India, and having just rescued his missus from the clutches of a very bad guy with ten heads, he decided that he was totally entitled to the guy's flying car for the journey home -- spoils of war and all that. This being the days before the IATA and GPS, the folks back home tried to make things easier for their returning king (whose slippers were doing a fine job of running the kingdom in his stead, apparently) and lit up the entire city so he could spot them from the air.

Hang on -- did Laxman have to walk home?

At the cusp of the 1990s, every home PC had to have one killer app installed. When you’d go round to a friend’s place and they’d show off their new Amstrad or IBM beige behemoth, the first question out of your mouth would be, “How did you convince your parents?” The second would be, “Do you have Prince of Persia?”

Jordan Mechner’s seminal 1989 game (published by Brøderbund) was the high watermark for computer games at the time, a title that combined fluid graphics, exquisite music and challenging gameplay into an astonishing final product. I remember the first time I saw it in 1990, on the PC of one of my parents’ friends. He fired it up for us, to keep us kids busy, I suppose, but I don’t think even he would understand quite the impact the next hour or so of play had on me.