neuro-designs

To respect the upcoming Isra Mi’raj national holiday, our office will be closed on Wednesday, July 30, 2008, and we will be back open the next day.

One of our ongoing projects that we’ve been working on for more than 6 months was Pixily. And today, the guys over there just turned their switch to fully on, and Pixily is now live as a fully working service.

Since we helped the creation of Pixily right from the beginning, by designing their corporate identity and prototyping their website, this launch has been exciting for us as well. We are equally satisfied that Pixily generated positive responses not only from their users and potential users, but from the media as well. That means both of our hard work has finally paid off.

Our best wishes to Prasad Thammineni and the rest of the Pixily team for making their dreams finally a reality. More details of the work will be published in the future on our portfolio section.

Continuing our quest to have a reliable electricity source because of the scheduled power outages, we finally got the generator installed today.

Since our office is a relatively small office, this simple Honda-powered generator is more than sufficient to power the whole facility during power outages. It also has a built-in power regulator, although it’s somewhat rather noisy.

The installation is not perfect, though. We still have some things to consider to permanently locate this generator. But as the time goes, at least should the power is out, we can still do our daily work for at least 8 hours a day with air conditioning.

Earlier today, the team went on a lunch break and decided to go out of the office and find a new place to have lunch at. And while we’re queueing for the ATM, we found this store:

Looks too awfully familiar, doesn’t it? It is. This is what you call a blatant copy of what’s successful. This is the same case as Blenger Burger (a burger restaurant in Jakarta with a Burger King logo rip off, which is the only reason why I refused to eat there). My concern is, are Indonesians really that uncreative? Or are they just blasted thieves that can’t seem to get their hands off anyone’s success? In Indonesia, almost everything rips off anything and they don’t seem to have a problem with it, and truthfully, I’m ashamed of my country. I mean, in regards of pirated softwares or movies, at least they only distributed it and they didn’t actually make those into their own brand.

Here’s some other photos of the store:

It was closed by that time, I don’t know, maybe they got busted? I wish they are.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.

I just found this over the internet, an interview with Syd Mead, one of my favorite conceptual designers. I even did an assignment as a tribute for him when I was still in college. This is surely worth the watch.

To our respected clients,

Along with this letter, I regretfully announce that we will have possible scheduled power outages on Friday, July 11 2008 toward Friday, July 25, 2008 due to our nationwide energy crisis. The currently published schedule from our power company indicates that we will have a definitive power outage on the July 11th, 14th, 15th, and 16th, with the remaining dates to be confirmed.

Please kindly note that this will be a force majeure event beyond the scope of our control, but we are working hard to provide optimal services for our clients. We are currently in the process of installing backup generators to provide power and communication, and hopefully our internet connection will not be affected by the outages, since it relies on the city’s cable network to operate. We also hope that the generator installation will be completed before those dates.

To our US-based clients, please note that the power outages are going to be done mainly during our working hours, therefore, our time zone differences may affect our proposed timeline and schedules. For this, on behalf of Neuro-Designs, I apologize.

To our web-hosting clients, please note that this power failure does not affect any of our web-hosting services, since our servers are located in the United States.

We will be on standby and continue working normally supposedly we do not get the outages on those confirmed dates.

Thank you for your understanding.