We wanted to give those of you who have been following the progress of this lamp from a wild idea to a final product something special, so we made a special limited edition just for you.

The limited edition features a laser engraved signature at the bottom of the UFO and a specially printed certificate poster. The lamp is made from metal with a high quality finish, and it comes complete with an alien crew, a perspex beam, a bovine abductee and real fake grass on a non-slip base. The antenna function as the on-off switch as promised, and it can also enable a very smooth pulsing of the light. I am happy to say that great attention has been made to every detail, making this a high quality product that I hope you will be happy to own.

Everyone who posted a comment on this blog or signed up at the original or the new abductionlamp.com should now have received an invitation to order a limited edition Alien Abduction Lamp.

There are only 2000 of these lamps, so hurry up and grab one at http://abductionlamp.com/order

And of course, the grass and/or cow can be removed so that you can place any figure or object that you want to have abducted in the beam.

Are you wondering what to do while you are waiting for the Alien Abduction Lamp?

Maybe a short stay with our green or grey little friends could be a good way of killing time. I don’t have any connections to help you get there, but I have put together this t-shirt for you to wear so that you can let them know who to get if they are in the neighborhood…

The text is glow-in-the-dark, and it is printed to be easily viewed from space.

One important parameter when making a good espresso is how much you make. When I bought the machine at Cortado in Oslo (hereby highly recommended), we had a little discussion about the volume of a single espresso.

The salesman claimed that a single Italian espresso is about 35-40 ml, which I found to be too much. But I didn’t have any idea of how much less it should be. (I am referring to Italian espresso here, not northern European which is larger – especially at restaurants, or American espresso which is even larger still).

I recently had the opportunity to measure it myself during a three weeks stay at a vineyard in Tuscany (also highly recommended and possibly the subject of a future post). The answer is that an Italian espresso (or “caffée normale”) ranges from about 10ml to about 25ml, where somewhere around 25ml seems to be the normal. The measurements were made in Siena and at Chianti Autogrill on Autostrada A1.

And did I get some strange looks as I did my measurements?

You bet

And I do not mean just interaction designers.

Graphical designers, gui coders, industrial designers, project managers and many others will gather valuable insight or build up an understanding for the importance of good interface design.

Web 2.0 + good interface design

As the web is growing up, the browser based applications finally start resembling professional desktop application. We have now started using a web based digital asset management system called Fluxiom. It boasts a range of features such as instant thumbnail scaling, search, tagging, filtering, multi-item upload, multi-item select and download, sharing, preview with metadata, and an rss-feed. Many of these features are not unique to this program, and free sites like flickr gives you much of this plus community services. What makes Fluxiom different is the way the elegant and user friendly interface gives you a great overview of all your assets.