Im moving away on Friday and with no cooking experience Rob kindly let me borrow this book.

How long will i last, no one knows.

Recipes on a post card.

Im becoming a proper grown up and moving into my first flat next week, and it just happened to be my birthday yesterday, so Nick kindly got me some birthday/housewarming presents!

I can not cook at all… But now i have the tools to grate cheese, peel vegetables (???) and open bottles properly!!

I just placed them on my desk and they started going at it!!!

They all got involved! slags!

Thank you Nick!!!

Our head designer Josh has obviously been working on a project with a lot of stakeholders…

….he should try sharing a house with five females.

This one from Blonde’s answer to Morrisey (aka Roy).

Heaven knows I’m miserable now….

I beg your pardon?

These are the names of a few of the IRN-BRU ads that can be found in the Favourite Ads section of the new IRN-BRU website.

To say that IRN-BRU is a content rich brand via its advertising heritage is a bit of an understatement. But as if a mini-archive of ads that did run wasn’t enough, we’ve also included a section of ads that didn’t.

This section is the subject of a separate post, but suffice to say here that it has enabled to tap into an even richer seam of content, based on the fact that the ads that did run are just the tip of a creative iceberg going back over more than a decade.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of ads from the two sections…

Bitches, Suck, Dick, Laid, Ass, Snog, Mad Ferret, Hard Core Prawn, Nookie .

I challenge you not to…

Mitra has to dress up as a villain for a forthcoming party, and was looking for suggestions. Nick reckoned that he’d go as Syndrome from The Incredibles because he wouldn’t have to make much effort.

The rest of us can’t quite see it…

Sigh (in a here we go again kind of way)….

He’s chicken….

He waffles….

Some say he’s actually quite shy.

He is….

….the Stig

Correction.

He is of course…The Nick!

How fitting (fitting – T-shirt, fitting, geddit?) that the author of the previous post should feature in this one.

Apparently this means something to a certain type of person.

The back of the shirt is much easier to get and, as far as this design is concerned, Fraser definitely is what he shirts…

…the techie Tarzan.

Or #|, I should say. Sorry – it’s a geeky post, nowhere near as interesting as the title sounds…

Anyway, I’ve recently been blessed (cursed?) with switching to Mac – aside from the rather painful purchase price of the machine itself I’ve noticed two things:

1. Older mac users are jealous of 8 core machines.

(thbthbhththbh!)

2. Someone forgot to put the hash key on the keyboard.

I’ll say that again for emphasis: SOMEONE FORGOT TO PUT THE EFFING HASH KEY ON THE KEYBOARD.
(Disclaimer: UK keyboard, I’m fairly sure it’s there on the US one, and it’s probably got a cosy home of its own somewhere else on various other keyboards for various other nationalities but on the UK one it’s just not there)

Thankfully, older Mac users know where this completely indispensible (if you’re a web developer) key is hidden. If you’re nice and stop taunting them with screengrabs of your CPUs they’ll sometimes tell you too.

Failing that, as always, the intarweb doth provide.

Now I can see that the keyboard layout is a tricky thing to fit everything into – you only have so many symbols you can put on it and still have that “Designed by Apple in California” look…

But the UK keyboard layout has a handy little euro sign above the 2, next to the @key to say “look, I’m here, alt-2 is me! click me! please!”, just incase I’d ever actually use a euro sign (rather than €) – I’ve not yet… but you never know. It’s on the keyboard – it’s not the easiest key to hit by accident or anything, but it’s there….

For some reason though someone somewhere thought that finding the ubiquitous # symbol situated at alt-3 on the key right next to that euro sign would best be left as an exercise to the user…

Perhaps it’s meant as an intriguing alternate reality game experience taking the user onto a journey throughout the interweb. Or possibly it was intended to encourage socialising with fellow mac users, who would take a pitying (and slightly smug) look at you, bemoan your misspent PC upbringing and then enlighten you with their Macly wisdom.

That or someone just fucked up.

#####AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH#####

A couple of hours getting very dusty in a spooky storage facility in Granton turned out to be time extremely well spent. We were raiding the archives for IRN-BRU poster concepts that, for one reason or another, failed to see the light of day. This is going back to 1994, so there was potentially a lot of stuff.

Some of the old files were missing or in the wrong place, but we came back with nearly 70 pieces of paper ranging from hand-rendered scamps to fully worked up presentation visuals.

Some of the concepts are recognisable as coming from the same stable as ads that have graced the bill boards of Scotland over the last decade or so. But some are the basis of entirely original campaigns that have never been in he public domain before. Until now that is.

The new IRN-BRU website features an Ads That Never Ran section, and we’ve launched with a selection of 12 concepts. More will be rolled out over time. Here are a couple of examples to whet the appetite.