July 2011
1 post
“In life, you can either ask for what you want and suffer the possibility of...”
– Sarah Hepola
April 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
1 post
April 2010
1 post
Come Home Baby Julie, Come Home →
American Analog Set, covered by Seafloor. Hauntingly beautiful.
March 2010
1 post
We Think the iPad is a Computer
Well, thanks, YCombinator, for taking the spotlight for the most obvious iPad speculation to date.
This, though, is a little more insightful:
“Many will never make a conscious decision to switch. They’ll get an iPad as well, then find they use their Windows machine less and less. When it dies they won’t replace it.”
I was in Portland over the weekend, twiddling away on...
January 2010
1 post
The Apple Paradigm →
I love it when my careers coincide.
December 2009
5 posts
"If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why...
Interesting take from The Man Himself (No, not that man. Er, I mean that one.). I think Gruber’s idea that the Tablet ultimately becomes most people’s idea of the PC over the next few years is insightful. The MacBook ratchets up a notch in performance to become the mobile version of a Mac Pro, for power users. The Tablet becomes a computer for the rest of the world. I could see that...
iSlate Addendum: Service
Here’s the missing feature that makes the iSlate the hot seller of 2010: iTunes subscription service. In validating the hardware, I lost track of the other half of the argument. The ultimate portable entertainment device is lost without service.
In the tablet/reader market, Amazon’s Kindle leads the pack for technology and service, now with B&N nipping at their heels with the...
“He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his...”
– An unattributed James Madison University student on the appeal of Jeff Bridges’ character in The Big Lebowski, excerpted from the NYT.
iSlate
In light of a recent insightful discussion with this character, I thought it worth posting some thoughtful speculation on the alleged forthcoming tablet from Apple. Their penchant for upsetting the…ehrm…apple cart with disruptive products is at this point legendary—the merest buzz of speculation around what may or may not be released at the next Apple event is a market force of...
New Photo Site
Thanks to the ever so talented Justin Ouellette for creating ihardlyknowher.com. I’ve been meaning to make a photo page just like this for ages, but lack the time/wherewithal to do so.
For now, find me here, at least until I can figure out how to apply the same thing to my own website.
November 2009
1 post
September 2009
1 post
“I’m going to make a film about a guy who goes around murdering people for...”
– Elliott Kember (@elliottkember)
June 2009
4 posts
Is it just me?
Gizmodo has a great review of the new Palm Pre. Without having one in-hand, this is as close a look as I’ll likely get for another month.
The OS is nice. Clean, appropriately flashy for the new kid, though I’d argue that from what I can see it lacks the consistency that makes OS X such a pleasure both to look at and to use. The Pre feels like it’s trying a little too hard to be...
Scribblenauts
I wouldn’t have given this game a second glance if it wasn’t for this review, which can be summed up by the following passage: ” I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES. This game is unbelievable. Impossible. There’s nothing you can’t do.”
I must have this.
Thanks to dotrob for the heads up.
How to be happy in business
Bud Caddell elegantly describes the challenge of finding happiness in work with his brilliant Venn diagram. To really appreciate the graphic, you need to read the body text. I’ll come back to this more than once, I’m sure.
May 2009
1 post
April 2009
1 post
“…These Books Are the Most Approachable of the Three (Apologies for the...”
– Massive technology meltdown, from a book review on Amazon.com
March 2009
3 posts
My first three minutes with Omegle
I just read about Omegle on Metafilter and popped over to check it out. My first contact had already chatted with hundreds of people. I bid him/her well and moved on. My second contact dropped me after a quick a/s/l query. My third was a gem. Apologies for the offensive language—it’s not mine. (Gah-I can’t even repost it. Just bothers me to have it on my blog. Shit-talk...
Where are all the designers?
After reading this brilliant and insightful piece from a visual designer from Google, I am wondering again where the voice of industrial designers is. Though the web is primarily the playground of those who design for it, I haven’t yet found a single industrial design blog online. The closest I can find is the forum-based community on Core77. Who are the thought leaders of the profession,...
Comments Enabled
Via Disqus. We’ll see how long this lasts-maybe someone has something interesting to say.
I actually don’t like comments for the most part since the internet is seldom the place for stimulating debate, but having just availed myself of someone else’s comment field, I thought I’d give it a go. If you really need to get in touch, say, if you had a big pile of money to give...
February 2009
2 posts
The Fidget Toy
Via Daringfireball: Cooper’s One Free Interaction
In school, we used to talk about designing the perfect fidgeter’s gadget. It was basically a product with no specific function except to be fun to play with, like a paper weight, except with even less utility. Various designs included ball-pen clickers, ratchets, pushbuttons and sound effects. The Free Interaction goes one better by...
“2012: Michael Phelps wins 13 gold medals, celebrates with bong hit of salvia....”
– drewtoothpaste, with the funniest comment I have ever read on Twitter.
January 2009
1 post
“Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll...”
– Derek Powazek
December 2008
3 posts
“There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and...”
– Norman Mailer
One-week update: iPhone FTW/FAIL
After one week, here’s how things are shaking out:
The obvious omissions have been commented on so many times I’ll only give them a brief nod: No copy/paste, no MMS, no tethering—major WTFs. App store dictatorship, mildly annoying, but frankly I’m glad not to have to sort through thousands of mediocre, buggy apps to find a few real gems. Open source is great, but I still...
The thing about iPhones is that you never knew how...
After months of pretending not to care, I finally took the plunge and joined the ranks of dumb looking men staring at their hands while standing in lines, sitting in bars, on trains, in taxis, bathrooms, and next to their significant others (unless those SOs have iphones themselves, then it’s two dumb looking people standing next to each other not interacting whatsoever). I could write a...
November 2008
1 post
Customer Service
Three years ago, after fielding months of frustrated phone calls from my mother to help troubleshoot her ailing PC, my persistent lobbying for her to purchase a Macintosh finally paid off. Within a week, our phone conversations resumed their normal peaceful tone and we only talked computers to discuss how great her new iMac was working out.
But as users and computers tend toward entropy,...
September 2008
2 posts
The Genuine Expression of any Intention is Beauty
A few photography links I’ve been enjoying lately:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acksonjay/
http://flickr.com/photos/sjrohde/
http://flickr.com/photos/tannerv/
"Through the Mirror" out now!
adcBicycle’s “Through the Mirror” remix album, on which I contributed the opening track, is now available as a free download! A tremendous amount of work went into this album by a roster of impressive talent, and it was well worth the wait. Check this one out ASAP!
August 2008
1 post
“Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But...”
– Miroslav Tichý, Photographer
July 2008
7 posts
Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man...
This is the best bit of vitriol I have read in recent memory. Fists are so boring when you can pound someone this eloquently.
“I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it.”
I’m going to steal every...
“Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel...”
– Stanley Kubrick
Of course we were freaks
“SZ: Why did you never take photos of people or of faces? HB: Because people weren’t our subject matter. People are a different topic.
SZ: But people are an interesting topic. HB: Maybe for others, not for us. If someone takes photos of cathedrals nobody asks: Where is the priest? Where are the worshipers? That would not be suitable. If there’s a person in an image, s/he...
“Never assume conspiracy when you can assume incompetence.”
– Edward Tufte
Merica
Pretty much sums it up for the whole West Coast, frankly, but as soon as you leave California, you drop the (awesome).
more graph humor and song chart memes
June 2008
4 posts
The Blogs, Redacted.
I deleted a couple of posts that were eating at me. It’s not that I don’t stand by my opinions on the matter (Synopsis of the deleted content: Reactionary behavior makes for a poor political platform. Vote smart!), it’s just that I felt my commentary was precisely the kind of behavior that fuels the problem, rather than being part of a solution. I can produce better...
The Funniest and Most Poignant Post I Have Read...
dotrob:
When I am sent an email requesting I replace a .jpg image file on our website with a replacement image the sender has attached, and the attached file is an .rtf text file with a .png graphic embedded in it — all of which seems to have been created with neither a word processor or an image editor but with an outlining and diagramming tool, I kind of have to throw up my hands. It’s like:
...
May 2008
1 post
April 2008
5 posts
Make me internet famous!
In the interest of (finally) becoming internet famous, I need 9000 votes by next Friday. Remember: Talent means nothing—POPULARITY IS EVERYTHING. Your vote can make a difference! Nude (Hot Pants Mix)
Why We Are the Biggest Obstacles to Our Own Growth
“Recognizing that we need to let go of ourselves in order to learn and grow is difficult. Part of my job is to bring my experience to the table, to guide and grow the team using the things I have learned. But I also have to accept that there are things I still must learn. And because I am a fully formed person, to make room for a new idea I must be willing to let go of an old one, I must be...
Welcome Home, Son.
I hadn’t been home for half a day yet when, at a 4-way intersection I was cut off by a car approaching from the right. Said car made a right hand turn, blowing through a red light. A few hundred feet later the male passenger turned around and flipped me off with a scowl. Dumbfounded, I threw up my hands in a display of confusion. He nodded and continued his salute for a few more seconds...