I laughed out loud
Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Bored of the dance
The problem we always return to is bandwidth. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Who would not prefer to pootle along the country lanes in a flowered gypsy caravan, rather than blast down the motorway in a colossal juggernaut? Trouble is, when you’ve a certain number of deliveries to make a van just isn’t big enough. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. I sound like a 30s schoolgirl with a lisp. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. What is she saying? Something to do with sandwiches perhaps? Or bandits. Bandits eating sandwiches and wearing bandages? We’ll never know.
Design by Coralie Bickford-Smith
There’s a great post over at the Penguin Blog about 8 new Red Classics editions of Sherlock Holmes stories and novels.
The designer is quoted in one of…
New Sherlock Holmes
One must wonder about the sense of irony that might have gone into Eliot’s Spitzer’s choice of alias.
George Fox (Wikipedia)
Milk bottles, steam engines, typewriters: these and other sounds of the past are available from Marnix Koolhaas’ Library of Vanished Sounds (aka the Museum of Lost Sounds).
The above images…
Lace Typography
Find out here. Mine spells “errs” in part but I’m trying to not take it personally.
Designer credit to come
We can probably infer two things from the way the title is handled here: 1) getting tied up is a popular fantasy, and 2) some people are really into type set in all caps….
When I am asked, "Why did you decide to go back to school?" or "How in the world can you work a full-time job and take two classes at the same time?", I can often provide at least 43 separate answers. That is the blessing and curse of my loquacious gift, which makes essay-writing easy but a succinct answer impossible.
I have a couple of good reasons I toss out about why I prefer taking two classes at a time: I often find points of unexpected connection between the classes, which I wouldn't find were I taking them one at a time; I'm going to be old by the time I get this degree, so let's hurry it up; I find the pressure of the second class provides time/energy constraints that force me to think creatively about my schedule, priorities; and so on.
Those are all nice, quantitative answers. But there's another, bigger reason that also goes to the heart of why I came back to school in the first place. I can't remember where I read it, but it's a quote by Virginia Woolf that goes approximately thusly:
After the age of forty, a novelist must either halve her output or double it.
For whatever reason, that quote and its idea has stuck with me. If you've published or written a lot in your early career, Woolf's advice is to slow the output and create fewer, denser works. But if you've thought more than you've written, then you need to use your remaining time to better advantage.
When I look at my last 25 years or so, I see that my output has been low. Others who look at my life may disagree, but for me, emotionally, I think I could have done more. Probably lots of people feel that way about their own lives.
So, one of my reasons for going back to school was to boost my output and make as much of the time and energy left to me as I can. Yes, I'm racing around like a maniac, I'm frequently overwhelmed, and my task diary is a paper-based super-collider of conflicting tasks, projects, and personal obligations. But--and here's the punchline-- I'm learning, writing, and producing a quantity and variety of material that, in my opinion, dwarfs what I have tried to attempt to do on my own over the last 10 years. And since I have the energy and the stamina now to take it all on, I want to make the most of this time and this opportunity.
Wait for the bluebottle/fly to land on a hard surface…wait for it to move its front two legs to its face in a feeding/cleaning action - then swat it. By the time it puts its legs back down to push…
The SILS Alumni Association held a speed networking event earlier this week. It’s the second one I attended and, although fewer students showed up this year than last year, I thought it went very well.The “mentors” – either SILS alums or local folks working in the IS/LS domains who have ties to SILS – sat inside a U-shaped line of tables, while the students moved from chair to chair every 3 minutes at the ring of Pavlov’s bell. Here are some thoughts on what I liked about it and why I think the experience was valuable.
Found some interesting or otherwise time-passable things on the web related to prototyping and our discussion on Wednesday. A List Apart runs deep-dish articles on web design. This article shows how paper is good for tabbed interfaces, widgets, and usability testing. He also suggests keeping a glue stick handy.
Pen-based low-fi vs hi-fi; use while keeping the above paper prototypes in mind.
A neat idea if you want to keep your prototypes looking rough.
This is a really good post that links to Napkin and other sources to express what we heard in class, namely, the more “done” the prototype looks, the more finished the client expects the entire application it to.
The SILK project grew out of someone’s dissertation research. The current public release of Denim runs on Mac, Win, and *nix.
Referred to in the List Apart article, this is a neat site that shows the evolution of OS and application GUIs from their inception to today. It has sections for splash screens, icons, the tutorials that were included to help us learn how to click with a mouse, and a timeline showing the slow progress of GUIs from the Lisa and GEOS on up to Leopard. The site appears to have run out of gas around 2005 or so. I have personal experience of GEOS (Commodore 64 & PC), Amiga, DOS 3-5, Windows 3.x, Mac (mid-80s-early 90s), and OS/2.
329 days until the end of the Bush presidency; who knows how long to fix the damage. I wish I could appreciate the attempt at humor in the UK edition (the second image), but I can’t. To be honest, it sorta pisses me off. Weisberg’s book has been described as “compassionate” and largely sympathetic to Bush, arguing that all this isn’t his fault but rather can be set at the feet of Rove, Cheney, Rumsfield and Rice. Thus, the imagery of a puppet show in the UK version, which seems appropriate.
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From why that’s delightful, via omnibrain.
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If you get up late in the morning on weekends, you must think sleep is very valuable. And if sleep is very valuable, that means we should go to bed early. Because if you go to bed early, you always have the option of sleeping later – that is sleeping more – and getting even more sleep than if you had gone to bed late. (You can’t just shift your sleep into any hours block you want, given the coordination issues.) And if sleep is very valuable, the option to sleep more must be valuable as…