Apple has released a new version of Safari; well, the beta, at least.
This would probably pass without comment everywhere except the Mac-centric world, except that they have a version for Windows…
I, for one, did not see that coming.
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Been reading The 4-hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (see The 4-hour Work Week). It’s a pretty unconventional book, but very inspiring.
In a nutshell, the book mainly advocates aggressive time management to delegate as much of your responsibility as you can elsewhere, entrepreneurship to free yourself from the 9-to-5, and taking small “mini-retirements” throughout your life rather than working like a animal for forty years until you hopefully have enough to retire at sixty. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but that’s the meat-and-potatoes of the content. Ferriss refers to it as “Lifestyle design,” and I’ll be the first to admit, it’s a very appealing concept.
Are the suggestions Tim makes actually realistic? Good question; so far, my thought is that a lot of people will read them, think that they are not feasible, and not do any of them. A lot of others will read it, think that it could be done, but still not do it.
Whether or not it’s all really doable, I think it will still inspire a lot of people to try to become entrepreneurs, and really, isn’t that what a book like this is for? You can’t actually accomplish anything without trying (the canonical advice from Yoda notwithstanding), so I hardly think it a bad thing to encourage people to take steps to reach for their dreams.
Hat tip to Ramit Sethi for recommending the book.
Mahalo is a new “human powered” search engine, currently in an alpha release. Not sure what alpha means when applied to human powered search (”We’re still working out the bugs in our humans”), but it sounds… neat?
It certainly looks nice, and the results seem good; if it doesn’t have a hand-written page for your query it shows Google’s results, always a safe bet, under what I’m guessing are some sponsored results.
Incidentally, on most of their sub-pages, they also show todays “top 20″ searches. “Linux” is number 8. I found this interesting because “Linux” is always the first query I put into a new search engine. It’s not necessarily even a good litmus test, because the logical top results for Linux are fairly obvious. (Mahalo’s #1 result was the Wikipedia page for Linux; I thought that was a pretty good choice, considering the enormous volume of information out there on the subject.)
It feels good to be home.
Saw a lot of things in our “free” time in DC; the one that is sticking most in my mind is the Jefferson Memorial. Presidential memorials never seemed to me as though they would be all that significant; some big statues in big marble-columned porticoes, how impressive could they be? When you stand there in person, the answer is very impressive. The inscription around the inside of the dome sticks in my mind:
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
It was a productive series of meetings, but like I said, it’s good to be home. Over the weekend, I’ll be trying again to restore my data from the old server… here’s to that.
I’m out of town on a team meeting, so any further efforts at restoring the last two+ years of blog-posting to this server will be put on hold. In the meantime, I’m debating the pros and cons of simply starting over.
Certainly, there’s something to be said for having a lot of archives. Popular posts from weeks or months or years back can draw new traffic consistently, long after they were originally posted and indexed by Google. A few of the longer comment threads which lived here, such as those following my posts about David & Dale Garrett’s Scripture in Song, would be nice to restore — if for no other reason than how cool it was to hear other people’s stories about how much that music meant to them.
From an SEO perspective, there’s also a certain value to having a lot of content — SEO interests me, but the blog was hardly a money-maker, ads or no. So except for a few posts which had some sort of sentimental value… it wouldn’t really bother me that much to just leave it alone and start over.
That being said, I’ve been asking myself, if I do just choose to start from here from scratch, whether I’ll continue the blog in the same vein (a little of this and a little of that), or whether I’d try to focus on a more narrow topic. And if so, what topic? I love using, cheer-leading, and following the development of desktop Linux, but you can only write so many “is this the year of desktop Linux?” posts before it starts to drive you slightly mad.
Anyways, those are some of my thoughts. We’ll see what happens. If a reader happens to have strong feelings one way or the other on preserving blog archives for posterity versus starting over, I’d be interested to hear other points of view on the idea.
On Friday, we went to Minneapolis’ own Walker Art Center to see a screening of the film Helvetica. And yes, it really is a film about a font, timed to commemorate the font’s 50th anniversary.
It’s a documentary about one of the most ubiquitous fonts in the world. That being said, it’s far from boring, is actually very funny, and can be enjoyed even if you aren’t a design geek (graphic, web, or otherwise).
It’s not only about the history of Helvetica, it’s creation and usage, though that is in the film as well. More so, it’s about how and why Helvetica has been used since 1957, and how people have reacted to it, and continue to react to it.
The primary narrative thrust of the documentary, inasmuch as there is one, is driven by interviews with designers and typographers. It begins generally from designers of the generation who were designing in the late fifties and early sixties, and moves semi-chronologically through history from there.
It’s very interesting to see how attitudes of the design community (at least, as presented from the handful of designers interviewed for the film) changed radically through the last fifty years. When Helvetica was introduced, it was embraced very quickly as a clean, modern, all-purpose font, and was quickly adopted and used almost everywhere: headlines, advertising copy, posters, signs, logos and corporate identities… everywhere. It was adopted so wholeheartedly that it became “the” corporate font, and a next generation of designers rebelled against it, and began to try to use anything else other than Helvetica… through to the present time, where you have many people going back to embrace, again, the clean simplicity of the ubiquitous sans-serif font.
It’s about a font, but the stars of the film are the designers. You have the whole range, from those of the old school who declare firmly that there are only maybe a dozen really good fonts available, and that you probably only need three or four of them (Helvetica being one of these), to those who despise the font as being pedestrian, boring, corporate and bland. I was amazed at how funny it was to watch seemingly normal human being become worked up to a near frenzy about… a font.
Notable quotes (paraphrased from memory) ranged from the typographer who expressed relief that he had never asked to improve upon Helvetica because he wouldn’t know how to improve it in any way, to the designer who, when asked why he thought Helvetica was so popular, replied, “I don’t know. Why is bad taste so universal?”
It’s going through limited screening around the country, so you may or may not be able to catch it at a theatre, college or art gallery. The DVD is slated to be released in the fall, so if you miss the screening, I’d still highly recommend it.
So, I changed hosts, and migrating the old data hit a few snags.
So, now I’m deliberating between actually spending the time and migrating all the old data, or simply starting over. Given my natural inclination toward problem solving, I’ve a feeling that I’ll try to migrate everything once more.
Stay tuned. Or, go outside; it’s quite nice, here.
Last night we went to a screening of the film Helvetica.
Yes, it is a documentary about a font.
And it is extremely awesome. If it has already played in your city, you might have to wait until fall for the DVD, but if you are any sort of design geek, graphic or web, professional or amateur, it’s guaranteed to entertain.
Mike Malone writes:
I’ve spent the morning reading over the Gears documentation, and working through some sample applications. Here are my notes. I’m hoping they’ll provide enough of an overview to get started with Gears without wading through dozens of pages of documentation yourself.
Getting Started with Google Gears - I’m Mike
Gears looks fascinating.
This portal has been setup with the aim of providing a single, searchable site where the Python web community can access existing project documentation as well as contribute articles and comments.
This will hopefully be pretty cool; I remember when I was first trying to learn to use Python on the web (from scratch), I had a semi-difficult time finding useful documentation.
