www.myspace.com/harryandthepotters

This has got to be the dorkiest band I've ever heard. Lots of fun.

H & S Bicycles

…because I'm always forgetting the hours/phone#/address of the shop where I bought my bike.

flying lawn mower

whacky shit.

Leatherman e306x/e307x

drool

CUTCO Cutlery: Cook's Combo - Santoku Knife and Trimmer

For fun in the outdoors I enjoy swedish stainless steel, but for kitchen knives Cutco is unmatched. They're sharp, strong, easy to use (dishwasher safe) and guaranteed forever. We sent in one of Cybil's grandfather's knives after he died, the handle was chipped and the tip was busted off; they fixed it.

Now Cutco has this new combo that looks like the perfect way to introduce somebody to their knives. We usually just give people a trimmer, and it winds up becoming their favorite knife. Now with the new Santoku they could easily become their only knives.

QuirksBlog: ... and the winner is ...

No resounding, "AhHA!" but at least there is progress and the functions are tight. (context: addEvent() recoding contest)

Vitaly Friedman | Blog: 20 Best License-Free Official Fonts

I should never have followed this link. I've whittled my font list nearly down to only web fonts (those installed on most user's systems) and those in my Adobe folio that are talked about by Bringhurst. It is not easy to reduce one's list of installed fonts, but the only way I'll ever get any good with the ones I have is to continually shrink the list, not grow it. But then again with Bringhurst my list of modern and sans-serif faces is pretty short, so maybe I could…

CSS layouts: liquid, fluid, elastic, flexible, jello...

Very impressive CSS layouts, all using the same simple XHTML (no nesting), all (or nearly all) flexible layouts, and no hacks!

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Be Willing To Be Wrong

"People can scan disparate patterns more easily than homogenous patterns."

This makes perfect sense. As visual elements begin to look more like eachother, more uniform, the overall esthetic may be nice and soothing, but distinguishing the individual bits (which is the important part) becomes harder.

Very cool to hear about all the real user testing they're doing. I'm impressed. We might all learn something from it too.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

Eat your heart out Mr. Bailey, this crazy lady has not 2, but 3 side-by-side vertical flat panel monitors. Highlights of the article:

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

and here's a study to support our practice of starting work at 7am and putting in most of our productive time before lunch:

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning.

Escape My Head: TTTk, Travel Tinker Trouble Kit

Add this to my preparations for pending travel. Which reminds me, I should move MacGyver up higher on my Netflix que. Hard to compete with Babylon 5 and Thundercats though.

Update: Here's another version. And here's a pro's Mini Survival Kit that's clearly been refined over time.

The Nexus of politics and terror

Conspiracy theorists eat it up. I for one believe it 100%. Our president is nothing short of an evil dictator, and to top it off I believe that he pretends to be even more fucking stupid than he actually is, to gain votes and also to put world leaders off their guard so that when the oil crisis hits and we take military control over the middle east nobody will see it coming. Or, more likely, when we place our man on the thrown in Iraq, errr, have our man voted in in a fair and public election, world leaders wouldn't suspect our horse's ass of a president of setting up a puppet dictator, even though the US has done it many times before. End rant. I don't know what I'm talking about. I just don't trust Mr. Cunthair.

Book thrown at proponents of Intelligent Design

Playing catch-up on last weeks news, this is pretty damning evidence against those neanderthal creationists. I like it.

Thinking Machine 4

brilliant AI visualazition. And it's done in the delightfully clashing orange+green on a grayscale interface.

PBF archive

Hilarious animal cartoons. My favorites: Zoo Keeper, Volcano Snails, Billy The Bunny, Bunny Easter, Gnome Bubbles, Freaking Vortex, Not Today Little One, Today is my Birthday, Eden, and Angry Hammer. via Centripetal Notion. If I filed things this would go under "twisted humor". There were a bunch that I really enjoyed but didn't feel comefortable linking to, which says a lot if you followed any of the above.

Justin Blanton | iPod nano + Brasso + invisibleShield

so here's the question, can I last the 4-6 without scratching the hell out of the thing (i left the original cover over the screen) until the official tube finally comes out, or do I go ahead and get this?

Google Reader

I'll give this try, subscribe to a few feeds and see how it compairs to the industry standard web reader: Bloglines. Some of it feels a little less intuitive and a little more gimmicky than I might prefer.

You know who I'd like to see make a feed reader? 37signals. A dirt simple bare-bones reader that my parents could use. Or, how about this, what if Gmail went ahead and integrated a reader straight into your email? The controls would be slightly different, the conversations would be one sided, and you'd have unsubscribe and such instead of reply. But I guess you're inbox would get rather cluttered really fast. It would almost need an automatic filter, applying the label "feed" or something, and archiving it. Anyway, just brainstorming how the whole feed reader concept might be made more accessible to the mainstream. Podcasts are making it big with their iTunes integration, maybe feeds need to piggy-back on something as mainstream as email?

Serenity Flanvention

UK Street Map Coordinate Converter

handy tool for dealing with various sorts of location finding data.

The National Trust

This site is the perfect comanion to the British Heritage Pass Attractions.

Knott's Scary Farm

Actually had a good time at Knott's Scary Farm Thursday night. It was early in the Halloween season so it wasn't too crowded. The shows were great, a little improv group, a magician with a twisted sense of humor, and a higher budget illusionist with sexy dancing/singing/half-naked women. The hanging didn't have the best dialogue, but the fight choreography was better than usual.

The highlight was this ride, the Xcelerator. It goes from 0 to 82mph in 2.3 seconds, then ascends vertically, and makes an immediate vertical drop of over 200 feet. I actually bought the cheesy ride photo. Cybil was quite scared. The girl in front of her blacked out during the initial acceleration, and woke up at the top, just in time to drop 200+ feet. Any ride that makes people lose consciousness is a good ride in my book.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Just found out they're making my middle-namesake into a movie. I should have read the book long ago. Maybe I should wait now until I've seen the movie, so as not to ruin it.

CSS: Specificity Wars (JPEG Image, 900x900 pixels)

Now this is how specificity should be taught. While I appreciate the whole multiply IDs by 100, classes by 10 and add them up along with the html elements, I don't like that teaching method because it just isn't accurate. 11 HTML elements won't take precedence over 1 class. So that method, while a quick and dirty hack easily understood by math geeks, is not technically accurate. But this way of teaching it is accurate, and far more logical. I mean, 11 Storm Troopers aren't going to beat Darth Vadar, right? Obviously.

CSS branching techniques

This article nails just about exactly how I do my CSS patching. The only difference being that I have little love for IE5 on the Mac, so I haven't been importing an ie5mac.css file. Same goes for version 4 browsers.

Orson Reviews Serenity

"And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made."

Almost makes you consider forgiving him for his Homosexual Marriage and Civilization bullshit. But then again, not really. At all. I do however share his sentiment that Ender's Game must be made this good, or not at all. Now we'll just have to see if he get over his whole mormon affliction and let the best person possible make his movie. Might have to wait until he dies.

Sheldon and ProFont

Setting up a new programming environment, but I'd misplaced my Sheldon Narrow. So here's the link again so I can download these excellent little programming fonts. Of course I'll have to run them through the encoding test to see what their foreign language support is like. But I'll have to switch over to MingLiU (or some such unicode font) anyway when it's time to play with trad chinese again.

PSPad editor supports UTF-8

I've been looking for a simple editor that supports UTF-8 encoding without adding a BOM (byte order mark) for two or three years now. To have at last found an alternative to UltraEdit is a releif. I won't even care if it sucks.

Update: as I'm figuring out how to use this app I'm compiling a list of tips/tricks on ta-da: PSPad tips/tricks

ViewSonic: Products: Desktop Displays: CRT Monitors: Graphic Series: G220fB

When I get the check for my next project this is what I'm going to get. Jeff got his for $650 (w/ free shipping) a year ago, the price looks like it has dropped a couple hundred (based on a froogle search), if I can find someplace that has one in stock that is.

find your whiteboards

…for when you lose the obscure address.

Dash It All

From The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst,

5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens - to set off phrases.

Background

I'm re-reading The Elements of Typographic Style for the third time. Every time I learn new things based on what I have been working on in-between readings. This time the section on Dashes, Slashes and Dots really caught my eye, since I've been trying to learn how to more appropriately use these analphabetic symbols. Here's what Bringhurst has to say about a bad habit that I'd picked up somewhere:

The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed by many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

And here is what he recommends instead:

Used a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.

With that advice in mind, here are a variety of HTML experiments:

em dash, no space

some text—some more text

en dash, non-breaking space

some text – some more text

hyphen, non-breaking space

some text - some more text

en dash, thinspace

some text – some more text

en dash, en space

some text – some more text

en dash, em space

some text – some more text

hyphen, thinspace

some text - some more text

Note: It shouldn't be a big surprise that Internet Explorer doesn't support thin space or en space, instead inserting what appears to be an em space.

No Rest For The Wicked -- an online comic

I haven't read enough of the comic to give an endorsement yet, but thought I'd blog this for the typography, and the interesting sentence structure navigation, something I've experimented with but not yet had success. In this case it comes off as almost a "cloud", which were trendy for like 2 days, but I never really bought as a navigation tool. Just let me sort the damn tags by frequency. Back to the sentence structure nav – I like the concept of integrating the navigation into the contents of the site. I'm starting to have my doubts as to whether people even use navigation (outside applications), since searching is so much more efficient. If it is true that people don't use navigation as much as search, then putting the navigation in with the content might catch a visitor with their brain actually turned on, not just in scan mode. Or it might even catch them scanning, a process during which normal nagivation bars may be ignored. Anyway, Something to be experimented with on personal sites, not professional work.

SabrinaJeffries.com Redesign Is Live

Here's what I've been working on in my free time for the last 6 months (ok, so maybe only 3 count since I took most of June, July and August off): www.sabrinajeffries.com

Back in the spring it took me several collages and 4 mockups, each evolving from the last until I scrapped them and just did something different for the last, to finally nail the design.

Beyond the design challenge this project has several interesting aspects to it. The Information Architecture had crept out of control on the last site. It needed to be stripped back to promoting essential information, and tucking the extensive peripheral content aside where it can be found by those who want it. With all that content just about every page utilizes all three columns in the design. I had to establish guidelines for what type of content went in each column. This is also the highest profile client that I've worked for so far. Her books regularly make the New York Times Bestseller list, and she is involved in one way or another in 8 releases next year.

It's been an exciting challenge, taking on such a large site single-handedly, but the heavy HTML production in September was rather grueling (all my own fault for slacking off all summer). I'm looking forward to not getting on the computer after work, and when I've recouped a bit starting some new projects. Next up is an online book trade in Ruby on Rails, along with a redesign of this site.

Scratching Post

Photos on Flickr: Fritz Attacking the Scratching Post

I made the cats a couple pieces of scratching furniture a couple months ago. One is a simple "L" shaped peice (like a couch with no arms or legs) that protects the carpet that they'd been scratching on the step up to the office. They don't use it that often, but they've stopped scratching the carpet; mission accomplished. The other is this upright post that I built because I was on a roll. It's a piece of scrap 4x6 wrapped in carpet, the seems protected with extra-thick leather. It's all held together with sheetrock screws.

For about a month the cats wouldn't touch the thing. I'd clearly put too much effort into it, and they wanted to see me suffer. Recently we decided to push the TV hutch all the way against the wall where it belongs (original furniture floorplan) freeing up more space between the living room and cat dining room. It also let us open up the left "wing" of the hutch and put the scratching post under it. The cats love it now. The Fritz has become very territorial, attacking the Milton whenever he goes to use it. Very entertaining.