I almost missed the chance to wish Benjamin Franklin happy birthday. 300 years young.
I had no idea how important the guy was, or how influential and famous he was in his own day, until I recently read several books about the revolutionary generation (Founding Brothers, etc.). Or, I should say, I knew he was very important, of course — but he turned out to be a much bigger deal than I realized. He was one of the most famous men in Europe in his time, and was almost solely responsible for lending intellectual and cultural credibility to the new US.
When I pass his grave in Philadelphia, I always smile. There he is, the great man, lying right there. What’s cool is that people toss pennies onto his grave (homage to “a penny saved is a penny earned”) and it’s right across the road from the US Mint, where they make pennies.
Ben… I would tell you to rest well. But we need your ghost kicking some people in the pants right now. So get to it.
Why is Internet Explorer unsafe? § Browse Happy
This Browse Happy site is sort of like the Apple Switchers mashed with a hippy version of “Just Say No.” But it’s effective, I guess.
I know so many people whose computers have become swamped by spyware, adware, and other system-crippling detritus, that I now tell as many people as possible to get a different browser. Firefox is now so robust, there’s no reason not to use it. Keep in mind, it’s not perfect and won’t stop *everything* but it’s so much better than IE it’s not even funny. Really. No laughing.
If you get as much of a kick out of “map vs. landscape” conundra as I do, take a look at mc.clintock.com, where someone has created an illustrated virtual directory of all of his possessions, mapped throughout his home, down to the postcares in the second bureau drawer in the second floor study.
There’s a movement afoot to create an open-source personal-information-management application (PIM) called Chandler. Much like Firefox was developed from an open source effort, some smart people are workingon making something that we can use to organize our crazy info-heavy lives.
I haven’t really found anything that fits (or interfaces well with) the organic, messy nature of how human beings really work, and figured this thing would be similar.
Much to my pleasant surprise, there is a lot of very smart thinking going on about it. There’s an excellent page, written by the articulate Lisa Dusseault all about the “Vision” for the application, and it sounds like the kind of thing I wish we could write for every new development idea we have where I work. It actually reads like a combination of Design Spec and Conceptual Manifesto for personal information management applications in general.
Here is a taste:
Greater Productivity through Procrastination
So much of incoming information can’t be dealt with now. Sometimes we just can’t take action yet. Sometimes we need a different environment to read carefully. Sometimes we could take action but shouldn’t due to higher-priority work. Many items can and should be dealt with later. It should be easy for the user to defer action on email and have the client ensure that it doesn’t get lost. In Chandler the user gives the item a tickler, a trigger that will return the item to their attention later. When an item has a tickler it has been stamped as a task — this shows how stamping permeates the design. The word tickler comes from the David Allen task management system which suggests a manual technique for maintaining a set of reminders and a habit of looking at them to see which are due.
I think I’m going to print this thing out and make everybody dealing with any kind of internal “desktop” interface at work read it.
Shortcut to: Drewspace Archive ==>
Or see the list of all months on it here.
For several years (starting in 2000!), I kept an old-school Blogger blog where I used to work. Because I haven’t had an ftp login for that account for a long time, I wasn’t able to import the entries into WordPress properly.
But I finally took a little time to suck down the whole site using a cool little app called SiteSucker.
The results are clunky, but at least I now have my whole blog history under one URL. So, drop on by the newly uploaded Drewspace Archive to see what I was blabbing about circa 2000-2002. I’m sure you’re all dying to.
Virtual worlds can have a deep emotional impact on people. This is as true of an old-fashioned BBS or discussion forum like The Well, as well as for MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like the recently deceased Asheron’s Call 2.
Unfortunately, the more resources it takes to run a particular world, the more money it has to make. If it doesn’t keep in the black, it dies. Someone posted a sad little log of the last moments with their friends in this world here.
Things like this intrigue me to no end. I realize that this wasn’t a truly real world that disappeared. That is, the people behind the avatars/characters they played are still alive, sitting at their screens. They had plenty of time to contact one another and make sure they could all meet again in some other game, so it wasn’t necessarily like a tragic sudden diaspora (though some people do go through such an experience if the world they’ve counted on has suddenly had the plug pulled).
Still, the human mind (and heart?) only needs a few things to make a virtual place feel emotionally significant, if not ‘real.’ Reading the log linked above, you see that the participants do have perspective on their reality, even if you think their pining is a little ren-faire cheesy. But they can’t help being attached to the places they formed friendships in, played and talked in, for so long. It seems a little like leaving college — if you made meaningful friendships there, you can never really go back to that context again, even if you keep up with friends afterward. Except instead of graduation, you stand in the quad and part of you “dies” along with the whole campus.
I think the discussion linked above about the Well articulates pretty well just what these kinds of communities can mean to people. Further discussion and inquiry goes on all over the ‘net, including a site called “Project Daedalus” about the “psychology of mmorpgs”. (Edited to add: I also found a new publication called “Games & Culture” with at least one article specific to serious academic study of MMOGs. And I’m sure there are plenty more at places like Academic Gamers and Gamasutra.)
Christmas is almost upon us. What it mainly means to me is that I get to see my daughter for about 10 days and be her dad. I get to see my parents and be their kid. Everything else feels pretty extraneous right now.
It’s amazing how hard humanity works to create so many different early winter-solstice holidays for feasting and celebrating. It all feels like whistling in the dark to me; like we’re all encouraging one another to keep up our spirits before the dark and cold descend with all their fury. Maybe it only feels that way because I’ve started getting used to Pennsylvania winters?
At any rate, I hope everybody has an excellent holiday season, whatever holiday it may be for you.
But if you don’t know how already, you just may want to learn to whistle.
I ran across a link to The World Of Kane today, and it’s really cool. Lots of design examples from the 60s-70s. And lo and behold, there were a bunch of stills from my favorite show as a kid, Space 1999. The caption says this is a “Sorella lamp by Studio Technico Harvey.”
Such a jolt of deja-vu. I haven’t seen an episode of this series in years. I may have to rent them soon, now. Especially now that I realize there’s so much cool design to look at … it did something for me as a kid (of 8 or 9) though, I’ll admit. But at the time it just felt *cool*…
But then again, anything looks cool with Zienia Merton standing in front of it. (I’ll confess, I think I had a tiny crush on her even when I was 9.)
via Boing Boing
A while back, the big deal was that red wine was suddenly great for you. While the hype was a little overblown, it turns out it was quite true, much to the happiness of those of us who enjoy red wine. (Especially Merlot, in spite of what that character in “Sideways” thinks.)
Well now dark chocolate is getting the same kind of hype. For a long time I’ve preferred dark chocolate to milk or other stuff — and now anything but 70% dark tastes awfully sweet and milky to me. Evidently companies like Hershey and Dove are now pushing their dark chocolates (fancier and more isoflavone-packed versions of them too) because increasing publicity of the health benefits are making it the latest medically sanctified indulgence.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I’d care if it was as bad for me as tobacco, I’d still have to eat the stuff.
While I used to be a big Ghirardelli fan, I’m now more partial to Lindt and especially the utterly perfect carnal tongue-gasm known as Scharffen-Berger. So, if you’re looking for something delicious for the holidays — or if you’re wondering what to get me for Xmas — look no further …
I ran across a new article in Wired about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about immortality — using technology to transform ourselves into everlasting containers of our essential being — and it occurred to me that the concept behaves much like the horcrux from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Maybe Arthur C Clarke was right about technology and magic?
I had no idea Google had a repository of all its special-occasion logos.
Adam Gopnik has an excellent piece on C.S. Lewis in this week’s New Yorker: Prisoner of Narnia.
He reminds us of a few important things to keep in mind about Lewis (he’s viewed differently in Britain, for instance), and discusses his brand of religious belief, and how it kept him in a sort of internal tension between belief and myth.
Gopnik manages to articulate something that’s always bugged me about the Narnia stories as “Christian” allegory:
Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
Now who’s going to write *that* story?? I’d like to see it. But, alas, I probably won’t. Instead I’ll see Lewis’ stories further glorified in film.
It’s not that I don’t like his stories. They’re fine, really. Old-fashioned, but fine, and quite inspired and beautiful in places. But I don’t think they’re very accurate or helpful as Christian allegory.
Philip Pullman, the author of the “His Dark Materials” books, has made clear his own feelings on the Narnia books. In the wake of Disney’s working so hard to publicize the new Narnia films, and evidently to capitalize on the huge evangelical Christian market for the stories, Pullman has been pretty strident. In the Guardian:
‘If the Disney Corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they’ll just have to tell lies about it,’ Pullman told The Observer.
Pullman believes that Lewis’s books portray a version of Christianity that relies on martial combat, outdated fears of sexuality and women, and also portrays a religion that looks a lot like Islam in unashamedly racist terms.
‘It’s not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue. The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself, is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books,’ he said.
Well, I think that may be a bit harsh. You do find certain kinds of love, but not precisely the mix I happen to find in the Gospels. In fact, great swaths seem to be missing.
At any rate, I think as fantasy the stories are pretty successful. I don’t hold them in holy reverence like so many do, though. But I think that until I read these articles, I was sort of afraid to admit that out loud, for some reason.
About this blog
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