Laura just posted some pics from the new city library in Seattle. I think it looks great. See her June 10th entry at her site.

I’ve posted here about GTD and similar sexy-computer-user fetish objects (Moleskine books, fountain pens, PowerBooks) but all of these and spiritual guru Merlin Mann will all convene at a meet-up in SF. Gift from Merlin

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz? It’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by Frank Herbert where Herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, I’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

As I posted earlier, I’m undertaking to better understand the basics of the DOM, Javascript, and DHTML on my pilgrimage to being Ajax competent. I’m using Ajax in Action as my guide.

Recently at work, we had need of a basic ‘dashboard’. It’s a pretty simple design: boxes on the left with one level of drop down for menus, a big, central ‘content’ section in the middle.

I was thinking of how I wanted to implement this.

1. It needed to be flexible (i.e. layout should be described in an XML file)
2. It needed to be updatable without touching the JavaScript (to get a feel for the Ajax design)
3. It needed to be somewhat visually appealing.

The goal was to use Javascript to create a 100% DOM rendered page that worked in IE and Firefox.

Here’s how I did it after the jump….

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I took the opportunity to read the autobiography of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, iWoz. Steve believes in “extreme ethics”: always tell the truth completely Steve was incredibly precocious in terms of becoming an engineer Steve seems to be one of the ’new atheism’ camp: Science, proof, reason, plus nothing else. So I never got any exposure to religion. Church, mass, communion. What is that? Seriously I couldn’t tell you. As for religion, if I asked, my dad would say, no, no, he was scientific. Science was the religion. We had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values.

In the following post I discuss potty topics. Consider yourself warned.

You wouldn’t think it, but my feet have been hurting. Bad. I couldn’t really believe it. It’s not lie i stand on my feet all day carving people with scalpels, or slowly planing off shavings on hulls or keels, or serve food. This was the most paradoxical part: I largely sit on my butt all day and stare at lights in a screen. But it is true. I tried to remedy the situation with some superfeet inserts for my Merrills, but these were apparently wearing out and my feet were hurting yet again. As such, it was time for a new shoe.

Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon. Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”. And then the answer became clear….

I have a new favorite coffee place in North Austin, and while I’m not excited about seeing all you sumzuhbitches there taking up all the outlets, I do like the ambience and the owners and I want their store to do well. So, if you have the inclination and are at the MoPac and 183 area, please come to Sodade Coffee. It’s much less-crowded than competitor Primo 360. It has the quietness of Epoch Coffee on a weekday but is several miles closer to my home and saves me some of that precious, precious petroleum. The other thing is that their choice of music is largely out of the jukebox of Steven Harms: Interpol, Pink Floyd, post-“Pepper” Beatles, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Helvetica-David-Carson/dp/B079N3Y4C6 I loved Hustwit’s movie, “Helvetica.” The feedback I heard during SXSW is that this film continues the cerebral exploration of our modern design sensibility.

Note the tab on the far right… the actual title was:

Introduction On May 14th, I competed at a Hackfest hosted by Podio. Podio is a customizable social networking application delivered as a service (aaS). After 8 hours of coding, I placed first in the competition and won a beautiful Apple Cinema Display. In this post I will cover my hack, how it was done, and lessons learned. Victori pretium it Background Let me first introduce the various companies involved and technologies provided or implemented in the solution. I think of these as the ingredients in the recipe that allowed me to code my offering. Podio In case you haven’t noticed, people are spending phenomenally large amounts of time on social networks.

I love typewriters. They’re amazing machines. They do something amazing (put letters together) in a consistent way (great for people with poor handwriting) and they’re shockingly simple to reason about. Make no doubt, typewriter repair technicians are a gifted sort of artisan that has been slowly disappearing from the world, but the idea that “it’s a piano, but for the alphabet” has a simple resonance that is oddly seductive.

Here’s my Underwood:

My Introduction to Typewriters

Previously: In Memoriam Harold Harms

I suppose it all started early for me when my paternal grandfather gave me an Underwood that, I believe, my grandmother had found at a yardsale. My grandmother loved to visit garage- or yard-sales. I suppose she was always looking for a bargain, but I think she also had an anthropological interest in the effluvia on card tables: Who are these people, anyway? At any rate, sometime around 1983 I was given the Underwood and I clacked and banged on it as a toy for many years. Somewhere in history it was lost and, during the peak of the eBay era, I bought a replacement for it that I still have. I plan on taking it to a repair shop here in Manhattan now that the shop seems to be open again post-pandemic quarantine.

In any case, both the lost Underwood and my current Underwood are clunky, heavy devices.

But, like their musical cousins, typewriters were for most of their existence, effectively furniture, resident on desks or in offices. As early at 1892, patents were being issued for a portable typewriter models. Throughout the wars and the rise of the industrial age, multiple other “portable” typewriters came into existence, but they were still on the heavy end. I suppose I was thinking about how “a lighter, more fun, fashionable” typewriter might have been a time-period fellow-traveler for the “lighter, more versatile, solo woman wield-able” cameras (e.g. Leicas) that I saw in the “New Woman Behind the Camera” show.

Olivetti famously created a typewriter that was both light and fashion in 1969 when they shipped their gorgeous Valentine designed by Ettore Sotsass and Perry King. I love this device (as I’ve said before), and I did some examination of its presence in pop culture and how it tried to express a different idea of the relationship we could have with the device.

In 2001, my first Mac, the iMac, embodied computing as furniture. Its translucent white half-dome base housed a DVD drive that melded seamlessly into the surface, like some protean sci-fi spaceship.

From the dome’s apex rose a silver articulating arm suspending the screen - substantial enough to grab and adjust. You could pivot it down during afternoon slumps or angle it to show a friend iTunes visualizations. Light enough to carry, it could migrate to the living room to DJ parties. Encountered in le boudoir, it suggested taste, restraint, and an acceptable level of geekery in a way that wouldn’t make a guest think about doing a 180. Add on a slim, clicky keyboard; a one-button mouse; and surprisingly punchy spherical speakers and you had a computer that could be, as CEO Steve Jobs vision-cast, the hub of your digital life.

Heck, I started this blog on that machine.

This was computing’s last public era, before it retreated into the private universes of our misnamed “phones.” While this openness lived in the hardware’s noteworthy physical design, it was equally present in OSX’s Aqua interface. Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of nostalgia for Aqua’s aesthetics. I think these various nostalgia projects:

• a bag
• historical research
• a recreation of the Aqua UI as open source project

suggest a lament in our hearts:

Computers (phones) today make my heart sad. I want to remember computing when it didn’t make my heart sad. I want to see computers like that again.