Friday, July 29, 2005

Friday fun: someone let loose 10,000 bouncy-balls all at once on the streets of SanFran, allegedly for a commercial. Wow. Via BoingBoing.

Monday, July 25, 2005

This one is for Kelly and my sister. I had to drop off a package just a little while ago, and right across from the DHL drop box is City Knits. It's a good thing they're closed on Mondays during the summer, otherwise I would never have made it back to work. I don't really knit, but it's hard not to drool over all the luscious yarns they offer, and the buy some thinking I'll magically learn. Anyway, I'm sure there are tons of these pages around, but I found a handful of really adorable, free patterns via the City Knits site. The best one was this great bag. Also, I found an annual crochet magazine that I definitely want to check out - it looks like it has some great projects. I guess I know what I'll be doing once the cool weather hits...


Friday, July 22, 2005


Cell phone cameras are the new toy cameras. I knew I had to have one after I heard about Sent, an travelling exhibition of photographs taken (by both professionals and amateurs) with their cell phones. I revisited their site today and was reminded how nice (and how awful) toy camera photos can be.

Thursday, July 21, 2005





Philip Stewart, an ecologist at Oxford, has developed a new representation for the periodic table (top image). Go here for a more detailed view. I want a copy of the Edgar Longman version it was based on (lower image) to hang on my wall. Via Slate.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

For anyone who is interested, this is why I want go back to school:



More map mashups.

Google is offering free downloads of a fairly robust world-mapping software, Google Earth. This software, although fairly new, has already been hacked (by the appropriately named Google Earth Hacks) in ways similar to the mashups that I mentioned two weeks ago, making for more fun and really interesting mappings. Now if only Google would hurry up and come out with the Mac version of this software.

Monday, July 18, 2005

After a week of trying to turn the conversation away from tech-talk at the Strings 2005 conference in Toronto, I'm back. Still, I can't seem to shake studies of motion and nature. I saw this really awesome video about "Chungian motion" last night - see a short excerpt here.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I've posted too many photos to my old flickr site, so I've had to make a new one to prevent too many old photos from being deleted. So go here instead to view more travel photos.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005



Saucier + Perotte, who designed the Perimeter Institute building (above), has a great portfolio. It's worth checking out.



Daniel Libeskind (who won the post-9/11 WTC competition) is designing the new Royal Ontario Museum annex. It's under construction right now, they've put up only the steel skeleton. The skeleton itself is impressive: it juts way out into the street. I hope to stop by there again today and take some photos, but in the meantime (and in the future), check the construction webcam the ROM has set up on the hotel across the street.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Happy Birthday Penguin!

I went to a bookstore in Waterloo on Saturday to pick up a Toronto guidebook. While at the bookstore, I saw these amazing Penguin books. As usual, they were wafer-thin and cheap, but Penguin has reinvented themselves for a 70th birthday series and have great authors and great graphic design. I was compelled to buy two from the birthday series (a tiny Jamie Oliver book of recipies and a couple of Zadie Smith short stories), a copy of from their new Great Ideas series of sumptuous letterpressed-cover books (a selection of these below), and their bookcover-design retrospective. Let's see if I can resist going back for more.

Thursday, July 07, 2005





This has been the summer to catch up on my vintage movie screenings. Instead of being a good girl and packing for tomorrow's trip to Toronto, I'm watching Bullitt on TCM. I'm always up for a good Steve McQueen movie. Bullitt's title sequence is really stellar, and it turns out it's by Pablo Ferro, who also did the only other title sequences I have ever bothered to remember: The Thomas Crown Affair (another Steve McQueen, the first series of stills above), Dr. Strangelove, The Russians Are Coming (above). Be sure to catch the short Bullitt movie on Ferro's site.

Internet Map Mashups

There's a lot of hacking going on today. Google Maps and Yahoo are both now offering programming tools that enable their mapping services to get "hacked," i.e. programmed not only to display streets and highways but, for instance, to show craigslist apartment listings, or locations of crimes and police beats, or local traffic conditions. Awesome.

Via WiredNews.

Cell phone recycling.

Ben and I both still our old cell phones hanging around, but it won't be for much longer. All of these places will give you cash and/or affiliate store credit for your old cell phones. They'll even pay for postage. The constituent parts from most phones can still be used, refurbished, or at least recycled, which all three businesses do. Via NYT.
RipMobile
Old Cell Phone.com
Cell For Cash.com
There is even one offered for groups who are fundraising.

Also, if you're feeling altruistic and willing to spend a little time researching, you can donate your phones to not-for-profit agencies. Google "cell phone donation" and your favorite cause, and I guarantee you'll come up with at least a handful of sites that will get you started.

Okay, I know this reeks of the kind of self-esteem-powerhousing, managerial, self-help genre epitomized by my high-school health teacher's favorite book, 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, but some of the ideas presented at 43Folders, although obsessive, are actually worthwhile. Actually, one of 43Folders' founders coined a term and spawned a whole movement of on- and offline efficiency geekdom: Life Hacker, which is a somewhat more palatable concept for freewheeling types like me to digest. My favorite lifehack? The bookmarklet.

To those who are wondering where I found the wishlist and flickr buttons, I made them. Sort of.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

I just returned from my first 3D movie; of course 3D glasses were required. It was totally awesome.



You know, when I first heard about Make magazine, I wanted to hate it because I thought it was a better-publicized version of Readymade. But it's not, and I love it. It's published by O'Reilly - whose books I see on the bookshelf of every computer geek I know (including, recently, my own bookshelf) - and it's all about how to repurpose technologies and hack-your-own-version of a bunch of useful stuff. I just subscribed to Make's podcast, since it's less commitment than a regular subscription, and therefore just learned how to hack the firmware of an $11 disposable digital camera (whose pictures the retailer is supposed to extract and save for you - for a fee) so you can download the pictures yourself. Next up on my podcast playlist: all about biodiesel.

An interesting interview with soldiers about their time in Iraq aired last night on the Newshour.

Monday, July 04, 2005

In Canada on the 4th.

Ben breezed through town on Saturday/Sunday, and rather than dropping him off to catch the train in Windsor as I had originally planned, I decided to drive him all the way up to Waterloo and stay overnight. On the way up, we stopped at a McDonald's, obviously operated by hockey fans, and met with a sunny border-crossing. Once there, on our way around campus, we saw a dude covered in tattoos, then ate at a tiny Japanese-Korean place, and stopped at a convenience store run by a middle-eastern man who had never heard the word "utensil" until Ben used it and was so excited he wrote it down to use again.

















Sunday, July 03, 2005

Tigers 10, Yankees 2

Mom, Dad and I saw the Tigers clobber the Yanks on Friday night; we left during the 7th inning stretch because my parents couldn't take the pain of the loss anymore. Needless to say, I was cheering on my boy Nook and the rest of the Detroit boys - they deserve to win once in a while.











A taste of summer

The first round of blackberries are ripening in the backyard. Time to start planning when to make that blackberry pie...





Saturday, July 02, 2005

When I took Dad to the Chinese grocery, I saw these great cans.

How 2.0


It turns out that sometimes my dad is way hipper than I am. Maybe it's because he still reads Popular Science (I know - didn't that mag die sometime after the tech boom?) and its new column, How2.0. The column is like a marriage of Readymade and Slashdot, or maybe a small-scale spinoff of Make magazine. It just gets the geek in me all excited. Here's some of the fun stuff listed:

For anyone who don't yet have a Gmail account (or those who have them and don't know what to do with all your extra invites), there are a bunch of websites that give away donated Gmail accounts. Here's one.

Convert your old game consoles into portable versions.

Send your camera (with some minor mods) up on a kite to take aerial photos.

Friday, July 01, 2005

RFID is sometimes really cool,

especially when the responders are embedded in casino chips. And now Walmart is getting into the act, too.

Go tigers

I'm @ tiger stadium watching tino hit practice homers.

Unexpected

Found a great sign in the parking garage downtown; we also saw two really unusual felt banners by Roy Lichtenstein, Thunderbolt and Pistol; the detailing on the banners was really amazing.





I stumbled upon

these odd leaded-glass windows when the 'rents and I were trying to kill a little time before the art museum opened this morning. We wandered around in the law quad for a while, happened to gain access to one of the halls and found these windows, each one describing some small-time vice. Along with them, each set of windows has a latin inscription about the basis of law. See more on my flickr site. They remind me so much of something Edward Gorey would do. If you're in Ann Arbor, they're not to be missed.