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Month: October 2007

The In-Between Moments Transcribed

Travel and airports seem to show up on Twitter all the time. The in-between times that were private moments of boredom and pain become a kind of blues refrain echoing through Twitter and the other microblogging venues.

It’s Dave Winer stuck in the Lone Star State, Jeremy Keith boarding a plane to San Francisco, Hugh Macleod picking up his baggage, or Steve Gillmor interviewing someone walking through an airport terminal. We work in the off hours, and now we transcribe our private moments of boredom and wedge a conversation into walk to the security gate.

Perhaps it’s Ev Williams fault, asking us what we’re doing— when we’re doing something very boring. But because it’s boring, we need an outlet for our pain. Twitter beckons.

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Paul Graham’s ‘Geeks eye’ View of Philosophy…

Plato

Paul Graham’s essay on “How to do Philosophy” deserves a serious response. And there have been some, here, here, and here. Like many who begin studying philosophy, he’s disappointed that he didn’t find any magical, universal truths. And in reaction plays “gotcha” philosophy, trying to show why the history of philosophy is filled with wrong ideas. He ends up with a combination of early Wittgenstein and Utilitariansim. But this is clearly a geek’s eye view of philosophy. It doesn’t conform, so it must be bent and shaped into a reasonable algorithm. I’d suggest that Graham read more widely in late Wittgenstein and the work of Richard Rorty on Utilitarianism. Philosophy is more often about deepening a question, than the kind of fixed answers he seems to be searching for.

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The Horror Revealed on a ‘View Source’

Thinking of relation between surface to depth, surface to the underlying material. These are fundamental questions when thinking about visual design. The ink on paper designer has tremendous freedom to create whatever the imagination can conjure.

The fundamental materials are the printing process and the selection of paper type. Clearly a print designer can imagine things that can’t be produced in black ink on newsprint. Generally, an experienced print graphic designer takes print production methods into account when starting a visual design. It’s called designing into the production process. When you do this, things go smoothly when it comes to to fire up the presses and put ink to paper. When you don’t there’s panic at the press check.

Of course, the fantasy is that you can make the surface manifest just as it exists in your imagination— the physical world has no claim on the execution of design. This, to some extent, is the state of much of visual design on the Web. I blame photoshop. While it’s true that just about any visual design can be built for the screen— it’s not always a good idea to do so. The horror revealed on a ‘View Source’ tells you why.

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Coffee and Nicotine with Tom and Iggy

Somehow I like this better on YouTube. The story is that both were smokers who had quit, this short scene got them started again. Both eventually quit again. I read in the NY Times Op-ed page today that they’re considering creating a non-addictive cigarette. A lot of kids start smoking young and keep the habit because of the addictive quality of cigarettes. The idea is that all new smokers would have to opt for the non-addictive version. That would make it easier for them to quit. Kind of strange concept, I wonder if it could work. Tom and Iggy probably would have opted for them in this scene.

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