One of my clients is pretty heavily reliant on Macs. This is fine by me… when I’m in the office. But it’s kind of difficult to look at Keynote files from my home PC.

Keynote, to the unaware, is an excellent presentation program. It’s part of iWork, which is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office. Keynote is the parallel to PowerPoint. In fact, it’s *better* than PowerPoint (though to be fair, I haven’t had a chance to experiment with PowerPoint 2008).

And yet: PowerPoint wins, I argue, because Microsoft makes Office for Macs.

Seriously. Keynote is great. Why can’t Apple make it for Windows machines? To force people to buy their computers? Wouldn’t their software stand a better chance of competing against Office if they were cross-platform?

Good, user-centered design is often simple and elegant.

I just wish the process of designing was as well.

It’s been a while since I did an image dump:

The Fill the Bus project is being run by the Center for Service Learning and Civic Engagement. We needed a very fast turnaround for this. I think it took me about 20 minutes total to create this image in Illustrator.

Interestingly enough, the font (Ravie) was a random pick. I wanted a font that would be fun and bouncy and chose it because it sounded like it might fit. Normally I’m pretty obsessive about font selection, but this time the first try actually worked well. I love it when things work out in my favor.

I’ve been playing the most recent Prince of Persia game over the last few days. The basic premise is that the unnamed “Prince” (actually a wandering tomb raider) gets lost and stumbles into an abandoned city. As it was built to imprison the god Ahriman (of Zoroastrianism), its decaying state means that the defenses are weakened, and about 5-10 minutes into the game Ahriman is partially released. The rest of the game is spent fighting the corruption spread by Ahriman and his minions and renewing the fertile grounds that act as his prison walls.

I think it was when Elika, the princess of the city, described the population’s decline from several thousand a few hundred years previously to fewer than 200 that it struck me: Prince of Persia is really a rather apt metaphor for the urban decay of Detroit, Flint, and, well, the rest of Michigan. Detroit in particular fits this mold well. The population declines; the merchants stop coming. Corruption–physical, political, metaphorical–inescapably spreads. The way the auto industry is faltering–it’s like the final seal containing Ahriman is cracking.

What, then, can we do about it? If only the metaphor carried through to the healing of the city! In the game, the Prince and Elika, with the help of Elika’s magic provided by the creator god Ohrmazd, kill Ahriman’s lieutenants and heal the fertile grounds. I suppose there are urban renewal programs and churches to “meet” both counts. But is it enough? And how can more be done? What can be done to bring Detroit out of its ruin?

I have an uncle who lives on a farm in northern Wisconsin. He’s been sending weekly missives for ages, but he recently started a blog: oldgrayegg.blogspot.com. Go read it. His life is more interesting than mine.

I’m very happy to be done with grad school. The professional environment, even when still centered on academe, is a much better fit for me. But every once in a while, strange to say, I miss it.

Usually, this strange nostalgia is centered around some sort of interesting research question. Tonight, it happens to be digital storytelling. One of my coworkers sent me a link to Bill Gates’ Facebook profile. Here’s the thing: this is getting to be a genre. There’s Austenbook, which retells Pride and Prejudice, or the Passion of the Christ, which came out right before Easter. And on Twitter, there’s the fictional adventures of Othar (a character from the ever-excellent Girl Genius), or @publicdomain, which just finished tweeting the entire text of Moby Dick, or @manyvoices, a collaborative storytelling effort from middle school students nationwide, started by Maryland teacher @mrmayo (his classes have since moved on to other digital writing and storytelling efforts).

At this point, of course, my inner lit major is bemoaning the sad state of literature in our day and age. The rhetor, however, is fascinated. What is the barest form a story can take? These forms, apparently. Plot, after all, is little more than a set of people and events. Austenbook may not be the most interesting read in the world, but it’s still the story.

Or is it? Does it stand alone without the reader already knowing the context? I mean, in reality, anyone’s facebook profile is functionally a story. Mine certainly tells a distilled version of my life over the last few weeks–a bridal shower for a friend, a baby shower for another, Star Trek, transitioning into roommatelessness. My twitter feed, interestingly, tells a slightly different story–a trip to the dentist, a phone interview (I really have no idea why they’re so different, which, of course, only adds to my personal fascination).

Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that nobody ever actually reads either a facebook profile or twitter feed as a story. Your status update is just one among many, and while one person’s may be more intriguing than another person’s updates, Facebook and Twitter are less like hearing the story of one’s life and more like reading a single sentence off each page in a book.

So: why do people force stories into tools that really can’t support them?

Perhaps more frightening: how much context do people create for the status updates they receive on their feeds?

For the record, I’ll be picking away at redesigning this site (and particularly the portfolio) over the next few weeks. If you’re visiting it live and it looks particularly wonky, that’s why.

I’m editing a coworker’s paper, and came across this quote:

“While politics is about power, an ethical framework can be seen as a ‘counterbalance’ to power, or at leat as a way to mitigate some of the potentially negative impacts of power.”

(Source: Cathy Gibson, 2009).

Mostly, I’m throwing this up here for the sake of storing it somewhere, but it really synthesizes some of the vaguely politicky thoughts that have been stewing in the back of my head. Namely, this is why the Right cares about issues like Gay marriage and abortion and the sexual exploits of politicians and whatnot–it represents a decay, perceived or real, in the mitigating force keeping those in power in check. And it’s why presidents like Bush, love him or hate him, could get re-elected: again, real or perceived, as a proclaimed Christian, many who voted for him perceived him as being guided by an internal counterbalance to the power–the human conscience.

It’s the entire purpose of the law: it’s not solely about keeping society in order, but it provides a structure by which leaders can help society maintain this order without losing control or, more frequently, gaining absolute control. Without moral absolutes, what is there to stop those in power from seizing it? Indeed, without moral absolutes, what does it even matter?

It occurs to me that I should probably mention that I was interviewed for Beyond Words, a blog for professional writers, editors, and designers. The interview went up about a week ago. Featured in this interview: a really goofy picture of me eating sushi.

SciFi's new logo

Apparently, SciFi has been trying to rebrand itself. Now, I admit, I don’t watch SciFi at all (or TV, really), so I have no idea if this has been necessary. But I will say this; the logo doesn’t look particularly usable across platforms. Maybe they don’t care about letterheads or business cards, or maybe they’ve got a flattened, monochromatic version for that. I am kind of intrigued by the lights and shadows–it reminds me of those pictures of dawn from outer space, but I have a hard time seeing what they’ve presented here as actually usable. An effective logo is a relatively small graphical representation of the business entity. The company is supposed to be able to splash it everywhere as a sort of placeholder for its corporate info; the consumer should be able to look at it and understand, if only subconsciously, who the company is and what it does. I think the only way this logo works as a logo is as the big block letters alone–but then you miss a lot of the symbolism with the lights and shadows–but with those in, this is too big to use as a logo. Sorry, Syfy, your old logo was better.

As for the name, I’m reminded of a few years ago when Beaner’s, the local coffee chain, wanted to expand and discovered that its name is actually a racist term in California for Mexicans. (I don’t think anyone I talked to had ever heard of this before.) This is a good reason to change the name of a franchise. Since the logo has always been a big “B,” Beaner’s decided to play off that, and renamed itself “Biggby’s.”

There was a public outcry, of course. People don’t like change. We in Michigan were especially frustrated, as most of us had never even heard the term “Beaners” outside the context of coffee. Personally, though, my biggest objection wasn’t that they changed the name–it was that they changed it to something without meaning. The coffee shop hadn’t been founded by a guy named Biggby or anything. Why didn’t they just change it to Big B’s? Was that name already taken? Why use the homonym?

That’s the heart of my problem with Syfy. I understand that they’re moving away from solely broadcasting science fiction shows, but Syfy as a word either says the exact same thing as “Sci Fi” (i.e. “We do science fiction!”), or it says nothing at all. And to a lot of actual fans of the old Sci Fi, I think what the new name conveys is this: “We are a horrible parody of what we used to be.”