I stumbled on this tonight:

I absolutely love it. It’s plain, simple, and perfect.

There were other things I was going to write, but I’m tired and having image uploading issues. Suffice it to say, if I’m not completely lazy, there will be changes around here (including, hopefully, an increase in the frequency of posts).

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.

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.

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.

There’s been a lot of hype about how the internet is killing newspapers. Armed with two recent headlines from the Lansing State Journal, I must ask: is this actually a bad thing? I mean, think of the rigorous standards leading to the creation of these two headlines:

5-14 Inches of White Stuff Dumped on Area

“White Stuff”? So, what, cocaine is now falling from the sky? Or feathers? Or manna? Your colloquilisms are forgivable in speech, not the newspaper.

Horse Put Down After Carriage Hit By Car

This one doesn’t sound that bad. It’s concise, right? But the problem with this one is the rhetoric–this puts the HORSE’s death as the most important component of the accident–the only thing that made the event newsworthy, in fact. Which it may very well be; I think most accidents are reported as news only if there’s a death involved. But this headline puts the animal component above the human component. A horse’s life is not more important than a human’s.

So, really, newspapers, if you want to survive the digital age, stop making headlines that read like they’ve come off Twitter.

I’m learning!

I created this image in Illustrator, using this tutorial as a guide. Not bad, considering it’s the first thing I’ve ever done in Illustrator, unless you count me using it to trace images to create my banners.

I like Moby, and enjoy reading his blog except for when he’s being political, as he has been for the last, oh, nine months or so–he’s extremely liberal, to the extent of (and, in some ways, beyond) “OH EM GEE APOKYLIPS” if McCain wins. (Which is the great thing about believing in God–He’s in control either way!) I just had to laugh at today’s post, though. I know he’s just being facetious when he suggests giving right-wing fundamentalists Oklahoma to found their own sovereign nation, but, really? Are you going to push the Cherokees out again in order to do so? Because your idea totally isn’t a return to Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal in the first place!

Honestly, I think I’m more surprised he didn’t suggest giving away Alaska instead.

From the Lansing State Journal: Man, 24, Shot Dead in South Lansing

What gets me isn’t that there was yet another murder in Lansing, though of course that’s horrible, or even that, as always, the victim was “such a nice boy.” (This is a commentary for another day, but dead people are always portrayed as saints. I’m sure this guy was nice, but c’mon, are drug dealers never killed like this? “Man, it sucks that Bob got shot, but I’m so not surprised. Dude was always totally wasted and picking fights.” Makes me wish we were operating under the Speaker for the Dead model.)

No–the thing that got me was this quote:

“These kids,” she added, with sadness coming into her voice, “they can’t just settle things with their fists. When you shoot somebody, they don’t come back. It affects the family. It affects the neighborhood.”

What about settling things with words? If you’ve got violent tendencies, take them out on video games or at the gym, people. I like to chop veggies when I’m angry or stressed–it turns the energy into something productive (and tasty). Fistfights are still acts of violence, and even if there’s a legitimate reason for the violence, there are better ways to pursue justice.

A friend of mine from grad school works at a company that promotes magazines.  Apparently the P.R. director got approached by the editor of this magazine:

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.