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Available space
2007-09-26 20:19:00
My old boss at the planetarium had some of the best advice I've ever received as a teacher (though phrased in his own typically inimitable fashion): "Kids are like a gas - they expand to fit the available space."What he really meant was that if you had a planetarium with five children in it, it'd be just as noisy and rowdy as a planetarium with fifty kids. (This was totally true.) But what I'm sure he would have meant, or what I mean he would have meant if he'd meant to mean it (or something), is that any task - whether it's designing seminar invitations, like I'm doing at the moment, or giving a bunch of sixth graders a lecture on the solar system - expands to fit the space given. Because despite my best-intentioned plans of The Week Before My Holiday being catch-up time, well, stuff at work has just sort of exploded.The good news is that the reverse also seems to be true in this case, and I'll probably be able to compress all this last-minute mayhem into my remaining three ...
More About: Space , Available

Go and stop
2007-09-24 01:18:00
So this morning, Dad and I got up criminally early and drove to Moline for the Quad Cities Marathon, where Dad put in 13 miles for his first half marathon (rock on!) and I did the 5K, which, even if it isn't nearly as impressive, was still a lot of fun. And I managed to shave two minutes off my time from my last 5K and hit 27:45, which clocks a mile at just under nine minutes. As someone who doesn't call herself a runner, that makes me pretty happy, particularly considering that it wasn't the result of any actual training, just another few months of my normal activity schedule, which makes me think rah! better overall fitness.But here's the thing: I'm exhausted today, which doesn't make any sense. I mean, I get more exercise on an average Monday between the Zumba and the ballet and my lunchtime walk, and I got lots of sleep and ate really well yesterday (mmm, the Summit Restaurant & Bar in Iowa City with S, after hashing out our quickstep routine) ... so what gives? Granted, t...
More About: Stop

No rockstar behaviour here
2007-09-22 06:10:00
So, yes, Friday night and I'm in bed, not partying like a rock star, just sleepy after a very long week and muddling over stuff:1. Must get ready to go to NYC in a week with S and S(ofie)! So very excited.2. And would rather be planning trip to NYC while in same room with S, not 70-some-odd miles away. Boo hiss.3. Running a 5K on Sunday. Only a little run, but hey! a good break from the usual pace.4. And re: all the general training/dancing/cross-training/fitness stuff, went down to the YMCA today and had bioimpedance analysis done, wherein the way-cool aerobics instructor chick ran some current between my hand and foot and turned it into a bunch of useful numbers about my general fitness. Which ended up reinforcing most of what I sort of already suspected (need more endurance exercise, can't really cut any more calories without tanking overall metabolism, but otherwise doing pretty well), though it was nice to get some slightly more concrete evidence of the same ol' same ol' .....
More About: Behaviour , Rockstar

Yarr!
2007-09-19 15:44:00
Just in case ye've forgotten, mateys, today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Yarrr!And when you get tired of hearing everyone yelling 'Yarrr!' all the time, hop on over to this story about how the humble emoticon turns 25. Because we be full of holidays today! Yarr!(Better yet, combine the two with pirate emoticons for VBulletin or, for the old-school, just a little bit of P-( ... yarr!)

Filing fling
2007-09-17 19:32:00
You know those giant org charts - those big project management things that you put up on the wall and everyone scribbles on them and draws arrows and highlights things and such in an attempt to get stuff done with some degree of efficiency?Yeah. I need one of those for my whole life. An org chart for Dzesika ... that almost sounds like a bad band name. (Maybe a really bad band name.) Preferably stapled to my forehead. Or even just something that links all the little threads floating, like a big swirl of spider silk, around in my head. Preferably in a visual manner - maybe a big flashing arrow connecting 'get oil changed' with 'get quote for new car tires' so I don't have to go to the mechanic twice, or a dotted line linking 'you have lots of time on Thursdays now' with 'remember wanting to use the treadmill more?'Because I have all these good ideas, but since I spend my work day trying to give continuity to other people's ideas, I don't do too well lending the same qualit...

Disjunct
2007-09-13 19:52:00
Taste should be at least a teensy bit consistent, right? Like a unified identity or a common feel or at least like matching your top to your trousers? (Which I did not manage to do today. Do not tell my co-workers, who put up with two hours of my painstaking colour-matching madness at a press check earlier this week, or they may string me up by the rafters.)So why is it - particularly if I profess to be a designer, for pity's sake - do I want both this ...... and this?Thoughts:1. By the second instance of 'this', I mean the dress, not the girl. Though perhaps if I could transplant her body onto my head, that wouldn't be so bad, either.2. I swear to you that I never dressed like a tart before I started dancing.3. Or shopped at places like Forever 21, which, I'm ashamed to admit, has a Web site that I spent probably an hour looking through last night because Dance America wants $80 for the skirt above and I'm just too much of a cheapskate to deal with that. (No dice, by the way,...

Who ate all the pies?
2007-09-11 16:21:00
Here comes the inevitable: According to this story from CNN (forgive me for being a patron of Turner, I will read my AP stylebook in penance tonight), more and more U.S. workers are being penalized by their employers to offset the added insurance costs of being overweight.Example given from the story: Indianapolis-based Clarian Health, one of the country's largest mega-hospital-complexes. Says CNN:In 2009 the company will start reducing pay for employees in its health plan by $10 per paycheck if their BMI is in the obese range of more than 29.9. The deduction will be $5 per check if they don't meet required cholesterol, blood pressure or blood glucose measurements. Workers will be required to complete an annual health risk assessment and can appeal to have their fees dropped if they show improvement.So what's the beef - or, perhaps, what's the high-protein red-meat substitute? It's been legal to take similar measures with smokers for years, penalising them (or in some cases, sa...
More About: Pies

What's your pointe?
2007-09-10 17:39:00
Tutus: So not machine-washable.Well, as a result of some scatterbrained attempt at getting in some dance cross-training, and because one of the Sisters girls sent 'round a fortuitously-timed e-mail announcing a class, I've just signed up for adult beginner's ballet in Rock Island, which starts tonight. I was going to use "I don't have any shoes and the class starts tonight" as an excuse to chicken out, but then the people that run the course said they'd bring some and I could buy them if I had a good time. So yes. I got thrown out of ballet class at age six for a complete lack of elegance, and now, it seems, I'm making up for two decades of lost time.If anyone had told me six years and 60 pounds ago that I'd be a completely obsessive ballroom dancer, I would have laughed until people looked at me funny and told me to be quiet. If I'd been told I'd be all excited about signing up for a ballet class ... well ...Just as long as I don't have to wear a tutu.

Stuff and, oh, right, more stuff
2007-09-08 03:52:00
Right then. I'd promised, and it's now long overdue, a link to my notes from the Edward Tufte seminar of two weeks ago, so here goes. Highlights:- As graphic designers, are we compelled to put boxes around everything because that's how we select stuff in our page layout programs? Are we just used to seeing boxes by now?- Also, as computer users, are we fraying the way we visualise information because every modern GUI is still application-based - i.e., we have to work in a different environment to draw an illustration than we do in order to create a spreadsheet? People don't conceptualise information in neat little compartments like that - at least not naturally. But does our 'application mindset' when creating information graphics enforce the same when we're asking someone to ingest those same graphics?- PowerPoint still probably crashed the space shuttle.- Every day, and in every way, we should break out of Flatland.Anyway, click up there above for the full details if you'r...
More About: Stuff

Twist turn
2007-09-04 16:09:00
Stumbled across this the other day, which is both a bit depressing and entirely apt:The forms of Tango are like stages of a marriage. The American Tango is like the beginning of a love affair, when you are both very romantic and on your best behaviour. The Argentine Tango is when you are in the heat of things and all kinds of emotions are flying: passion, anger, humor. The International Tango is like the end of the marriage, when you are staying together for the sake of the children. - Barbara Garvey, in Smithsonian MagazineAnd remember Bobby from the last week? He must be way past even International-style tango, or at least judging from the conversation I had with his wife. Yup, she finally called - I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with her at work the other day, trying to calm her down and do my best to assure the poor woman I had no idea who her seeming fleabag of a spouse was, and hearing her out about the scads of women who apparently keep calling for him, and how he's o...
More About: Turn , Twist

Say what?
2007-08-31 03:28:00
Okay, so I have all sorts of notes about the Tufte seminar in Chicago, and I will type them up and share them as soon as I unearth them from the pile of stuff that accumulated on my desk while I was at the seminar. (Sigh.) But in the meantime ...The strangest thing that happened all that day wasn't some oddball ET non sequitur, nor was it the bit about the hotel staff not wanting to let us back in the room where our bags were, or the bit about our waiter looking almost exactly like the guy who took over the lease on my last flat (yes, can I have some pizza and is there any leftover mail for me?) ... nope, it was the part where I turned on my mobile phone during the lunch break to find a vaguely irate message from someone I didn't know, to the tune of:Dzesika! Hello, Dzesika! This is Bob Gonzales' wife. I'm just calling you to find out why he has your phone number written in his wallet. But I'll just have to call back later to find out more! Click.Okay, well, first of all, I don...

Wayfarer
2007-08-29 15:35:00
Do what now?I wish I'd discovered Legible London earlier, because five years of walking around the city as a neophyte pedestrian (my level of general navigational competence increased only very slightly during that time) left me with astigmatism from trying to make out (usually nonexistent) road signs and a cramp in my hand from clutching my London A-Z a bit too tightly.Anyway, the site devotes itself to making London a more navigable place for those on foot - particularly in advance of the 2012 Olympics, and Mayor Ken's pledge to make the city 'world-class' for walking by that ubermuyimportantemonumentous (etc) date.I raise my glass without, er, a trace of discernable sarcasm: good luck, guys! Just don't go calling me on your mobile, lost in the three-minute walk between Bank and Cannon Street.
More About: Fare

Gratuitous cuteness
2007-08-28 03:20:00
How many again? They're like one big amalgamated metabunny.So I came home tonight to find that - or rather the cats had found that - we've got a nest of baby bunnies in the front yard. Having never seen baby rabbits before, and then having them right there in the front yard (where, okay, they will eat all the daylilies, but whatever), and then being able to get about two inches from one, close enough to watch him watching me watch him ... okay, I am just awash in a giant sea of cuteness. So I thought I'd share.Feel better? All together, now ...Awwww.*cuteness buffer overflow*
More About: Cuteness

Keepon keepin' on
2007-08-27 03:12:00
Here's a little pre-emptive Monday goodness. So what's the story behind this little yellow spherical dude? He's one of the Beatbots, simple robots designed with the aim of learning more about child/machine interaction. Click here to read more.
More About: Keepon

Technicalities count
2007-08-23 01:24:00
There really isn't any commentary required on the Nemi cartoon below, particularly if (as Arlo would say) you've known anyone in a similar situation, or you've been in a similar situation.But it still made me smile.
More About: Count , Technic

Choose your crayons
2007-08-21 04:06:00
Which one's the monolith again?So I'm excited beyond all reasonable expectation because I get to schlep myself to Chicago Thursday after work to have food from non-Iowa restaurants and wander around Michigan Ave and, here's the kicker, attend a day's seminar from that guy up there above, otherwise known as Edward Tufte, otherwise known as The Big Kahuna of Information Design. About ten years ago, I stumbled across one of his books on one of Viera's overflowing bookcases, and wow! presto! A decade later I get to meet the guy and ask him questions. Fantastic.If you haven't heard of Tufte (which means you probably haven't been listening to my near-continuous ranting since I registered for the seminar last month), the most interesting short version may be here and here, in which he alleges that bad PowerPoint design was a major contributor to the space shuttle Columbia exploding on re-entry in 2003. Big stuff, yes? Everyone's default slideshow-presentin', auto-font-adjustin' w...
More About: Choose

On a(nother) stick
2007-08-16 15:34:00
So I was laughing so hard at the egg on a stick at the Iowa State Fair - or more accurately, at the hordes of people milling around eating hardboiled eggs off Popsicle sticks - that I forgot that EtheP took a picture of the Egg on a Stick promotional poster, which has got to be one of the best marketing pieces I've ever seen in my life. (By the way, click on that last link and you'll get some way-cool Flickr fair photos.)It's a bit blurry, but you get the point:(Oh, yes, and in the bottom left corner is the logo of the Egg Council, or whoever ran the promotion - it's a hand making the universal A-OK symbol, but in the space between the thumb and forefinger there's a big yellow egg! Genius! Would you like some cheese with your eggs?)If I can someday design something of such sheer genius, I can die happy.
More About: Tick

On a stick
2007-08-15 16:44:00
It's not really Monday, but since I've taken the past two days off work to go to the Iowa State Fair with EtheP, it feels enough like Monday to offer the following tasty Monday link: Block Posters, a free online tool that'll break the photo of your choice up into printer-friendly pieces which you can then reassemble and put up on your wall. Of course, it won't account for the fact that your low-fi digital phone photos mean your subject matter will look like it's made of Lego, but whatever; it's still a cool tool.The fair was brilliant, albeit completely surreal - we spent an hour or so hanging out watching swine judging, and I now know more about the various merits of Hampshire gilts than I ever will need to in my life, ever - and I think I've consumed enough fair food to last me the next three weeks or so. Also, I didn't know until Monday that, in order for a food item to succeed at your average state fair, it must be served on a stick. Seriously: there were pork chops on a...
More About: Stick , Tick

Time sunk
2007-08-10 15:47:00
Yesterday morning - after hitting the snooze button the obligatory two or three times - I got up, started to stumble to the shower and realised that there was nothing doing, that as stupid as it sounded, I was going to have to take the day off work because I was just so run-down I couldn't really stand up. Okay, I've been fighting something off all week, too, but had I not been so exhausted I probably could have made it into the office and struggled through as per Monday through Wednesday.I felt a bit foolish calling in un-sick, but went back to sleep and woke up about four hours later, feeling still pretty run-down but also really a lot better. Lazed around and watched bad telly and caught up on e-mail, and sorted the rest of my iTunes library (how in the world do you effectively organise ten thousand songs in such a way that you actually want to listen to them? but that's a topic for later) ... and by the end of the day still felt pretty rubbish. This morning, woke up in about ...
More About: Time

Wrap it up
2007-08-07 15:32:00
Still convinced that advertising doesn't really work? Here's a powerful (or rather, powerfully frightening) counter-example in the form of a study indicating young children strongly prefer food when it's wrapped in McDonald's packaging.Now, if we could only storm McDonald's corporate HQ and make them trade hamburgers for hummus and chocolate shakes for carrot sticks. Fat (literally) chance ...
More About: Wrap

Sprung
2007-03-21 17:35:00
Our sense of smell is a funny thing, really, whether for bad or good. I once had a particularly vivid nightmare in which I was attacked by someone whose face I couldn't see, and awoke knowing that my mystery assailant was an ex-boyfriend who spent most of his waking hours wearing an immaculate leather bomber jacket ... not because I could see the jacket in my dream, but because I could smell the leather.This morning was about another similar experience, though thankfully not of a death-by-jacket variety: Driving into the office, I kept getting distracted (hello, Davenport police officer! Thank you for just flashing your lights and not pulling me over!) by spring, but not so much the whole lush-green-tapestry thing (because everything still looks brown and dead around here) as the smell of it, like fresh grass or life thawing out or some actual sunshine peeking slowly from beneath a far-too-heavy winter blanket.I've yet to spend an entire spring in this part of the country, but I d...

Criminal behaviour
2007-03-20 14:13:00
So we all have weird little desperate things we do to get a sugar fix now and then, but this is just ridiculous: according to the BBC News Web site, two thieves hijacked a truck full of Cadbury Creme Eggs and made away with about GBP 70,000 (note use of GBP, as my Americanian keyboard doesn't have a pound symbol on it and I'm too lazy to look up the alt code) worth of the treats.According to the story, police say the thieves will have a difficult time passing them along, as, well, Cadbury has more where those came from. So, are the hijackers just hungry? Can the NHS catch them by patrolling emergency rooms for people coming in suffering from insulin shock? And will they simply eat the things, or are the criminals planning on making a gigantic Creme Egg cake?Actually, on second thought, maybe this is scaring me a bit. The UK gets Creme Eggs all year 'round, but we're limited to them only in the Easter season. To make up for the deficit caused by all this Creme Egg-based crime, do...
More About: Behaviour , Criminal , Al B , Rimi , Mina

Ubiquity
2007-03-19 14:38:00
At what point is this here Interweb going to become ubiquitous?I'm a bit stupidly short on time at the moment, but being as I've (again) caught the CMS bug (this time at work through doing some skinning for DotNetNuke, which is much more fun than Joomla, my last foray into piecemeal Web sites), I thought I'd put together something for my local dance studio - at the moment, they're without a site, and as a result losing potential clients to the slimy guy on the other side of town (motto: 'We don't need good technique. Now will you sleep with me?'). So watch this space, as I'll probably be asking for advice on overall quality of a beta design, etc.Here's the thing, though: As with most volunteer/semi-volunteer organisations, people move around a lot and commit to stuff for only short periods of time, or get bored with things, and if I'm going to be pragmatic, I'm not really sure who's going to be maintaining the site I build. (We're not so much a studio as we are a group ...
More About: Quit

Fizz-le
2007-03-16 18:41:00
Here's something weird:I'm not really much of a soda drinker. When I do have some, it's in a restaurant (bottomless glass of diet Coke, anyone? we have refills in Americania), or a few swigs out of a two-litre bottle or some such. In any case, I don't really buy soda (called 'pop' in these parts, which always makes me laugh - is someone going to punch me, or sell me their dad?) at the supermarket.Except that the ladies' formation team is having a party tonight (we're doing a number to 'Sisters' from White Christmas, and so it seemed appropriate for the sisters to have, well, a slumber party), and I said I'd pick up some snacks, so I ran into Target (oh, sweet Target, how I have missed you these past four years) and for the life of me I could not buy a six-pack of soda.Have I really been away this long? Are my choices either (a) a massive 27-million 'fridge pack' that is, honestly, just about too heavy for me to lift, or (b) a six-pack of these tiny little squat cans of ...

Delish
2007-03-15 14:36:00
Okay, so maybe I'm severely behind the times here, but last night I got it into my head (after mailing a link to myself, at home, from work, the eleventeenth time) to start using del.icio.us.In addition to having a truly killer name, it seems (so far) to be simple to use, fairly logical and generally integrated into my overall user experience. (The Firefox extension doesn't hurt, either.)Anyway, I'm at del.icio.us/hamstersphere (fancy that) if you feel like bookmark-stalking me. And if you've got your own del.icio.us login, feel like dropping me a line so I can spy on you, too?Call it 'interdisciplinary research'.
More About: Deli

Pretty
2007-03-14 14:29:00
Happy Pi Approximation Day! (Go eat some pie!) Much samba on the carPod on the way to work this morning - fantastic accompaniment to a giant orange sun inching over the horizon (the one downturn to this daylight-time stuff is that I'm driving in the dark again these next few weeks of mornings) and wind mussing my hair from the open sunroof. However, the fact that my car cannot seem to manage even a simple spot volta on the interstate frustrates me to no end ...Today's quote is simple, but fittingly so. It comes from Eric Gill, who designed the Gill Sans typeface that permeates modern design (and is one of the few standard XP fonts that faxes well without looking terribly generic and boring):Look after goodness and truth, and beauty will look after herself.
More About: Pretty

Whither the weather?
2007-03-13 14:50:00
Okay, I just have to show this off:See that? Inside the red circle? See that number? I cannot tell you how beautiful that number is. (Also see the tab for the Photoshop CS3 beta in the taskbar below? Love love love. And the new-and-improved Bridge that comes with it ain't bad either.)I mean, consider that three weeks ago my car was stuck in an ice storm. And now I am sitting in the office in bare legs and a swishy little skirt that hasn't seen the light of day since last September.Weather ! Love you!Oh, yeah. It's supposed to be just above freezing by the end of the week.Gather those rosebuds while ye may ...

Muddle huddle
2007-03-12 14:32:00
Right. I think it's probably got something to do with the fact that this weekend was Not About Sleep At All, and then there was the time change and I'm going into work in the dark again (zzz zzz), but my brain is going in about fifteen different directions and I've got the attention span of a one-year-old and look there's a chicken!But yeah.1. St Louis was a ball (okay, a Star Ball, so pardon the pun) and we got to see some good dancing, and I finally got to see my aunt dance (family samba solidarity, and all that), and S and I didn't kill each other and actually managed to find a few common musical threads somewhere in those ten hours of driving to and from Missouri, which was really incredibly encouraging as no one likes my music.2. And I was introduced to gooey butter cake, which apparently everyone in St Louis knows about, it being in the population's constituent DNA - though that bit mentioned a few posts ago about having been born there certainly came into play after one...

Toodle-oo
2007-03-08 21:32:00
Right. So this weekend (or, more specifically, in about two hours, not that I'm excited about the day off or anything), I'm headed to St Louis, where I was born and where I spent countless federal holidays visiting with extended family and where now, a dozen or so years later, I find myself utterly flummoxed by in terms of how to be a tourist.I started off thinking I'd go for the weekend, sort of on a whim, as an excuse to hang out and watch some dancing - my aunt, it turns out, does pro-am Latin, and I've never actually seen her dance - and it's sort of turned into an Actual Holiday by means of general accumulation: First, S thought it would be fun to see some dancing too, and then I figured that as neither of us have had any proper holiday time in a while, we could make a real weekend out of it and do a little tourism and ... hang on a second. I've probably spend a good two years or so of my life in St Louis over the course of various family holidays, and I can likely count ...

Local jokes for local people
2007-03-06 15:11:00
Every area, everywhere, has a variant on the below. I guess what really threw me is that when a friend forwarded this along, I actually (a) knew and (b) laughed at most of the references.Friends, she's settling in. Scary.You know you're from the Quad Cities when ...You know what the phone number is for "Car Dead Call Fred!"You refer to the Mississippi River as "The River"You have to watch the paper to see which bridge would be best to get across "The River," since they are all are being worked onYou know that Joe, Frank, Shorty, Clint, and Nancy are not names, but pizza placesYou know that Whitey is an ice cream place, not a racial termYou know that South Park is a mall, not a television showYou know that Daisy Dook's is off of I-280,and you don't have to wear those little shorts to get thereYou know that Tuxedo's is not a place you rent one fromYou will stand in line for over an hour to buy "sculpted concrete"You know that Milan is not pronounced like the one that is the fashi...
More About: Jokes , People , Joke , Local , Loca