HamstersphereHamstersphereRandom musings, media theory, design, geekery and ballroom dancing from an American ex-pat now returned to the States from London. Articles
What the Helvetica?
2007-03-05 15:31:00 Okay, so here is something that may just illustrate that I am the Biggest Geek Ever and that also I have a real problem with controlling my typography use, but whatever: Veer sent me a promo in the post the other day that included a teaser to their new documentary 'Helvetica', and even just being made aware of the existence of this film (never mind that it will never, ever be screened in my area) made my world a little brighter.Any normal person would be saying right about now okay, hang on, an entire feature-length film about a typeface?! ... but wait just a second, it's actually a bit more than that, so I'm not completely nuts. The film's main site touts the project as starting out as an exploration of the eponymous font (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year - how odd that only half a century ago we were a world without this ubiquitous collection of letterforms) and then going on to explore in general the relationship between typography and visual identity in our ... More About: What , Hat , What The
Tempest in a teacup
2007-03-02 00:14:00 A lot of us have a visualisation program tacked onto our iTunes or Windows Media Player or whatever we use to covertly listen to music in the office - but what about doing it the other way around, e.g. using the images on your monitor to generate sound? Here's today's spish link, courtesy of E the P: Temp e st for Eliza, a sort of reverse-visualisation application (only for Linux folk, unfortunately) that fine-tunes the EM waves coming out of your monitor to make music, or at least some semblance thereof.An explanation from the TforE site (excerpted because otherwise you may just miss the description of what this thing actually is - the explanation is buried way, way under the fold):What is it?Tempest for Eliza is a program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer-generated music in your radio.How does this work?All electronic devices send out electromagnetic waves. So does your monitor. And your monitor does it all the time. And at ve... More About: Pest , Teac
Index this, buddy
2007-02-28 18:03:00 I don’t remember if it was Nermal or the Fembot who came up with the original idea, but it’s brilliant: Now that the States has had standardised nutritional information on all foods (and drugs, for that matter, which is faintly ridiculous, but whatever) for about a decade, can we add in another item to that what-the-Helvetica box of text we see on the back of all our edibles? I’m proposing the Date Food Index - a single-digit, on-a-scale-of-one-to-10 kind of thing that depicts just how ‘dangerous’ a food is to eat on an important first date or a big business meeting or what have you.I mean, seriously, this would be incredibly useful: How often have you gone to meet up with someone important, snacked on some hors d’oeuvres during that big conversation and, when you stopped into the toilets on your way out three hours later, noticed that you had an entire head of lettuce stuck between your two front teeth? And, now that more restaurants are publishing nutritional data in t... More About: This , Buddy
Everybody must get stoned
2007-02-26 02:12:00 Whoever said blue eye shadow is a dead force in fashion has obviously never witnessed competitive dancing, viz:Yes, that is a rhinestone glued to my face. You wanna take this outside?So yes. I spent the majority of the weekend at the Indiana Challenge, a fairly decent-sized competition about an hour outside of Chicago and my first significant experience of the rhinestone miasma (thanks, S, for the terribly apt phrase) that is pro-am ballroom. Explanatory note: in the States, there are two ways you can do this dancing thing. The first is to go out and find yourself an amateur partner and compete through USABDA, which is pretty much like how it works in any other sensible country. The other, far more common, way of going about it is to look up your local Arthur Murray studio and take lessons with a professional dancer and then pay that person to go to NDCA competitions and dance with you, where you're judged against other couples who are also made up of one professional, one amateur... More About: Body , Stone , Ever , Must , Stoned
Decor? Adore.
2007-02-21 16:12:00 I love my office, but I will also freely admit that it's a cubefarm, and something about the nice warm spring-y weather outside the last few days has made me want to 'redecorate' the eensy amount of personal space I have in my little world. (The cube is a good size, but seeing as I don't have my own place to live, the cube is also kind of the equivalent of my teenage bedroom. Except I don't have posters of The Cure up on the walls. You see what I mean, though. Right?)Anyway, I've been staring at the same batch of postcards and silly visual-meme e-mail printouts for a few months. What about you? Want to trade cube-decor? I'm suddenly completely intrigued by trading random artwork with Internet strangers.Drop me a line or a comment if you're game. More About: Decor , Deco
Realise
2007-02-20 13:40:00 So maybe you start wondering if there isn't more to this than you're admitting when you start to miss him when he's not near, or you see something interesting on the news or in a shop window and you mentally file it away for the next time you're in the same room. And then you're having phone calls like you're fifteen again, those silly long, drawn-out affairs where not too much gets said but both sides come off the line in an odd state of sublime. And your colleagues start wondering why you're in such a good mood, and if it's got anything to do with your 'un-boyfriend', as they've taken to calling him, and when are they going to meet this guy anyway?And you do a pretty good job of trying not to get whirled into all of it until one night he calls to make plans to meet up after work, in your town, which is a good hour and a half away from his town, on a school night, just because you'd mentioned something about feeling unpracticed and wanting to get in some floor time befo... More About: Real
Stay safe
2007-02-18 01:40:00 Here's a good idea, and not just because the guy who wrote it is a good friend of mine: ShoutSafe , an 'event and disaster information service'. Basically, you sign up on ShoutSafe using some basic demographic information, get your friends to do the same thing, and then forget about it until something big happens - either good big, like 'I'm going trekking in the Himalyas for six months', or bad big, like 'someone just blew something up on the Tube'.I bring up the latter example because at the time of the Tube bombings, I got about a zillion e-mails from people back in the States in a matter of a few hours, all of them wanting to know if I was okay. And I wasn't so good about answering them because I was too busy checking on some friends who I was worried about - and so on down the line. And if there had been a single Web site where everyone who was concerned about my wellbeing could go and see what was effectively a Big Green Light about my existential status, well, that wo... More About: Stay
Conversationalist
2007-02-14 15:20:00 Happy Pink Hearts and Flowers Day!Normally I cringe at the thought of Valentine's Day, but since I've come into my office to find a giant pile of cookies on my desk, I'm in a good mood. Also because I've found this: the Acme Conversation Heart Maker. (For all you Brits who have been unlucky enough to know a lifetime without conversation hearts, check out the Wikipedia definition. They're kind of like Love Hearts, but smaller, and nicer because they don't taste eerily of bicarbonate of soda.)I had a few 'spins round the Heartmaker, trying to come up with something suitably sappy, but just couldn't, ergo:Here's hoping that you have a lovely Hallmark holiday with the people/cats/dogs/goldfish/Secondlife avatars who mean the most to you. (And if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. I always wanted to work that line into something somewhere.) More About: List , Sati
Too hot to hold
2007-02-14 01:13:00 Well, if by the roads were not so bad you really mean it was possible to break 45 for a few brief shining moments and I didn't even get caught in the fray when the semi jack-knifed, then yes, the roads were not so bad.And as addendum to the 'benefits and lack thereof of living with one's parents', I can add the following benefit: Someone is there to make you a G&T while you go knock the snow off your boots. More About: Hold
Too cool to let go
2007-02-13 19:45:00 The Iowa DOT tells me:Interstate 280: from I-80 to Illinois State Lineroadway is completely covered with mixed snow ice or slush, towing services prohibited US 61: from Muscatine County Line to Dubuque County Lineroadway is completely covered with mixed snow ice or slush, towing services prohibited Looks like I won't be getting home tonight ... More About: Cool , Let Go
Ingenue
2007-02-12 21:15:00 Just for the record, after much deliberation and living-room rumba-ing, S and I managed (a) not to kill each other (b) to pick out some music. Also for the record (quite literally), the music is this, and not this.Just in case there was any confusion.
Are you ready ...
2007-02-10 04:06:00 (I won't finish off that phrase, as I'm sure you've heard it before, from the mouth of some cheesy Dude There To Pull Chicks, if you've ever been to a dance class.*)But I will talk about rumba. S and I have embarked on potentially the most dangerous discussion that can be had between man and woman - not does this dress make me look fat? or what do you mean you don't like football?, but rather okay, rumba routine? so what about the music?.I mean, um. Dance music is often pretty bad as it is, because your criteria are pretty strict: it's got to be within a certain (usually quite small) tempo window, the emphasis has to be on the correct beat (with international rumba, it's really beat two, and what kind of ordinary, halfway sexy pop song has the emphasis on two, for pity's sake? let me tell you: none), etc etc ... and beyond all that, there's that little bit about it actually having to be a piece of music that you both enjoy, or identify with, or, well, even just don't cring... More About: Read , Ready
Re-restart
2007-02-09 05:22:00 Personifiers of the world unite: You have nothing to lose but Mr Dignity!Or, in my case, my car. Though I am not necessarily saying that naming my car has had any influence on its failed alternator (keep in mind this car is only five years old, it's not supposed to do that yet), it's as plausible a reason as any other.So at the moment, I'm sitting in picturesque Silvis, IL, with Goldie the dog, my mother's beloved car (which I am utterly afraid to drive) in the driveway and Sergei the Galant ... fifty-odd miles away, back in Muscatine, awaiting some sort of repair.My standard modus operandi would be to just utterly freak out about this, particularly the bit about the money and the bit about potentially not being able to get to work next week, but then again, I'm lucky to have people in my life with some good sense to tell me that I'm being rather full of it. It'll be fine; thanks for reminding me.Now, anyone know how to knit me a new alternator? I've got yarn - it's even No... More About: Start , Star , Rest , Tart , Restart
Hit 'em up style
2007-02-07 16:03:00 In high-resolution print typography, designers enjoy considerable freedom and control over the articulation of this [font size] range. In low-resolution screen typography, designers don't.- Todd FahrnerFor the past year and a half or so, I've been pretty much used to doing exclusively print design, or screen design in which the exact specs of the finished project are known (i.e. someone's digital window sign), which is pretty much the same as print design as far as the uncertainty quotient is concerned. Over the last week or two, though, I've been doing some reasonably hardcore Web work - starting from someone else's visual structure schematic and turning that into page mockups, then picking apart the mockups in terms of usability, legibility, white space, etc., then revising them and giving them to the developers, who will inevitably find more problems with them because as much as I wish it weren't so, I am not a programmer and probably never will be.Anyway, now I'm working ... More About: Style
Restart
2007-02-06 04:07:00 Sergei is happy! (Okay, my wallet is not so happy, but whatever it takes, right?) And I was not injured by any flying battery debris. And my car actually has some semblance of pickup back again. And Goldie the dog and I are enjoying a quiet night in watching my friend's cable TV ('you do have a lot of cable', comments S, quite correctly - as in 'the classic film channel is a vortex from which I might never return'). I could get used to this.Weeknights are difficult. What do you do on the weeknights in a town where there's nothing to do but watch cable TV and spend silly amounts of money getting your car fixed? More About: Start , Star , Rest , Tart , Restart
Wanted: juice
2007-02-05 15:59:00 Sergei is dead. Or rather, his battery is. I got up this morning, and tried to start up the car, and instead of the usual VROOMvroomvroomputterputterputter I just heard mrrrrrrrrthud.Fortunately, the friend whose house I'm watching left me the keys to her van. So I'm currently trying to scout out someone at the office with some jumper cables, so I can go back and start up the car with the van.I've never jump-started a car before. This sounds scary, what with all the voltage involved and all that. If you don't hear from me soon ... erm ... More About: Want , Juice , Wanted
Parentis locis
2007-02-03 17:44:00 So, for the next week or so I get to play at being a real adult again, since pretty much the entirety of my office is away at the big industry trade show in Atlanta and I, having been agency staff until about two weeks ago (#$*^ headhunters), am one of a handful staying home to make sure the phones don't go unanswered and all of that good stuff. (Actually, that sounds like complaining, but really it isn't. I've done so many trade shows in the past that it's kind of nice to be part of the group that stays at the home office and fights over who gets to make the tea. Also I can maybe try to answer some of the 1,283 e-mails that are sitting in my inbox, and perhaps keep the 'in' tray on my desk from spilling over and taking over the rest of my cube in some kind of paper-based coup. Me? Busy? Oh, no, not at all.)Anyway, the whole 'playing at an adult' bit comes in because one of my colleagues asked me to watch her dog for the week, and since she lives a whole ten minutes away fro... More About: Rent , Parenti , Parent , Pare
Meow muse
More articles from this author:2007-01-30 16:36:00 The family cats, ever willing to help, are contributing to my career development by providing me with free English lessons. At the moment, they’re helping me out with prepositions of location. In this example, Grey Kitty demonstrates “in.” More About: Muse , Meow 1, 2, 3 |
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