Instead of going to cool converences, like the current SXSW in Austin, or visiting the sets of Law & Order as my cool pal Jake Dobkin did, or reading what looks a great new book on improving websites usability by the 37signals folks, or putting up the new superbly excellent artist of the month, Ruth Root, on The Site at MANOVERBOARD, I’ve been working.
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Spokes
The wheels at Apple just keep turning, as Apple today released news of its upcoming Spoken Interface, a pretty spectacular piece of software that allows those with disabilities to interact with an OS X-based computer. It’s impressive, brilliant, prescient, and genuinely humane.
My Pal D.
Every once in a while, New York City pulls a very fast one on us, and it is never pretty. The mayor did it a few days ago with his education buddies (a good idea, imho), the restauranteurs and their dishwashers have fun with us (with their special sauces), and now my old high school buddy, D. Strauss, comes clean about New York’s latest crappo artist: House of Scams and Fog, Or How to Break Into Your Own Apartment. Published in this week’s New York Observer, it will either break your heart or break your supposedly hearty New York spirit.
A Story of Lost Love
I’ve been looking around recently for some new typefaces that I can exploit in my serious and casual design escapades with clients.
Currently in love again with the Nobel font, which I’m using for a z-fold brochure, I revisited its founding foundry Font Bureau, which still has one of the finest typeface sites around. I fell in love with just about every font on the site. Hard to do? Hyperbole, you say? I placed every font in the “cart” and tried to punch out, credit card in hand, and guess what — my browser crashed.
Macromedia Site of the Day
I’m completely elated that Barneys.com, a MANOVERBOARD designed site, received the Macromedia Site of the Day award today. Flash partner CLR Media got noted, too. Total dream.
Passion
I haven’t publicly weighed in on the asinine, anti-semitic, anti-spiritual, aggressive, and agonizing aggravation called “The Passion of Christ,” because so many others have written persuasively on the subject. But, if one is looking for the True Passion, the Box Office By Movie” href=”http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=passionofthechrist.htm”>stats sure are telling.
A Few New Blogs
It’s that time of year (or rather, that time of the morning) to post some new blogs that have come into my purview:
Dishes
There are so many dishes in the sink. And all I can think about are two things:
a. The huge pile of work I have to attend to tomorrow, digital piles on top of piles on top of ruins of email.
and
b. The fact that Coca-Cola never patented its formula, because to have done so would mean that the copyright would have expired and we would all be making Coca-Cola syrup on our stove top. Coke does, however, tell you how Coke is made. After reading it, I estimated that a bottle of the stuff costs them about $0.16 to make.
11:59
I’ve always wanted to post something at 11:59 pm. I’m usually either fast asleep or in the throes of creative endeavor (or both).
I’ve been thinking a bit about the process or trajectory of death. I wonder if the transition between, for instance, sleep and the few moments before death and then full and utter death itself is one of comfort, repose, and certainty or instability, insecurity, and illusion. I think this is the thing that bothers me most about death — the very act of dying, the process by which one’s consciousness is sloughed off into another true state far from one’s experiences or expectations.
As a Jew and a naturalist, I do believe that death, in its finality, cannot be hellish. No G-d worth his salt would want people, animals, plants, or other living things to suffer in eternity — which is a very long time I’ve heard. But as a paranoic, or at the very least a modernist, I wonder if there a screech between the two states, a hurried and lousy rush of feeling, a tension among a million competing parts for the soul to be pulled out into nothingness (or everythingness). I guess I also wonder if that is felt always or sometimes, depending upon the state of the dying and the partiality or fullness of consciousness, which brings me back to sleep, which I must now do.
Brilliant Maps
It is indeed the little things in life that count. In looking for the location of a doctor’s office online this evening, I punched in the address into Yahoo! Maps. In the rest of the country, driving directions are all one might need to get from A to B. But, finally, someone figured out that if one lives in New York City, one might want to know which subway line to take to a specific address.
Yahoo! Maps has done it. Surrounding the starred doctor’s office on the map are very clearly labeled subway stops — and relevant distances to the office were only a click away. Not interesting? Using a technology called SmartView, one can also locate specific restaurants, community services, stores, and even ATMs near any specified address. (SmartView is so new that I could find no online documentation for it.)
SmartView does not yet allow one to see multiple locations at the same time, so if I wanted to find a buy a book, find a cafe, and then rob a bank, I’d have to try different radio buttons sequentially. In the coming search engine battles, it’s these seemingly small advances that are going to win the annual wars.
Is SmartView perfected? Not quite. In typing in my own address, I learned that the nearest “tourist spots” include “Two Little Red Hens Cafe,” the “Brooklyn Museum of Art,” and “FG Guido Funeral Home.”