//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, a Brooklyn-based Interactive Designer.
Ashley is already thinking about Valentine’s Day:
I love Valentine’s Day for all the wrong reasons: conversation heart candy, an abundance of pink and red everywhere, lacey lingerie in the window of Victoria’s Secret, making construction paper valentines with pornographic inserts.
Nicely put, and it’s not even February yet. Oh, and Heather has some cool little V-day postcards.
Sometimes someone you don’t know says hi and says her name is meghan. And, it makes you feel strange, since you’ve been going to that very coffee house almost daily for 8 months, and you haven’t got a clue what anyone’s name is.
Well, I’m having trouble coming up with anything to post on this, the final Friday of January. I so wish to thank God that the thermometer is up above freezing again. And, for this kitten named Katya. She makes all of this jobless stuff bearable.
I just wanted to share indienow.com with any of you who are interested in listening to good music online. They’ve got different feeds, depending on your internet connection.
Also, I ordered the Shelby CD, after I learned from the Morning News that the new New Yorker fiction editor is married to a band member. Hey, if it’s good, it’s good.
It’s funny too, because in their about page, they describe themselves as The Who meets My Bloody Valentine… if there is anything that the classic rocker Tbone and the modern rocker myself could agree on, it would be that combination. no?
Yes, so the other shoe dropped today, as I found out that I finished in second place for the BHCC job.
I kind of knew last week, when I called a woman there who was, up until then, giving me terrific signals. She acted very stand-offish, but polite on the phone, and I should have guessed what message was being conveyed. The VP for Communications, the big man, said that they went with someone who had more experience, (yet the person in the position now has no experience, design or technical, in making websites).
I really want to wring some necks, but obviously I am failing to convince people that I can do the job. Either that, or there is a glut of talent in Boston, and too few opportunities. I’ll go with option 2.
This article on Lo-Fi web design, which includes an interview with Jason Kottke, is very interesting. Jason argues that information is more important to weblog writing (why I love RSS readers), than having glitzy, highly-graphical designs. Sites with 60k background images need not apply… I agree, begrudgingly… and I love trend reporting.
These past few days, I’ve been intensely working on a weblog site for a friend… using CSS. and it’s frustrating. It’s nearly impossible to do anything advanced layout-wise with CSS. There are always browser inconsistencies to deal with.
So after screwing with that for days on end, I decided to revert to tables. That site will be ready soon. But, I had to do something affirming with CSS, so I updated this site. Not an ounce of <table> code at all. Email me bugs (especially on the macintosh / safari / mozilla side of things.)
Anil posted this link to an online photo exhibit — Stop Motion Studies — strange and beautiful portraits on the Red line in Boston.
In these photographs, the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of Web-based animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage.
I love these. And, many pictures were taken in the station just down the street.
Presley and I spent our 6th anniversary at Carlos, little Italian restaurant in the old neighborhood in Allston. It’s a quiant little place with good wine and terrific food. She had an Rigatone with Eggplant roll, meatballs, sausages and chicken, in a plum tomato sauce. I had the lobster ravioli with salmon, plum tomatoes, in a lemon vodka sauce. She gave me the new McSweeny’s package of issues 1-3 (reprint) and the upcoming issue 10. I gave her… um, dinner. I’m poor lately.
Well, after much calling and emailing, I’ve finally heard that MIT hired an internal candidate for the position I was in the running for. I made it so far, out of a pool of over 100… seems like I was owed a phone call, but apparently not. So, my energies shift to focus on the BHCC job. Options are running out!
Ok, so it’s 6:30ish in the morning, and I’m watching a video of the Yes Men at work. They’re an arts/political performance group, and they’re convincing impostors, lampooning the GTO, Dow Chemical, or other global symbols… Here, the Yes Men pose as reps from the WTO, and present a modest proposal for solving world hunger. I don’t know what is more funny: the presentation, the graphics, the animation, or the believing students. Why didn’t the professor butt in?
WATCH VIDEO (click login, video, and scroll down for The Yesmen: The Plattsburgh Lecture)
I’ve been building my first XHTML & CSS site today. The benefits are increasingly apparent, though attempting to build a complicated layout without using any <table> tags is daunting. And boy do I love validating along the way!
Well, I posted not long ago, extolling the virtues of FeedReader, but I’ve run into some bugs that drive me absolutely nuts. Take this for example. Everytime I restart the app, it tells me that my website has 276 new entries! That’s because the app isn’t properly saving or reading whether a post is marked as “read” or “unread”. Sucky.
I’ve installed all the common windows apps, and none of them comes close to the usable design & features of NetNewsWire for OsX… Apparently, I’m not the only one going through all this, too.
Enter Beaver, a great new app just begun this month. It has all the simplicity and usefulness of FeedReader without all the bugs. And we’re only at v0.3.9! Kudos to Sumod — I look forward to watching the development.
UPDATE: On Dave Winer’s recommendation, I installed another small RSS app called WildGrape NewsDesk… I was less than impressed. Nevermind that I had to download and install a BETA of the .NET Framework, but the UI is repulsive. For starters, there isn’t a subscriptions button. It’s hard to add customized feeds, e.g. my RSS 2.0, and it doesn’t have a familiar 3-pane layout. Kinda lame.
I was futzing around in Photoshop the other day, in-between working on some freelance gigs… (it’s coming matt!)… and I created this little vectorized version of the new Charles river bridge in Boston. I think it’s fabulous that the city named it for Lenny Zakim, a civil rights activist and community leader — especially given that he passed-away in 1999.
I certainly understand why government buildings and other projects are named for WWII heroes and long-dead (some corrupt) politicians, but I’m encouraged by this choice… It’s a modern, personal and meaningful choice.
Personally, I’m kind of ambivalent about all of this Big Dig stuff. Elevated highways are evil, so I will be glad to see the Green Monster come down. Still, what will be put in it’s place? And at what cost? The current plans call for mostly green “open” space, surrounded by surface roads that might have as many as 4 lanes. Whoa. Wait up. You’re replacing 8 lanes of elevated highway, with 8 lanes of modern, wide-lane surface streets. Not to mention the 10 lanes underground.
It would be a mistake to try and correct the transportation and urban renewal mistakes of the 1950s, by dropping a narrow park in the middle of all that asphalt. This city needs to knit back together the fabric of a neighborhood that was sheared in two. That means moderately-scaled buildings, shops, caf?s, sidewalks and, in the middle of all this: a park. Maybe with a fountain. And, you’ve got to minimize traffic. Make it difficult for cars to move through there.
Downtown Boston burned in 1872, so reinventing downtown is nothing new. I’d hate to think that this scenario would unfold: Developers get to build tall, private skyscrapers cut off from the street; the fire department gets wide traffic lanes; the tree-huggers get the rest as dead “open” space. That’s a recipe for a non-place. This should be the place… the destination.
Had some server problems that caused the site to break today. Everything is back up, now.
//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, an Editorial Designer at NYTimes.com, living in Brooklyn.
