Wow, this is an incredible find: a Japanese site featuring a huge collection of Blue Note album covers in order of their catalog number. It’s like a virtual school in excellent graphic design from the late 40′s up through the 80′s. Ten years ago there was a website selling large blowups of famous Blue Note album covers, but they’re long gone now.
I’d love to buy Finn one of these T-Shirts, given her love of all things Uglydoll, but $25 for a toddler size is a bit spendy. And, I’d like it more if we could add her name or a custom icon instead of the fifteen or so included.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, this 1954 Hudson Hornet Special is beautiful. There really isn’t anything bad about this car, even though the paint is peeling, the upholstery looks like it was dug out of a casket, and the engine resembles a 1950′s robot monster. I would drive it exactly as you see it.
Here’s some fascinating reading: The complete history of the Fallout Shelter sign.
For some reason, my hosting provider’s pipes have been incredibly slow lately, which means this site is slow as dirt. That makes adding old content that much more time-consuming. It took me an hour to add the second half of September 2004 this evening, while jumping around doing other things.
I’ve been working on a WordPress-based portfolio site for a friend of ours, and over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve dipped a toe back into working with PHP, which has been fun and challenging. This evening I was able to pull some snippets of code from here and there, make some educated guesses, and get a spiffy category display page working in the way that I’d originally imagined—something that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to do. The site is coming together really well, and our friend sounded excited about it when we talked to her on the weekend.
Meanwhile, the simple fix I thought I had planned for the Slattern is not so easy after all. I read that simply manually cranking the sunroof motor would seal the window, but I couldn’t get it to budge on Sunday. So I have to pick up some Torx screwdriver bits and tear down part of the sunroof in order to slide the tracks back into place whenever the sun decides to come back out this week; in the meantime, I’m back in the Jeep. I guess it’s a good thing we haven’t sold that yet, huh?
Wow, for an art school, I can’t imagine designing an uglier custom license plate than my alma mater did. Does the URL need to be in all caps? Really?
A couple of weekends ago, when Mr. Scout and I were insulating the basement, I ran across an ancient cardboard box with my father’s handwriting on the side: “BILL’S TRAINS”. Inside was an old friend of mine: a wooden Montgomery Schoolhouse train set my parents bought for me over time as a child—they were probably as expensive then as they are now. I opened up the box this afternoon to let Finn get her first look at them, and they captivated her for about a half an hour, which is about a year’s elapsed time in her toddler’s attention span.
Thanks, Mom & Dad.
I just found out that we won two Addy Awards for a particular sign in a particular city, as well as the website.
Jen’s been wading through the process of filing for an MBE over the last few weeks, and asked me to take a look at some of the paperwork to help her make sense of some of it. We sat down on Sunday to review the state’s directions, which are about as helpful as a wetsuit in the Sahara. Looking for further clarification, I did some google searching and found a page of directions that were supposedly for the same set of applications we were holding, but were just different enough to cause a splitting headache.
What really made me laugh, though, was the online MBE application. I thought it might offer some more clues as to how she should fill out the paperwork. Once I’d selected one of the six inscrutable options offered (guessing it might possibly be the right choice), I landed on an .ASP page loading a Java applet, and from there things got even worse. I was presented with screen after screen of forms that looked just like this:
Seriously, what is that shit? I’ve seen better forms written by first-week HTML students. Even if I knew what I was supposed to be filling out, I wouldn’t know where to put it because half of the field descriptions are behind the field boxes.
For the uninitiated, the whole point of Java is to be able architecture neutral: that is, to “write once, run anywhere.” Therefore, the fact that I’m looking at this on Safari on a Mac should have no bearing whatsoever. The fact that it’s absolutely unintelligible, and that my tax dollars paid some hack to “develop” this fucked-up system makes me especially angry, as both a citizen of this state and as a web developer. This is the kind of crap work that gives my profession a bad reputation, and it’s also the reason small businesses like my wife’s get a shit deal instead of the tax breaks and coddling large corporations enjoy.
That’s just fucking embarassing.
Through some creative finagling over the last couple of weeks, We here at the Lockardugan collective have secured a welcome addition to our studio tools: a large-format (11×17) color laser printer. Getting it here required use of the babyhauler, calling in a favor, and careful jockeying to get a 160 lb. brick up a flight and a half of stairs in the rain. It’s a ten year old Xerox Phaser 790, and though it’s a bit slow (10/100 ethernet, 6pgs/min.), it’s maxed out on available RAM, it came with a spare set of color cartridges, it’s paid for and it’s OURS.
Right now it’s rocking AppleTalk via ethernet, but I should be able to divine sense from the Xerox manuals and figure out how to set up network printing in the next week or so. I’m also trying to find a service manual that’s available for download online without paying money; we’ll see how that goes.
In Columbia this morning, I spotted this gorgeous old delivery van from a distance, and my heart raced, because I saw there was a “For Sale” sign in the window, and I thought it might have been an early model Metro, a type of step van that International Harvester built in the 30′s to the 80′s and which (these days, on this coast) is pretty rare. Getting closer, I noticed the Ford badge on the front and was a little bummed out, but I was still so taken aback by the styling of this van that I got out into the rain to shoot a few pictures.
This is the kind of vehicle I would love to own; completely utilitarian but also aesthetically beautiful, from the graceful lines on the grille to the gentle curves at the edges of the roof. I don’t know if it’s stainless steel or aluminum (the latter would be my guess) but I’d bet, especially with the duallys out back, that it could be fitted with a hitch to tow a 19′ Airstream of similar vintage. Finding glass for this thing would be as difficult as sleeping on a roller coaster, so having it all intact is a bonus.
I have the number on the window in my hand, but I’m resisting the temptation to call it. Too many projects and not enough space in the driveway. Farewell, you lovely beast.
American corporate culture is fucked: The Incompetence of American Airlines. Nutshell version: UX consultant redesigns AA website as an exercise, receives thoughtful response from employee at AA (a fellow UX designer), which he posts with permission as a follow-up. AA fires the employee an hour later. (via DF)
What could have been a learning experience for the management at AA turned into a witch hunt, and ultimately an online PR disaster that didn’t have to happen. After years of this self defeating circle-the-wagons mentality, I would have thought the old grayhaired suits would realize by now that it’s more damaging to attempt to squelch this kind of thing than it would be to embrace it as a chance for positive change. Imagine what might have happened if the suits had engaged the UX guys in a meaningful dialog, cut through the bureaucracy and, hmm, made the website better? Imagine if they had let the employee write back and describe how his post had made a sudden difference inside the corporation, or how the website was improved? It might not have been the attention-grabbing headline it is now, but people do listen to positive PR, and that’s the kind of thing companies pay big money to generate.
Incomprehensible.
Driving home on Friday evening, I was listening to Marketplace on NPR and heard a story in a series about climate change where a certain carbon counter in New York City got a mention.
I may or may not have had something to do with this.
I’ve driven past this building every day for the past three months and never noticed the advertising at the top until this morning. Word!
Monday night we spent a little time with some friends in the industry, trading gossip, war stories, and news, and it left me feeling a little sick to my stomach. I know that times are tough out there, but the more bad news I hear, the more discouraged I get. This business is cyclical in nature, and having lasted through three recessions since joining the full-time workforce (exiting college right in the middle of one, no less) I know that this will be the way of things until I retire or give up and go sell insurance.
This one has me more worried than the last two, and that’s probably because I’m wired into the scene a lot better than I was in ’93 or ’01, and a lot more knowledgeable about the economy, our country, and my insignificant place on the edge of the whole mess. Work is scarce, jobs are even harder to find, and the money that people are spending is net 120 at best, so I’m holding on to what I’ve got for dear life and hoping we can ride this one out.
Compounding my worry was a rough time I was having with a project at work, which seemed to be dragging onward with no resolution. I’d sketched and sketched and between fifteen or so pages I had three distinct approaches, but I was having a hell of a time getting them to flesh out onscreen. At times like this it’s easy to get into an “I suck” mentality, which becomes self-defeating (and self-prophesying), but I’ve learned the hard way over the years that time and a little perspective can be an ally. I came home, helped give the baby a bath, watered the garden, spent some time with Jen, and then took another look at what I’d done. Within an hour or so I felt the quiet, pleasurable shift of things starting to fall into place, and soon I had had one solution finished, the second on its way, and the elements of the third sorted out for the next morning.
I guess the upshot of all this rambling is that even though my chosen profession doesn’t have the stability of, say, law, banking (ha), or civil service, it’s more rewarding than anything else I can think of. That feeling of the gears meshing and elements clicking together is one of the best things in the world—I’d be hard-pressed to find something else so rewarding that I could get paid to do, even when it seems like the industry is groaning and creaking and imploding around me.
I’ve not been around here much lately, because I may or may not have had something to do with this sign in New York City.
More info here.
Wow. So we had a couple of people inquire about internships here at the office this summer, and apparently they were vetted and culled down to a few likely candidates. I heard yesterday that all of them have withdrawn, which isn’t all that surprising, but the story that gave me pause was the candidate who found out the internship wasn’t paid, and thus dropped out.
At the risk of sounding ancient, internships during my college years were always unpaid, and usually somewhere distant, which meant we had to drive to D.C. on our own dime (or catch a ride in someone else’s rattletrap car) to reorganize someone’s flat files or clean out a utility closet and find a way to eat Ramen noodles quietly in the back room without messing up one of two good dress shirts. Nobody I knew was actually designing anything. The whole point was to make connections and get a foot in the door somewhere, anywhere.
We’re in the middle of a recession, you dumbass. You’re not getting paid to be here.
Now get off my lawn.
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