some blogs have a theme :

Themes are so focused.

again, Dan Savage hero-worship :

I love this man.

And if I were his type, I’d totally move to Seattle and throw myself at his feet. (Sorry, Partner of 1974.)

From a recent column:

“This is not really a question about sex, but I couldn't think of any other gay person who could give me a reasonable answer: Am I a homophobe if I make certain jokes regarding gayness? For instance, if I say, "The Olympics are gay," or ask, "Why are you so gay?" I don't feel as though I'm a homophobe. I know and like gay people, and I'm for gay civil rights and gay marriage. Also, if I hear somebody call a homosexual person names in an angry or blatantly derogatory manner, I get upset. So can I call my buddy gay if he tells me he uploaded a Phil Collins CD onto his computer, or should I just call him a dumbshit instead? —Fine With Fags, Really

“Officially, FWFR? It's so not okay to use "gay" as a synonym for lame. When you use "gay" like that, you're reinforcing a cultural prejudice against gay people—I mean duh, right? You may not be a homophobe, but using that expression is homophobic, and when you use it, you're helping to sustain the prejudice that deprives your gay friends of their civil rights and marriage rights.

“Unofficially, FWFR? I don't care what you do. Most of the gay people I know use "that's so gay" the same way you do, and the few times I've overheard strangers using the expression, people who may or may not have been gay, I had to concede the point: The thing they were tagging as so gay was, in fact, so gay.

“Finally, FWFR, a buddy who uploads a Phil Collins CD onto his computer isn't a dumbshit, he's a douchebag. Please make a note of it.”

Previously: Dan Savage is my hero

embiggening

What is often derisively referred to as the “Super-sizing of America” (because we Americans are also stupid and can’t remember our cultural references or how to pronounce fancy words) should actually be derisively referred to as the “embiggening of America”.

Since as an American, I am stupid and can’t remember how to spell, I had to look this word up. Which led me to possibly the best Google find I’ve made since at least yesterday: The List of neologisms on the The Simpsons at Wikipedia.

Check it out yourself. And revel in car holes and 40 rods to the hogshead.

he’s so best :

The septuagenarian Edgar S. Woolard Jr., a former board-member at Apple, explains how Steve Jobs works and how he won’t change much at Disney.

And sounds a little like a 14-year-old valley girl.

The best example from the “old-money, patrician” and former CEO of DuPont:

So the comparison is so nonvalid.

Oh my god, Steve Jobs is the best CEO ever!!! Ah, how the patrician have fallen.

portfolio updates :

I’ve been working on updating my online portfolio (and generally thinking about what I want from a career and how I want my work to be presented).

The first round of changes are is viewable here. I haven’t yet added some of my most recent work, yet, nor have I figured out if I want to include some of my writing and video pieces.

UPDATE: Verb agreement. Who knew.

separated at birth :

This post at Jalopnik got me thinking that I haven’t done a separated at birth, well, since I started getting plagiarized by Autoblog.

As for the Chevy Malibu Maxx, well inspiration comes from odd places, but an Austin Ambassador? No wonder GM is in trouble.

the SUV, officially over :

Forget high gas prices and rollover rates. Or even crossovers.

The new release of Hoover’s new Sport Utility Vacuum marks the official end of the of the SUV.

From the official PR statement:

“This new addition answers the call of consumers looking for seamless cleaning without interruption,” said Dave Baker, vice president and general manager, Hoover. “The Hoover Z bagless upright allows users to move from cleaning hard floors to carpet, and then vacuum draperies and extend to the top of a flight of stairs, all without the need to switch to different vacuums or stop the cleaning process . . .”

Wow, that's more off-roading than the Hoover owner gets in his/her Jeep Commander.

happy pills indeed :

Bristol-Myers Squibb and Gilead Sciences today announced that a once-a-day pill could be ready soon. They have been working to combine the most popular AIDS (or Aids, if your British) drugs into a single pill. These are the very drugs that I am on. I recently switched to Gilead’s Viread and Emtriva combination pill (which cut my co-pay by $30 a month). The other drug in combination therapy was Brisol-Myers’ Sustiva (oh, you of the fabulous dreams). That will be ready soon. This will cut my co-payments to $240 a year total from $480. SInce I’m scrounging around now to pay for this months’ pills, the thought of saving $20 a month is very happy one indeed.

safari feeds :

I haven’t yet explored combining my two blogs and looking at a different host. I don’t even feel like I’ve even finished my Christmas holiday.

As a space holder: my thoughts on RSS feed integration in Apple’s Safari web browser.

At home, I use NetNewsWire Lite to aggregate the sites with RSS feeds that I regularly check for updates. For something different, and to keep from installing unauthorized software at work, I thought I’d give the feed integration in Safari a spin.

(I’m not all that honest an employee. Afterall, I’m writing this quote on work time. Oh, and I recently embezzled $3M. j/k.)

So far, I’m impressed.

I especially like the ability to expand views in multiple ways: just a headline or a whole paragraph; one day, one week or one month; etc. And to sort by title, source, or new.

My one quibble is bookmarking. I have to either have a separate folder for all my RSS feeds, or keep the RSS feeds in the same folders as the main sites.

This means that, for instance, in the toolbar folder entitled “Mac/Design News” I have a list that includes two listings for Core77.com, two for Design Observer, two for NussbaumOnDesign, two for Kottke, etc.

If I don’t want to look at the RSS feed I now I have to sort through a menu that is almost twice as long.

Since Safari automatically detects a syndicate feed when visiting an HTML site. It seems like Safari should be able to do the same from the bookmarks. Or otherwise combine them.

This would allow both the web browser to be truly integrated with RSS reader.

As it stands right now, it just makes a mess.

thinking about making some changes :

So, we here at oneninesevenfour are thinking about making some changes.

I’ve become enamored with the Open-Source WordPress project.

Plus I've been reading over my posts from my original blog and thinking that I want this latest endeavor to be continue that train of thought. Or thoughts.

I suspect that part of my holiday vacation will be spent trying out WordPress and then merging the two blogs.

Look for more news as it happens.

mac apps for the little things :

Any of us who spend anytime at VersionTracker know there are about 5 gazillion apps for by small developers for OSX. About three-fifths of these are pure shite.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is daunting. I keep an eye on the blogosphere to do it for me.

Rob Griffiths writes today at MacCentral about a little app to improve the not-as-great-as-it-should-be Services menu: Service Scrubber.

Turns out that app’s writer, Peter Maurer, has some other useful tools.

Check his site out here.

de Tocqueville reminds us :

The Religious Right Watch (whose logo leaves something to be desired) reminds us that de Tocqueville never stops giving (200 years after his seminal look at America).

save us from the malls :

Through the DCist links section, I discovered Richard Layman's blog about planning.

Richard is a DC-based community activist and planner, who I know from name only.

He is a frequent contributor to the Columbia Heights Yahoo! Group. (A group who's underlying banter is so full of bile, that I actually had to unsubscribe, it was angering me so much. But that's a topic for later, or a Washington City Paper Article [$].)

Richard weighs in on the loss of locally-owned businesses in Ferndale (a Detroit suburb) and Dupont Circle.

As someone who grew up in a far Western suburb of Chicago that had and continues to have a thriving downtown of almost exclusively locally-owned businesses, my interest in planning issues has often surrounded this very topic: how do you beat the Wal-Marts of the world at their own game? Geneva’: marketing.

I also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. San Francisco politics, such as they are, offers another option: ban everything.

San Francisco has banned coffee shops in certain neighborhoods, attempted to keep out Home Depot and continued to ban chain stores from specific neighborhoods.

This works well, in some twisted way, in San Francisco, which has a distinct distaste for all things chained (while at the same time being the home of The Gap, Levi Strauss, Williams Sonoma and their spawn).

This course approach doesn't mean that people don't shop at chain stores. Heck you can head down 680 or take BART to Colma and find all the chain stores you're missing in SF. And people do, Colma would be just the city of the dead, if it weren't for the exodus of San Francisco shoppers and their tax dollars.

The marketing option, as mentioned by Richard. Geneva, IL, which now sports such chain stores at Home Depot, Old Navy and Applebee’s, is also considered the granddaddy of all Illinois summer festivals, Swedish Days.

The annual “Midsommer” festival (now more upscale with the addition of foreign words!) which draws hundreds of thousands to the city of only about 20,000 has led to the creation of seasonal festivals for fall (Festival of the Vine) and the Winter (Christmas Walk and House Tour).

Festivals are common draw in the Illinois to get people out of their homes and cars, but Geneva is unique for being one of the first (Swedish Days is over 50 years old) and for the size of the city (Geneva until the mid-90s had less than 10,000 residents).

Many of the same stores that I worked in as high schooler are still downtown. In fact, sometimes I feel like I grew up in the 1950s (and not the equally banal 1980s) as my childhood was spent riding my bike downtown to shop in the toy section of the five and dime. Or get ice cream at the local ice cream parlor.

Other ideas that have only killed the small downtowns of the America — pedestrian malls, covered sidewalks, out-of-scale malls — forget the basic tenant of marketing: play to your strengths.

In Geneva’s case that was unique stores, a unique experience and the open air environment that is ideal for festivals. The Chamber and Third Street Merchants associations were smart enough early on to realize that people weren’t going to the mall for the air-conditing. The were going because of marketing, common store hours and free parking.

Saving the independent businesses doesn’t require crazy redevelopment schemes. Just old fashioned chutzpah.

from the WDITOT files :

WDITOT (Why didn't I think of that?)

A previous version of my blogging prowess (uh-hum), I looked at information mapping.

Mapping was a theme that ran through my senior BFA work. (The blog as a map of my thinking was one project. Get it?)

Three years later in the midst of the blogger revolution, information aesthetics put a name on it and blogs on it regularly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Edward Tufte’s website. He doesn’t update it enough to feed my hunger. And oddly, I find it kind of hard to navigate. Especially in terms of finding new content.

in an alternative lifetime :

In one of my many alternate universes, I studied fashion design.

Project Runway began last night on Bravo! There is an interesting profile of all the contestants over at Fashion Wire Daily. (Is this post gay enough yet?)

Of particular interest is contestant Diana Eng’s web-based DIY fashion program I Heart Switch.

The other alternate universe of mine is in love with strange technology and interactive environments.

Check it out. It’s like ReadyMade + web TV.

really? :

I like still pretending I’m an artist. Although, I haven’t figured out what that means in this city/arts community that I don’t really understand nor have any artist friends. To keep up the ruse, I read DC Art News, though.

He's got the list for ‘06 Whitney Biennial up. How can it be that he doesn’t know who Jim O’Rourke is? And he’s the pulse of DC art?

Jane Jacob’s is right, unfortunately :

I’m a fan of Jacob’s. I devoured Life and Death of Great American Cities.

(Okay, not devoured, it took me like two years, but I was taking lots of notes, dog-earing pages and writing in the margins!)

Writing about the U.S., she predicted that the suburbs immediately outside of the center cities would fall into disfavor with a buying public that was continually looking for more land and bigger houses. These suburbs were ill-equipped to handle the influx of poor people that would eventually occupy them. They (the suburbs not the people) lacked pocket parks, low-rise apartments that oversaw the street, walkable streets and other marks of well-designed urban places that become, in effect, self-policing by design. She was worried that the isolated design of these suburbs would work poorly in conjunction with social ills of less-well-off communities. Thus, they require a heavy police state to protect the towns from the sorts of ills from which the town should naturally protect itself.

The riots outside of Paris this week have, unfortunately, underscored her thinking.

Paris has a ring of suburbs built after the war using the prevailing “wisdom” of modernism of the time: large apartment buildings isolated from each other in park-like settings and dependent on the car for transportation.

The talking-heads are going on about the lack of assimilation of France’s poor minorities as to blame for the violence?

But how are you to assimilate if you are stuck in a housing block isolated from the country around you? New York’s immigrants didn’t assimilate by moving to suburban housing estates. They lived in crowded conditions, near stores and transit and the cultural life of the major cities.

The immigrant gang problems in suburban Los Angeles and Washington, DC, only seem like Jacob’s thinking is coming to U.S. as our increasingly gentrifying cities can no longer find room for the poor.

The call of urban gentrification of the ’90s was “look at Paris.”

Yes look.

sigh :

I can’t tell whether I’m attracted to these hot young real estate moguls.

Or perhaps I’m just annoyed/jealous at another MSM-alleged “trend” that I’m not apart of.

Like I even know how I’m going to pay to replace my blown car tire.

Damn them and their commercial real estate money.

fall reading list :

I like to think that I can get through the stack of nonfiction books near my bed — the 9/11 Commission Report, On Holiday, a swedish anthropologist’s look at the history of vacationing in the U.S. and Europe.

But since I’m convinced that no one else actually read the Report, despite all those weeks on the best seller list, I needed to read something fiction for creativity’s and sanity’ sakes.

Browsing through N.O.’s bookshelf I found No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Confused as I am sometimes about his mind and the Japanese condition, I started reading.

As a side note, N.O. reads older Japanese books in English as the language is more contemporary than the original Japanese text. Japanese of only a half-century ago is as foreign to him as English from four centuries ago is to English speakers.

As often happens, though, I’m finding the Kafka-esque book is telling me more about myself than about him.

It’'s be a quick if depressing read. A needed break from consumerist holidays and terroism. More tk as I discover it.

I don't write the stuff :

What have I been working on? Laying out things that include lines like this:

Increasingly, large organizations are requiring real-time or zero-latency integration solutions that utilize mainframe-based events, data, and transaction resources to solve business challenges.

Oh... increasingly.

Huh?