First Lady Travels in Style

This is odd but when the First Lady has to fly in a military transport, they tow a Airstream on board where she is cocooned away in comfort.  Click on the photo for more interior shots.  I like Airstreams as much as the next guy but this seems a little excessive.  I am glad it isn't my taxes that are paying for this...

The Rebranding of Jesus

How the top Aussie ad agencies would sell salvation.  What do you think?

Worst Album Covers of All Time

 

 

Technorati Tags: Worst album covers of all time

via Warren Kinsella who has ensured that productivity went way down today at work.

Long live the Phoenix Coyotes

If Dave Blondel had comments, I would comment here and tell him that the Winnipeg Jet's logo was and is terrible.

Presidential Campaign Logos

From 1960 to today.

A bed for the cabin

I made the mistake of showing this to Wendy the other day.  The next thing I knew she was commenting that a smaller version of this is what we need at the lake.  Despite me lacking the same enthusiasm that Wendy has for the project, it will quite a bit cheaper to build than purchasing a new bed although for this summer, we will be using a queen sized air mattress to sleep on.  With Wendy being off work on medical leave, she has turned her attention to getting organized for the cabin.  If you care, her complete to do list for the lake can be found here.

The Church in an Age of Scarcity

A couple of weeks ago Jason Evans started to post about the recession and the church which started me thinking as I was reading Howard Kunstler's excellent book, The Long Emergency (Wikipedia summary - Full text available on at Google Books) for about the third time.  If you haven't read it, you need to.

I don't know if I totally accept all of Kunstler's findings.  While I accept that technology today does not allow us to deal with the problems of living in age of scarcity, technology in a capitalistic society does tend to bridge a lot of gaps when the capital is there for innovation as it will be in the future.  At the same time I accept his statement that the western world as we know it is not based on democracy, Christianity, or the pursuit of liberty, it is based on cheap oil and natural gas.  Of course we are running out of those two commodities...

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

Which will mean that we need to make some changes

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Over the years I had a lot of discussions on what this will mean to the church.  Chris Marshall is wondering the same thing

My truck is paid off but the gas prices are killing me. I don't drive that much and its over $300 per month, not including my wife's car. So what does this project to as a national economy? Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences?

How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can't be fed? As builders pass on who are the committed givers what is left? 1/2 of boomers are there to give and the other 1/2 are driven past their financial margins with consumerism and can't help. Gen X and Millenials have very little value in long term commitments, are all about instant gratification and consumerism is their native language. Commonly this group of up and comers are living on 125-140% of their income taking on exponential debt per year. What will be the result of these decisions having no margins when the shoe drops?

Will American churches go the way of their European counterparts? Becoming really funky coffee houses, restaurants, art galleries and dance clubs. Just things I wonder about.

I know a couple of people who are the boards of Bible colleges and seminaries who talk about getting new projects done in the next couple of years before the builders who give most of the money to churches and institutions pass away.  After that they know that the money will be in far less supply.  On top of that, while churches like to talk about sacrificial giving and committed tithers, most studies show that people give when the economy is good and are more casual tithers.  When faced with higher heating costs, much higher fuel prices, and more money to go to food, will the cash go to paying the churches bills or their own bills?

One thing that economists have been saying for a long time is that our lifestyle is being financed by VISA and when a recession hits, it will hurt those that are carrying debt the most.  In 2004, Maclean's ran this story about Canadian's personal debt being at record levels.

And so this summer Russell Kent and his wife, Mary, joined the legions of other young families in opting to ignore the admonitions they'd heard from their parents and taking the plunge into home ownership. They bought a house in the suburbs north of Toronto - and in the process have run up their debts far above anything they'd ever imagined. The house cost more than the top amount they'd intended to spend. They had to drain much of their savings and load up on personal lines of credit to muster a 25 per cent down payment. In total, they now owe roughly $340,000, spread across a mortgage, three lines of credit and two credit cards. Every month, $920 goes to pay interest on the cards and bank lines, and another $1,460 toward the mortgage. Mary also spends $300 a month to lease her car. Debt payments eat up close to a third of their after-tax income. Russell says making ends meet over the next few years will be "like stretching a gnat's ass over a rain barrel."

If the Kents feel intimidated by the debt challenge ahead of them, they're not alone. Collectively, Canadian consumers now owe $752.1 billion, according to Bank of Canada, up 36 per cent in the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, personal disposable income, or take-home pay, has risen 15 per cent. In other words, Canadians are piling on debt more than twice as fast as their income is growing.

It is conceivable that many churches in a particular region of the country could find themselves in a horrible financial mess when funds drive up and the demand on church and other social services intensifies.  While many recessions are relatively short lives to the last big one in the 1970s, there are many who are forecasting the next economic meltdown to last much longer.  Of course this will hit the church in a couple of ways.

1. The Church, Powered by VISA.  Several friend who are pastors bring up the point that their churches have some serious debt and if giving goes down then things will be really tough... of course the good news is that banks aren't all that thrilled with foreclosing on banks but have been known to demand spots on church boards as a condition for continued solvency.  For churches who are owing to their denominations, the money that comes from those investments is now tied down which impacts other areas of church life.  Depending on the denomination, it could have a serious impact on church planting/missions or other areas that are dependent on investment income (as if the downtown in the economy won't have a big of enough negative impact).  Even in a church of people committed to tithing (which Barna reminds us is a rarity), 10% of a reduced income is still less.  Add on top of that rising food and fuel costs, we may have a lot less to give above and beyond.
2. Running on Empty| With today's gas price at $1.31, Wendy and I are driving a lot less then we ever have before.  I am walking to work and if Wendy wasn't on medical leave, she recently was transferred down the street to 33rd Street Safeway.  She says that even at -40 degree Celsius she is walking (I'll believe it when I see it) to work.  I was listening to a podcast with Todd Hunter who talked about that at a church he previously pastored, they would track how far people were driving to the church.  At Lakeview, we used to talk about being a city wide church where people used to drive in as far as Borden to attend church there.  Will people drive at $1.50 a litre, $1.75 a litre, $2.00 a litre?  Kunstler talks about a localization of the economy in The Long Emergency and I wonder if that applies to the religion as well.  Will the small Baptist church at the end of the street look more attractive then the regional megachurch on the outskirts of town?  Especially when you can do as Charlie Wear blogs about where he found his sermon to listen to last week on YouTube.  Of course some are going to say, video churches are the answer and they might be if you believe that only dominant alpha males have the right to speak about how to deal with stress in your families for 14 weeks straight.  I personally prefer the idea of local expressions of Christian community throughout the city.
3. Expensive Natural Gas | When natural gas was cheap like borscht (which itself is becoming more expensive) I hated visiting mostly rural churches that lowered their ceilings to save on heating costs.  Now they are looking smarter and I look out of date.  Most churches are really costly to heat and keep functioning for what is still primarily a Sunday event.  Of course you can keep it cold in there during the week and hot during the summer to keep costs down but churches are pretty expensive to run considering many of them aren't used that often compared to other facilities their size.  There are other options that can be used.  Look at how the Freeway uses their space for the community or as I have blogged about forever.  Of course there are a lot of options for making it cheaper to heat but perhaps going the other way and making them useful spaces again is the better option.  I keep thinking to what Steve Collin's did up as his efforts for rebranding the Church of England.  He was re-imagining church interiors as public spaces again in the city, the local church as a third space, a place to work, rest, and pray and being surrounded by spiritual resources as opposed to something that was open from 10:30a to 12:30p on Sunday's.  To answer Chris Marshall's earlier question, maybe the future of the church is to embrace what the Europeans are doing to churches before the churches themselves die off.  Of course the other alternative would be to start weaning ourselves off our addiction to church buildings.  Look at what ReImagine is doing in San Francisco or what the Hawthorn House is doing in San Diego is doing without a traditional church facility. 
4. The one other thing that needs to be addressed is the issue of the Clergy Class.  I don't have a problem with highly educated and well taught clergy but the process to get them to this point is expensive and this is paid for by one of three methods.  1) Rich parents 2) Marry rich (this idea was suggested to me in college) 3) Student loan debt.  All three of these funding options have advantages and drawbacks but the most popular option is often student loans which tends to make hiring clergy expensive.  I am not badmouthing clergy but if we stick with the current method of church leadership, the economics will need to be rethought out and since our current best idea is debt financing, I doubt there is a pile of money out there to fix the issue.  Either we figure out a way to make private education a lot cheaper, we accept the fact that only wealthy churches get qualified church leadership, or we rethink ways to develop leaders.  During the Great Depression, my grandfather's theological education came through correspondence classes.  During the age of YouTube, I am sure we can come up something as least as effective and maybe quite a bit better.

I am a disciple of Thomas Homer-Dixon and I tend to think that there will be an upside of the coming age of scarcity.  I think the church has a tremendous opportunity during this period of change.  Of course a lot of things we think are sacred cows will be turned into black angus burgers but c'mon, it isn't as if we did that well during the age of abundance anyways.  While managing to start a bunch of megachurches, we also managed to usher the church into a very long period of decline and irrelevance and that was after spending billions and billions on church growth.  As we enter into a new age of global warming, scarcity, and perhaps conflict over resources, maybe the church adapt a little better this time.

Also: Alan Creech has posted some more thoughts on his blog

Technorati Tags: The Long Emergency,Thomas Homer-Dixon,Steve Collins

Mistakes in logo design

Yeah.

The rustic re-use cabin

I live this a lot and it only cost $15,000.00

You can order your own from Hive Modular

Technorati Tags: shipping containers,cabin

Pixish

Some of you designers out there may be interested in Pixish.  In their words,

Say you're a business that needs photos for your website, or a magazine that needs an illustration, or just someone who wants to hold a contest … Pixish is a way to engage creative people online to submit, judge, and source amazing images.

Technorati tags: pixish, design

The Death of Suburbia

This video is from TED and is one of a long series of videos I am downloading off of YouTube and converting to my PSP for viewing again later.  I am a big fan of Kunstler's view of the future (although I think he underestimates the power of capitalism and innovation a bit) but the video is one that you will want to watch.

In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about. Reengineering our cities will involve more radical change than we are prepared for, Kunstler believes, but our hand will be forced by earth crises stemming from our national lifestyle. "Life in the mid-21st century," Kunstler says, "is going to be about living locally."

Technorati tags: James Howard Kunstler, TED, urban, suburbia, energy

The next version of Blogger

I was home sick yesterday and thought to myself that since I was pretty much immobilized that this would be a good time to switch to Wordpress. I looked at AKMA's new blog and I really like his template and went looking around for some other templates I liked.

That is when I realized why I don't like WordPress. It is the themes. I am finding that sites like Adam Cleaveland and AKMA's site are the exceptions and many, many WordPress themes compete with the content rather than let the content shine. The minimalistic themes that I like seem to have been used over at Wordpress.com so I would have a theme just like everyone elses.

I installed MovableType 4.x the other day and while I liked it, it is a lot harder to use than it needs to be. I can't believe that blogroll support was not included and has to be added via a plugin. Also, Windows Live Writer does not work with Movable Type for some reason. I suppose I am looking for a Typepad type version which SA is smart enough not to do because everyone would host Typepad themselves which would cannibalize their revenues. I did try out a free trial of Typepad and I do like it but then I am paying to host my site at Typepad and then also some hosting for Resonate as well on a different site which makes little sense. Although importing 8000+ posts into WordPress is easy but rather difficult into Typepad or MT. If anyone has an easy solution for this, I think I would switch.

In the end I am still using Blogger and here are a couple of features I would love to see for those of us who use FTP and host our blogs ourselves.

• Integration with Google Sitemaps. I know it can use my RSS feed to update with but there has to be a better solution for our old content. The publication of a complete sitemap of our blog content would be wonderful, even if the file was stored on Google's servers.
• A separate archives and labels page. This way people could browse our labels and archives easier and we could even move our listing of archives off our main page if we so desire. Actually Blogger used to do this and it is a feature I would love back.
• Some new templates please. If Yahoo! 360 has more template options, something is wrong. In the Pyra days you had design competitions. Do one again and involve the Blogger and design community. You may be surprised.
• Integration with del.icio.us: I don't know who started this feud but it would be great if my contextless links could be posted daily via del.icio.us. While you are at it, could you get together with some of your old coworkers at Obvious and work out some cool inline Twitter integration as well.
• Can you please enable labels of longer then 100 posts. When Blogger publishes it republishes almost all of my categories anyways. Why not have it publish less unchanged pages and update a couple of current pages. Limit each label to 100 posts on a page but simple do the "previous" link to older labels.

The Re-emergence of the High Line

I have never been to New York but one of the things I want to see when I go there is the High Line when it is done.  The New York Times has a nice article on how it is coming along.  It's enough to make me want to move to New York.  Oh right, I have always wanted to live in New York but it's another reason why I want to live in New York. 

Speaking of New York, at coffee yesterday I was listening to some co-workers mention that they would want to live in a small town.  I thought they were crazy and when I mentioned New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, and L.A. as cities I want to live in, they thought I was certifiably crazy.  Each carries risks.  In several of those places, the chances of being run over by a run away swather is a lot less then the others.  Nothing is worse than "death by swather".

Technorati tags: High Line, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, swather

Getting Things Done with Palm Desktop

My Palm Desktop experiment in office organization has lasted a couple of weeks and I have to admit, it working quite well for me which is weird because it generally has failed in the past.  A couple of things are different now.

I have to track far more information then I ever had to do at Lakeland or Lakeview Church.  There are social workers, government agencies, NGOs, politicians, other agencies, and co-workers who need to be kept track of.  Each of them has an e-mail address, fax number, address, cell phone, home and work numbers that may need to be called.  While e-mail address books do a great job of tracking e-mail addresses, I find with many agencies, the fax still rules and I joke that there is still carrier pigeons in use.  At work I have high speed Internet and a quick Windows XP based computer on a well built network.

I need to access the information from more places.  Of course my office is used quite often but also while I am in other areas of the building (which is a lot) and I am on call 24 hours a day.  While there is not a lot of calls at home, there are several calls a week and some of them require information.

The information is in two places.  The Palm Desktop keeps my calendar, contacts, to-do list, and notes all in one place and generates alarms for things that are urgent.  Most of that information is entered while in my office.  As I get my voice mail off my phone, it is easy to enter much of the information needed into the Palm Desktop for future use.

Whenever I feel like it but always once a day, I sync my data with my ancient Sony Clie PEG-SL10 (which is a new case on a Palm III)  This works well because part of every day I am working in the front desk area or am taking calls in other areas of the building.  Also it travels home with me where I enjoy having it to add things once in a while to my to-do list.

I know a lot of people see a Moleskine and a PDA in the context of either/or but I tend to use them in conjunction.  Using a PDA to keep notes in during a meeting is a pain and a notebook and pen still work pretty well.  At the same time I enjoy having access to the information that my PDA gives me, especially the calendar and contacts.  After any meetings, my notebook makes it way back to the desk and the relevant data is transferred back to the Palm Desktop or added to another program.

I know people have told me that an iPod Touch would do all of it but as a friend has proven to me, you can't always get a wifi connection and the iPod Touch is not a great note taking machine, especially when compared to a pen and notebook.

All of this helps create a system where I can move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere.  According to David Allen and the GTD theory, my limited is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.  The Palm Desktop (and a massive filing cabinet) is my way of dealing with the information.

Related Links

• Palm Desktop download page (the software is free to download and you don't have to own a Palm device either)
• Zire 22: Palm's latest and cheapest handheld
• What is GTD?
• Blueline hardcover notebook (wonderful and cheap Moleskine imitation)
• David Allen admitting he uses a Palm and Palm Desktop to GTD

Technorati tags: Palm Desktop, GTD, Sony Clie, PDA, Moleskine, iPod Touch

Cleveland goes old school

I have always enjoyed the Cleveland Browns, maybe because they can never beat the Denver Broncos when it counts but I enjoy the Dawg Pound and the rabid Cleveland fans.  As I flipped to watch the Browns play today, I was wondering why they stenciled their numbers with Sharpies on their helmets.  A quick look around the Internet told me that they are supposed to look this bad.  Apparently they are wearing "throwback" uniforms which makes little sense to me because what makes the Browns uniform work is that it is basically a throwback uniform.  The uniforms aren't that much different but the bad numbers on the helmets not only look but seem to be applied inconsistently, especially Derek Anderson's.

Technorati tags: Cleveland Browns, Derek Anderson

AKMA now using WordPress

I really like AKMA's new design for his WordPress powered blog.  Of course I was a little late to discovering it as I was subscribed to his MT powered RSS field.

Technorati tags: AKMA, Wordpress

Best Designed Independent Press Awards

My friends at Beyond Magazine have been nominated for Best Design at the Utne Independent Press Awards which as you can imagine, is a pretty big deal.

We began by upending the orderly shelves of our library, corralling some 1,300 magazines, newsletters, journals, alt weeklies, and zines into wobbly stacks. Then we dug in to read articles that we might have missed during the year and to reread our favorites—everything from gritty newsprint publications to polished perfect-bound journals. After much deliberation, debate, and a bit of teeth-gnashing, we whittled it all down to 111 standouts.

In case you haven't done so, head on over to Beyond's website and subscribe. Your subscription supports what Utne thinks is one of the best designed independent magazines out there.

Technorati tags: Beyond Magazine, Utne Independent Press Awards

Where Writers Write

There is a great special report in the Guardian about where writers do their writing (with some fun photos). So where do you do most of your writing? Post some photos on your blog or on Flickr and post the links in the comments.

Evolution of jordoncooper.com

I updated the site last night with a slightly new look. I want to thank everyone who wrote to say they hated the new look.

Here are the highlights (lowlights) of the changes.

• The store is now gone. It has been with the site since GeoCities but no one uses it anymore and it was a pain to update.
• Updated profile page
• I added a disclosure statement to help with accountability and transperancy with the site so it is clear where I come from, how I make my money, and identify any conflict of interests on the site. Read it and met me know what you think.
  
• The quotes section has it's own search engine now so you can search just that section of the site.
• There are new header images being created but they aren't done yet.
• I put some thought into the footers for the first time ever and I think they add a bit to the site as well. There are links there to the social networking sites I am a part of (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm...)
  

The site still isn't in CSS, although a CSS version of the site is almost completed. I am having problems with IE6 and IE7 and then I looked at it with Safari and it looked funny there as well. It will be uploaded in a couple of weeks if I get around to it.

Moving

So Wendy and I have had two ongoing discussions the last couple of days. First we have been debating whether to sell the house and move to a different neighborhood. The anger part of us wants to move but the more we talk about it, the more we realize we like our neighbors and also we like our little house, despite the non-stop list of things that need to be done to it (click on the photo and you can see the exterior ideas). Part of the crime problem can't be fixed (we are a corner lot on a quiet side street) and therefore will always be a bit of a target. Also, houses that do not have attached garages seem to be seen more of a target (as proven by my neighbors). The church across the street also causes a bit of a problem as two of the three entrances to our home are obstructed by that church and we have no neighbors more or less on the north side of the house. Lighting is poor as well. Of course the easy solution would be to blanket the north side of the house with lights (and snipers) but that is quite unattractive so we are looking around at what we can do. I don't like motion detector driven lighting but that would be an option as well. We do need some better lighting on the driveway which is a bit back from the house. The other options would be either mongooses or wolves penned up in the yard.

10 Most Dangerous Toys of All Time

Radar Magazine offers up a list of the ten most dangerous toys of all time. For some reason I expected own more of them but I only owned lawn darts and Battlestar Galactica Vipers which shot real missiles. The only one of the list was the toy set made with uranium. via

In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. Gilbert, who Americanmemorabilia claims was "often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius," had a dream that nuclear power could capture the imaginations of children everywhere. For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson Cloud Chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a Spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, and an Electroscope to measure radioactivity.

How could that possibly be dangerous? Any one out there own in particularily dangerous toys? If you did, let us know in the comments.

45 Amazing Blog Designs

All can be found here. via

Alternatives

to living in the McMansion. The micro-compact home or the Tiny Tumbleweed Housing Company which are not much smaller than my house :-) Of course another option to sprawling burbs is living in a shipping container. I link to these because a couple of years ago Wendy brought home a magazine and it hard a feature on a family of four who decided to purchase and live on a house boat all year long in Toronto. Two teen boy and two parents and not a lot of space. The mother talked about the discipline it brought to them in regards to materialism because for everything that made it's way on board, something had to be tossed. Everything they bought cost them twice. First for the purchase and then the loss of something else. Wendy and I are working on that right now and I think it is a good idea.

Living in an over inflated housing market like Saskatoon does change the way we live. If we were to sell, we would get between twice and three times what we paid for our home but to purchase again, we would have to leave the city for a rural outlying area and commute in (thanks but no thanks). The alternative is to change the way we live being changed as opposed to the container we live in.

The Beauty of Simplicity

An article on simplicity in design in Fast Company..

To make it to the home page, a new service needs to be so compelling that it
will garner millions of page views per day. Contenders audition on the advanced-search page; if they prove their mettle--as image search did, growing from 700,000 page views daily to 2 million in two weeks--they may earn a permanent link. Few make the cut, and that's fine. Google's research shows that users remember just 7 to 10 services on rival sites. So Google offers a miserly six services on its home page. By contrast, MSN promotes more than 50, and Yahoo, over 60. And both sell advertising off their home pages; Google's is a commercial-free zone.
So why don't those sites simply hit the delete button and make their home pages more Googlesque? Hewing to the simplicity principle, it turns out, is tougher than connecting with tech support, particularly if you try it retrospectively. "Once you have a home page like our competitors'," Mayer says, "paring it back to look like Google's is impossible. You have too many stakeholders who feel they should be promoted on the home page." (MSN says more than half its customers are happy with its home page--but it's experimenting with a sleeker version called start.com.")

My friend Gloria and I argued this all of the time at Lakeview Church. I favored a more Google approach and she favored a more MSN/Yahoo! approach. From this it looks like I was right and apparently petty enough to bring it up.

The article talks a bit about John Maeda

John Maeda runs the Media Lab's Simplicity Consortium. His goal is to find ways to break free from the intimidating complexity of today's technology and the frustration of information overload. He is a gentle, soft-spoken man, dressed elegantly in a crisp, white collarless shirt and black pants. And he is an unusual amalgam: having the mathematical wizardry of a computer geek with the soul of an artist. Indeed, in 1990, he left MIT for four years to study art. "My whole life changed," he says. "I thought, This is a great way to live." But rather than throwing over his digital life entirely, he conceived a mission. "I came back to MIT to figure out how you could combine simplicity, which is basic human life, with this thing--technology--that's out of control."

In his book, he asks the basic question. How simple can we make it and how complex does it have to be which is something I have been mulling over in regards to how we live life.

I am not alone is looking for something simpler. Again from the Fast Company article

Philips deployed researchers in seven countries, asking nearly 2,000 consumers to identify the biggest societal issue that the company should address. The response was loud and urgent. "Almost immediately, we hit on the notion of complexity and its relationship to human beings," says Andrea Ragnetti, Philips's chief marketing officer. Consumers told the researchers that they felt overwhelmed by the complexity of technology. Some 30% of home-networking products were returned because people couldn't get them to work. Nearly 48% of people had put off buying a digital camera because they thought it would be too complicated.

It explains a bit of why I am using AbiWord for writing my book. It just allows me to write. If I really need a complex chart, Open Office is a couple clicks away and yes I know how to use all of its features but at times, I just want to communicate with words.

Contextless Links

• A Soviet Poster a Day :: Delivers what it says
• An online Etch-a-Sketch
• 10 Fashion Must Have's For Men
• Churchgoer tips God for a great week
• Bart Campolo is blogging
• MySpace vs. Facebook :: Class determines which one people choose :: Interesting study on UI and class.
  

New design being created

Last night at work, I grabbed some paper and started to sketch out what the next version of this weblog will look like. I thought I would share a couple of things that inspired my thinking...

• Derek Powazek: "Embrace your bottom". Evhead's new design was inspired by part of it.
• Khoi Vinh's weblog: Khoi controls the design and layout of the New York Times online edition and I hesitate to even link to his blog because it is so much better than my own ideas but we are generally inspired by those who are way better than we are.
• Michael Sippey's redesign made me realize what a poor designer I really am. His is the first innovative use of categories that I have seen in a weblog.
• Obviously: It is nice to see a weblog powered by Blogger that isn't using the old templates and actually looks good.
• Pernell Goodyear may be one of the best Blogger based designers out there. I liked his design from last week quite a bit. It reminded me a bit of an old design I had and liked (but none of you did).
• Jen Bekman has one of the best implementations of the famous WordPress theme Hemingway that I have ever seen.

The design is still a week or so away from being done. I have some other things that need to be done (plan for the Exiles, write a book, spend time with my kid) when I get off working nights but among them is to turn my sketches into a site. We'll see how it all turns out.

What just happened?

For three weeks I had been WordPressing along until I got an e-mail from my ISP saying I was using up a huge chunk of the server's CPU power. I deleted some wiki's and got another e-mail saying that I was using even more CPU usage while at the same time felt that WordPress was slow, even with the caching on. Reading the site was slow but internal Wordpress functions were painfully slow and much slower than WordPress.com At the same time some little things with K2 and WordPress started to bug me formatting wise so I decided I would make the switch back.

Instead of building my own theme, I decided to come back to Blogger and then redesign my site later. I'll see what I can do about integrating some of the features back into Blogger.

A Business Card Gallery

I made the mistake of clicking on this link to a photoset of business cards (If you have a half hour or so, check out the slideshow). These are not so much cards as they are pieces of art and they made me feel very insecure about my own cards. I am off to design some new ones...

The backyard

There has been a lot of plans made regarding our backyard over the last winter and today after work I had plans to go to the Home Depot and start working on my backyard bar. On our way over, I started thinking about how much I would actually use it. Five or six times a year at the most. We use our backyard a lot but we don't have people over every evening so I don't think we are going to build it but concentrate on some other areas.

So after Wendy and I debated and pondered while wandering through Home Outfitters, Canadian Tire, and eventually back into the Home Depot. While at Canadian Tire we looked at some gazebos which were nice but the important thing they reminded me that that they do is make a larger space into a smaller one which we are working on without that. The plan is to move our fire pit closer to the patio and add a couple of plastic adirondack chairs to the mix and redo some older patio furniture, add some more shrubs for a hedge, expand the patio, and sit back and relax. A lot of work but I think it should be fun.

Of course the first thing was to move the maple wood from our now gone maple tree to the back of the yard to dry out. Under the mess there is my landscape pond, a destroyed juniper, and part of my patio. When we moved it, there was still snow under all of the sawdust. Apparently it provides better insulation than what we thought.