In summary – Jaron spends the book pointing out how technology sometimes exhibits unanticipated negative pressure on society. A solid example he uses is the Facebook relationship status – with only five options to choose from, it forces people to pigeonhole themselves into categories arbitrarily concocted by a developer somewhere, rather than allowing people to express their relationship (from the full range of human relationships) in the terms they prefer. There’s a subtle backchannel message going on that says “Here are the categories that society has deemed normal and acceptable, and if you can’t pick one you don’t belong.” The same goes for gender (which seems to be a contentious issue lately), sexuality, political stripes, etc, etc. Humans are very rarely easily categorized into neat boxes.

He’s definitely on to something, and the book is chock-a-block full of powerful and interesting observations about technology’s impact on creativity, freedom, economics, that really opened my eyes to the subtle effects of interfaces that even I, as a UI designer, take for granted. However! While I see where he’s coming from on a number of issues, the conclusions he draws are rarely compelling. I had a really hard time reading this book, because whatever starts off as a neat humanist observation ends up degenerating into a 10-paragraph disorganized rant around the point, sometimes further devolving into a wordy tirade about the singularity. At times I felt I was swimming around in an ocean of argument without any really solid conclusions.

Maybe he’s not the greatest writer in the world – I think a lot of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed by a good editor forcing him to consolidate his arguments. (And to stop name-dropping mercilessly!) He’s a very bright man – I think he raises a lot of really interesting issues in his book, but it’s a bit of effort to get at some of them.

(a shot of the Vintage Wings of Canada by Peter Handley)

What a cool, unexpected sight! And how much fun must they be having tooling around over downtown doing formations? Beautiful planes!

Update: Mystery Solved – it was definitely Vintage Wings, and they were doing an “airborne parade” for the Tulip Festival. So much going on now that the festival season is in full swing!

The lunar clockwork moves along with some pretty regular precision, and that’s why I’m especially annoyed by all this hype about the “Supermoon”. The Moon orbits Earth every 27 days, and it’s in perigee & at full phase (Super!) about 5 times a year, which makes it a pretty common event. It’s the same colour and shape as usual. The supermoon is not really a big deal. Astronomers don’t even observe the event – they call it “perigee-syzygy” and it’s marked in their calendars as a particularly annoying night to try to observe stars.

With a title like “Supermoon” though, you expect some rare fireworks display in the skies – the Moon bleeds rainbows down into the ocean while a ring of volcanoes go off on it’s surface. I think the media pushing the Supermoon story are setting laypeople up for disappointment. When is it going to get Super!? It’s just the Moon – but fractionally bigger/brighter than yesterday!

The Moon’s still cool in it’s own right though. Go out and look at it just for the sake of seeing it!

A bunch of years ago I heard a competition on CBC Morning featuring architects hilariously trying to reproduce their structures out of gingerbread and it put the idea in my head that you could get pretty elaborate with your cookie houses. I’ve since had the good fortune of meeting a very neat family (you know who you are) who do a traditional gingerbread building party every year – and although I’ve only been a few times, my inner architecture nerd is always coming up with unreasonable construction ideas.

I think The Gingerbread Man just inspired me to new levels of madness.

The burgers are pretty great! Their fresh-ground paddies are beefy, not too seasoned, thick and juicy without being so huge you can’t finish one. It’s served up on a good quality bun, too, which is a big bonus. I don’t know if I’d drive across the city for one, but if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry you’re going to find a better burger here than any of the fast food joints, and they’re considerably more affordable than The Works. I heard that the Vera Sauce is crazy delicious, but I played it straight up on my first visit with my usual toppings. (Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Tomato, Lettuce, Cheese)

Since Vera’s is inside a butcher’s shop, skip the fries and grab one of the bucher’s prepared stuffed baked potatoes – they’re only like a dollar and they’re delicious. Wendy’s has nothing on this place.

Because the burgers are grilled to order, you’ll have a few minutes wait. They have a paper form you fill out with your name and burger preferences and they’ll call you out when your food’s ready. It’s hilarious to mess with the form – they played along and called me out as Captain Awesome. Fun staff!

]]> http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/05/veras-burger-shack/feed/ 0 http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/04/capital-cleanup-2012/ http://lunarbovine.com/blog/2012/04/capital-cleanup-2012/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:06:59 +0000 jcobill http://lunarbovine.com/blog/?p=2241 Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site right nearby – but any thicket that made a suitable windbreak was heaped with jars and bottles and mats of plastic bags.

There’s definitely enough trash laying around in spring to gross you out. We found not one, but TWO mattresses blown off the Queensway. Dirty diapers. Lots and lots of Tim Hortons cups. And then you find a beautiful field of wild trilliums (Ahem: Trout lilies! ), and it reminds you why it’s worth making an effort.

though similar to Calibri in a lot of ways, is a typeface called Colaborate by Ralph Olivier de Carrois. I really like the way he’s put descenders on traditionally straight figures, and he’s put little geometric wrinkles in everything to make it feel a bit more square. The kerning pairs are a bit chunky, but if you’re willing to tighten things up manually, it’s a nice display font. You can’t argue with the price! I think I’m going to use this one for a project!

I have to identify fonts all the time, because clients never pay attention to what their previous designers told them. I’ll pull away the veil and reveal all my secrets!

My usual strategy for identifying fonts is four steps:

1) Off the top of my head. (About 80% of stuff in the world is printed in the same set of 30 or fewer fonts, and I’ve examined them all under a microscope.)

2) Try identifont – a site that lets you specify details about the font’s unique traits (angular serifs, etc) and generates a list of known matches. Pretty handy, and sometimes a good resource for learning about nice new derivatives of fonts you like.

3) Try whatthefont – a site that lets you upload an image, and the OCR tries to figure it out (almost never successfully matches for me)

4) Scour the cheap/free fonts sites to see what’s popular. You can almost always find trendy fonts on the front pages. My favourite resources are google web fonts, dafont, fontsquirrel, and abduzeedo’s surprisingly popular Friday Fresh Free Font. Take a look at the first 20 fonts on any of those pages, and I guarantee you’ll see faces that made their way into tons of recent mobile apps, skateboarding magazines, and video games.

The production design was hit and miss. I found the tech and costumes and sets lacked a cohesive vision and often felt cheap and mixed up. The camera was absurdly shaky, to the point where even I (who normally doesn’t mind) was getting uncomfortable. I get that the handheld shaky camera is supposed to lend a dynamic, action, ‘cinema verité’ look to the film, but it was awful. Directors: please stop asking for this!

Wrath of the Titans (Fun Spectacle!): Movies like this are why I still go to movie theatres. Sam Worthington runs around fighting stuff in this very linear video-gamey movie about the last dying breaths of the Greek Gods. There’s not a lot to it, truth be told, beyond the swordfighting and monsters (and an unlikely romance), but it makes a pretty great spectacle film! The effects are terrific, and I thought they made really effective use of the 3D cameras. The scene where Cronus erupts out of Tartarus as a giant lava-covered demon was particularly gorgeous – kudos to the effects team that made this movie look incredible.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Sooooo boring) : This one’s been on my renter list for ages, so I finally got around to watching it and was bored to tears. I fast-fowarded a chunk of the film looking for anything to shake up the pace, but no – it drones on for the full 119 minutes. This is my second Wes Anderson disappointment (I hated the Darjeeling Express) and I’m wondering if he and I are just on different levels or something. I enjoy cerebral films – and there’s a lot to like about his work. I love his shot compositions, and I think he has a real talent for evoking emotional, honest performances. It’s too bad nothing ever happens in his movies. Magnificently dull. I want my hour and a half back.

The worst thing is that our house is pretty clean – if I left it laying around I’d see it. No, everything’s tucked away in drawers, bags and closets, meaning I get to turn the house upside down looking for stuff. I never did end up finding my bag of markers. So frustrating.

[Edit: I found my markers, they're were in the car after recently taking them for a drive.]