Internet Soul Portraits

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“a tongue-in-cheek treatment of web design as pure representation. In this project, familiar images are altered by the application of essentialist, reductive approaches from a painterly tradition. The images are derived from the home pages of some of the most popular sites on the Web: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon, CNN, eBay, The Weather Channel, MapQuest, Best Buy, and MySpace.” Thanks to Laura Holder for the link.

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You Can Go Home Again

AIGA BaltimoreBeing from Maryland and all — I grew up in Gaithersburg — I’ve got a soft spot for Baltimore, for its cozy, rough and tumble neighborhoods, for that special ‘small town trapped in a big town’s body’ feel that it’s got, for the tarnished glory of the O’s. So it’s especially flattering for me to have been invited by AIGA Baltimore to speak for them in just a few short weeks. On Thu 21 Sep 2006, I’ll be appearing at Villa Julie College and giving a talk about work, play, NYTimes.com, and a little bit of my grand, unifying theory on design in the twenty-first century.

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Message to the Messengers

AdiumIf there’s an indispensable kind of software that helps me keep my work and personal lives balanced during the day, it’s instant messaging. It’s absolutely integral to making impromptu appointments, clarifying questions, asking for quick-hit reactions, and planning my social calendar. Because of this, I take a very conservative view to altering my instant messaging tools in any way — I generally don’t like it. Whenever the software I use changes — whether a feature is modified or a new one is added — it can take me weeks of grumbling about its newness before I can get accustomed to it.

For the most part, my program of choice is the superb, open source Adium. As an instant messaging client, none of the others can touch it; Adium is elegant on the whole, extremely pliable in its customization options, satisfyingly capable of talking to multiple I.M. services, and a high bargain at the price of free. I also make it a habit to use Apple’s iChat while at home, more so that I can keep an eye on what Apple’s doing with their instant messaging platform than anything. If I had to choose between the two, Adium would win, hands down.

It’s likely going to stay that way, too, because I’m not particularly encouraged by what I see coming for iChat 4.0, the next major revision scheduled to ship next year with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system update.

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Please Return Your Battery (If You Can)

Dear Apple Customer: Thank you for checking our Battery Exchange Program page for the eligibility of your 12-inch PowerBook G4’s accompanying battery for replacement. According to our records, your battery is is covered under this program.

So congratulations, it stands a better-than-usual chance of blowing up! And when we say “blowing up,” we mean it in the old school way, not in the way that young kids were bandying about five years ago as a euphemism for “getting really popular.”

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Night of the Revenge of the Bookeaters

Revenge of the BookeatersBy way of recording for posterity, I thought I’d note that last night I attended “Revenge of the Bookeaters” at the beautiful Beacon Theater, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Bookeaters” is the revue of literary and musical entertainments brought together by the over-achieving Dave Eggers to raise money for the good works being done by his 826 Valencia organization, which is dedicated to tutoring children in the art of writing. Last night’s show was the kick-off performance for a series that will travel to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Ann Arbor, Michigan before it’s all over.

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