▪ New York City

▪ Jersey City

▪ Killington VT

▪ North Creek NY

▪ Montreal

▪ London

▪ Dorset VT

▪ Bennington VT

▪ Buffalo NY

I would like to direct your attention to an interview of industrial designer Alissia Melka-Teichroew by Michael Surtees over at designnotes. Really quite good. Alissia is the designer of the ring I gave to Doris when I asked her to marry me nearly two years ago.

My diamond rings… There wasn’t a “problem” with the existing ones. I just question the fact if people really still remember the original value (not the diamond, but the act of asking someone to marry you) that is not a problem I think, that I solved. It’s just one of many ways to look at it.

byamt website

@alissiamt on twitter

whitelines is a new writing paper that uses a stark white line over a light grey field rather than the usual dark line on white field. The reduced contrast inherent to the paper allows your drawings or writing to stand out cleanly, some examples. They come in a bunch of ISO paper sizes and bindings and are available lined or gridded. The books and pads also look pretty great. I ordered some A5 wire-bound gridded sketch books and look forward to trying them out in a few days.

Wonderful weekend of skiing at Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks.

large version here

I really like the service/application Instapaper, but yesterday I noticed I kept putting more things into it and not taking them out. I am hoarding stuff – in hopes to Read Later (thats the text of the browser bookmarklet), which I truly want to do, but just keeping up with what’s new, tends to leave no time for what I had wanted to Read Later. I posted this thought to twitter and through the magic of twitter and a very thoughtful Instapaper I received the email tweet I had been expecting.  Now that Instapaper has taken an interest in my dilema, even if just responding to my wondered aloud pseudo request, I promise to try to hoard less and read more – later.

2007

Junk Drawer by Paho Mann

They are a necessary evil I feel both physically and digitally. Not everything is easily file-able or able to be fit into a easily defined category. Clay Shirky alludes to this when speaking of folksonomies allow for things to be tagged with different meanings and thus make them easy to find. Of course he speaks of the problem with physical items, say a library book, not being able to be shelved on 5 different shelves. So we can add tags to things and that will help us organize and find things in the future, and attach meaning to them. I set about the fearsome task of ‘organizing’ my Google Reader this morning and ran into some problems that I am still trying to figure out and get myself to the right mental model of what I want from the tools and options that Reader gives me.

• You can add multiple tags to any particular RSS item
• You can add an RSS feed to multiple folders
• But, tags and folders are the same

Folders are tags, so they get put in the same pool of tags. What’s good about this? One can put an RSS feed into multiple folders, effectively having it shelved on multiple shelves in your library of feeds. But like in a library you only want to have a certain number of folders, so you try to distill down the list, group similar items and get it to a manageable number. And then there is stuff that doesn’t really fit into any of your broad-as-possible-while-still-being-useful folders. This stuff has sat unfiled, unorganized, adrift until today I was able to ignore the desire to put them into 1 (obviously not happening) or 8 (seemed not so great either) folders so I made a new one which I called Interesting, and this is my junk drawer, and I am very happy with it.

my first post to dawdlr went up today. dawdlr is set up by one of the more interesting people around, Russell Davies who describes it as such:

I’ve tried to make dawdlr way slower than twitter. I reckon most people I know twitter about twice a day, so dawdlr is going to update twice a year. To try and get people to say what they’re doing, you know, more generally.

Its been over six months since I posted. I must have missed last Novembers posting by a few short days.

At the recommendation of a friend, who questioned the very idea that someone would plug their headphones in to a sign, I did just that. The experience was, as you might guess, pretty stupid. This particular sign was in the 42nd street A/C/E Station, where I stood about a foot away from the ad to which I was tethered and listened to a few moments of John Legend. I can’t even say I remember much of the music though I am pretty sure I hated it, but to be fair the experience wasn’t helping. When I pushed my unprotected headphone plug into this skanky 42nd Street subway sign the music was already playing, I had arrived mid song. Maybe I should have waited until the song (or songs?!) looped but the draw of standing uncomfortably close to a sign, listening to new music and thinking that this was supposed to sell me a compact disc was less than strong. I unplugged from the high-tech billboard, thinking of the marketing people convincing themselves that this idea was totally awesome.