the real social

I have spent the last dec­ade nat­ur­ally evolving towards a work day that largely takes place in cof­fee shops. Hav­ing writ­ten my MA largely at the Second Cup in Guelph and turned to the Star­bucks before that to do busi­ness plan­ning, I cur­rently spend the bulk of my time at the Second Cup in Westdale. …

Making the Magic Believable

Eng­lish Rus­sia has pos­ted some great foot­age of a Sta­lin­ist video show­ing the won­der­ful archi­tec­tural rewards that the popu­lace was about to reap. I was par­tic­u­larly impressed by what must have been a rather impress­ive tech­nique for the time of put­ting the modeled or rendered struc­tures into live video of the actual con­struc­tion sites. I …

Running Sparklines

I got the little Nike+ pedo­meter for my iPod last year to track my run­ning pro­gress. Yeah, that’s right its was purely for exer­cise sake…yeah. Yes, its a gad­get. I like gad­gets. And this one is very cool. If you don’t know the Nike+ doodad. There is a wire­less receiver that attached to your iPod …

For those Challenged by Waking Up

From bestdesi.com comes a top ten list of the most annoy­ing alarm clocks in the world. I like the selec­tion of clocks. All are pretty much annoy­ing which of course is part of the deal, but what the bet­ter ones seem to fea­ture is a rather chal­len­ging activ­ity to turn the alarm off. I really …

Making Connections

Gene­a­logy remains one of the more pop­u­lar pas­times in mod­ern cul­ture. Embra­cing Web2.0 Ajax comes Geni.com, which is quite viral. It offers a very easy guided data entry pro­cess geared towards encour­aging con­tact with rel­at­ives to have them fill in their own inform­a­tion and gradu­ally flesh out a very com­pre­hens­ive tree. Its extremely fun to …

Making the Pitch

Clever lads have run the CES address of Bill Gates and the Mac­world Key­note by Steve Jobs through a vari­ety of text ana­lysis tools to get an idea of why one has greater impact than the other. The art­icle demon­strates that there is a huge dif­fer­ence in the com­plex­ity of the mes­sage. Jobs deliv­ers short, …

Braudel

An incred­ible num­ber of dice, always rolling, dom­in­ate and determ­ine each indi­vidual exist­ence: uncer­tainty, then, in the realm of indi­vidual his­tory; but in that of col­lect­ive his­tory … sim­pli­city and con­sist­ency. His­tory is indeed ‘a poor little con­jec­tural sci­ence’ when it selects indi­vidu­als as its objects … but much more rational in its pro­ced­ures and …

Survival Tips for Parisian High Society

From Michele comes this very mus­ing cor­res­pond­ence about <a href=“http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6205403.stm” target=_blank”>an Englishwoman’s exper­i­ence in ‘polite’ Parisian soci­ety. It provided me with a good chuckle and I hope it does the same for you. I guess I wasn’t hanging around in polite enough circles to have been apprised of or embar­rassed by my beha­viour. Things to …

Changing Glasses for Changing Tastes

Thanks to Usama for this one. Glasses that have inter­change­able parts so you can choose a col­our to match your mood or your fash­ion. The toulch ONE eye­glass sys­tem has a series of arms and nosepieces in a vari­ety of col­ours and pat­terns. The web­site itself is pleas­ingly enter­tain­ing. They aren’t cheap of course, but …

Architecture Imitating Something…

Simply too absurd not to blog. Appar­ently there’s a new lux­ury condo planned for Dubai which is designed to resemble an Apple iPod (I prob­ably don’t actu­ally have to brand tag that do i?). Designed to ree­mble to that extent that the build­ing rest on an iPod dock (hope­fully size appro­pri­ately ;-) and is canted …