A holophonic recording: you really need to be wearing headphones to get the full effect, but man is it worth it. How many of you turned your head at the beginning?

Women in art through the ages (from drawn.ca)

Keeping up with the recent videos, I present... a super cool dance to some Daft Punk:

I'm not sure why but I find this hilarious, especially the third time around.

(realized while listening to Sam's new badass mixcd) If someone wrote a vocoder that laid Schwarzenegger's voice over as a lyric track on RHCP's Dani California, it'd be like a humour-based immediate diuretic.

Photosynth looks cool.

While the Safari 3 beta might be easily exploited, I’m actually finding it entirely useable (on the Mac at least), unlike its previous incarnation. Its in-page finder is particularly snazzy, though I wish I could remap keys innately, without having to look for some plugin. I’m still keeping Firefox around for its awesome development plugins (namely Firebug), but I’ve had it with its memory and CPU hogging and random keyboard non-responsiveness.

How stupid awesome is this? A lot. Massive props are sent to Connected Ventures to producing this bitchin' one-shot, one-take corporate lip-synch fest of Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger.

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten has a great write up of their experiment to see what would happen if one of the finest musicians alive played some of the best music written on one of the best instruments ever fashioned in an ordinary metro. (i.e. Joshua Bell playing the L'Enfant Plaza on the Gibson Stradivarius) The result is a little disconcerting, and best summed up by the author’s analysis of W.H. Davies’s poetry:

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

This gnarly advert for Miranda July’s new book goes to show that a little creativity, a a camera, and some CSS can go a long way in terms of marketing on the cheap.

Whoa, this public transport planning widget for the Northern California bay area is really cool. Anyone feel like making a simple schedule widget for the STCUM (Montréal)?

Montreal is awesome and weird. Where else do municipal workers pull up to you and yell "Hey Jew!" and ask you in a genuinely inquisitive tone if rabbis can be gay?

As seen at An Event Apart Boston: The Flap and Snap is where you let your face go limp, whip your head back and force as fast and hard as possible, and people take pictures. Kudos to Jason Santa Maria for the Flickr group. Example:

While on the phone this morning, I realized that I think I forgot to post this presentation of mine I gave last summer on Ruby. Check it out! Even if you’re not a programmer, I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of it.

Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits fame continues to rock my socks off in this presentation on juggling design and UI challenges. I wish to make stuff as cool as this guy one day.

Excuse me? A fully functional paper Optimus Prime?!?!

I couldn’t resist: here’s Oliver Reichenstein’s Web Design is 95% Typography

I drool for good typography, so I’m awfully glad that Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton presented on why Web Typography Sucks.

=== Confessions of an information junkie == WTF? Today's connection to easily obtainable and digestible information inevitably has detrimental aspects; the proliferation of information addicts being one. Being afflicted this way doesn't mean you're a scholar or a person with particularly vested interest in a subject so that you can produce something of net benefit to the community – a junkie has an endless appetite for the easily absorbed – retention and contribution are not serious concerns here. For this reason, zoning out on IRC, or any other high-traffic IM venue is another great funnel to the head, apart from the web. The destructive effects are pretty obvious: I can remember days where I would wake up at around noon, read till my stomach hurt (around 2:00pm), return to the machine, eat dinner, then go to sleep when the birds woke up. This kind of pattern lurches against everything you're supposed to do as a functional, healthy, social human being. It is BAD. If you've got this, you can at least use your addiction to try and get out of your slump by learning more about it and eventually controlling the vacuum cleaner your brain has become. If you know someone with this, push it in front of their eyes and hope for the best. == Dealing The best way for folks like us to kick our habit is to understand what's going underneath the hood (to some extent). I'm not sure what exactly triggers this behavior, but I've got a feeling that it's related to workaholism, where you're going through the motions because it feels right, without much thought as to whether you're producing anything useful. This is something beyond regular procrastination. Taking heed from an article by Sierra on the scary aspects of Twitter (a crack-like Internet service that alerts you via email, mobile text messaging, and other avenues on the status of your friends and what they're up to), the key aspects of information addiction are how learning "stuff" regardless of its immediate practicality is an “example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines.” Be aware of how your head works in this manner; when your health starts taking a beating because you're spacing out on the net, get out of your humble abode, do something productive, or just run around and be active. Go parkouring (it's fun and dangerous!). Your body and mind tend to reset themselves to a more sane state while doing this, giving you a chance to reflect on what and why you're doing. If you're a RSS hound needing that "feeling of connectedness", uninstall your client or blow away all your feeds and try living without for a week – you'll find that it doesn't make a huge difference, because you'll hear about the important stuff anyway, either through another news channel, a friend, or through directed research you're doing for something with a concrete goal and deadline (Sierra). Go call your grandparents and ask them about the last abnormal thing you spoke to your room mate or peer about; if it's inappropriate, go for it anyway – they were your age once and probably had to deal with much crazier situations than you. Doing this will satisfy your craving and let you get on with what you should really be doing. == Wrapup Be cool. Being a total nightowl whackjob that hoards information obsessively is a controllable (and eventually highly prized) attribute. You knew the solution before you started reading this, but act on it now: get out of your house. Jumpkick a tree and run through a forest as fast as you can. Call an elder and ask hard or bizarre questions that'll have an answer you're not prepared for. Godspeed, you crazy junkies. Get better. Kathy Sierra's "Is Twitter TOO good?" : http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html Also inspired by "If", by Rudyard Kipling.

I'm a big fan of learning about the process of creation, especially when it reveals the mistakes and how they helped define the final product, so stuff like this incremental logo design process is something I'm really into. If anyone can find more like this, please comment.