August, 2006

I will one day build a Fortune Global 500^WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.

I really do. This quick demo by Merlin Mann only whetted my appetite. Had I the money, I swear I’d buy an overpriced MacBook Pro just to get my hands on it^WP.

Isn’t it weird that Macs’ current killer app (for that’s certainly what Quicksilver has become) is a sort of meta-program (a launcher to control other programs)?

As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)

The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.

Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?

And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

I’m in the middle of (among many things) an intriguing music experiment. More to come in a month or two.

I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.

...and this is one of the best.

Blogger’s own (lousy) spellchecker says blog’s a spelling mistake (and helpfully suggests bloc, Bloch, blows, or bloke instead). Ironic, ain’t it?

Btw, haven’t you felt Blogger has been pretty much abandoned lately? It’s feeling untended and clunky lately, not that it ever was particularly elegant—it’s just that obvious errors aren’t being corrected, obvious improvements (webcraft advances by the minute) aren’t being implemented.

I really digged those balls. I’m giving them away! :)

(Notice the “Give you a very interesting feeling” cute engrish^WP)

I can’t believe it has been almost 20 megaseconds since I started this blog (so long already?) and I’ve never talked about them:

Well, if you must know they’re simple cookies I got quite obsessed with some years ago. An acquired taste^WP, they’re way too dry for the uninitiated but just perfect with constant (cold) sips of Arizona Lemon Tea, Bonafont Levite, or milk. They come in several flavors but for chocolate all of them are to be avoided like the plague. They’re advertised like energy biscuits (“bizcochitos de poder” for the in-crowd) and I say the label’s fitting, though in my opinion not so much for any energizing properties they may or may not have, but because they can quickly, cheaply ($1), and somewhat healthily fill your stomach and let you go on with your late night spree (remember Bere?).

A small bakery from my city^WP, La Integral, makes them, but I’ve had reports they now sell them (in your nearest OXXO) as far as Monterrey^WP (near the US border) and I like to think I had a tiny wee part in it. ;)

(I’m only linking to the products’ websites out of some sense of customer loyalty, the pages themselves are as lousy as you can get—really, truly, blatantly hideous.)