I had a very nice low-key birthday celebration yesterday. My wonderful wife made my favorite dinner (chicken enchiladas with green sauce) and dessert (oatmeal raisin cookies). The girls gave me a wonderful assortment of handmade gifts. Allie’s gift was especially notable / touching as it was the first work she completed at her painting class at the Kaleidoscope School of Art.
I’m looking for a suitable frame and can’t wait to put it up in the den.
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The crazy mix of snow and freezing rain this weekend made for treacherous driving, but it was perfect for building a snowman.
While I was flirting with a heart attack clearing the heavy snow off the driveway, Anne was playing happily and mischievously tossing an occasional snowball my way. Once I made the driveway passable, we got to work on our friend.
I’ve been enjoying an odd mixture of music lately - found via listening to XRT in the car or via searches for additional news about the upcoming Rush album, Snakes & Ladders:
Today, UPS delivered “Designing Interactions” by Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO. Designing Interactions “summarizes how the technology of interaction came into being and how it will advance in the future” and presents interviews with over 40 influential designers who have shaped the field of interaction design.
It’s a monster of a book, tipping the scales at over 750+ pages and includes a DVD that contains segments from all of the interviews along with examples of interactions being discussed. Based on a cursory skim this evening, I’m looking forward to diving into this since it’s still very fresh, having been first published in October 2006, and contains many recent products and designs.
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My dad and I visited the Chicago Auto Show today and I snapped a few pictures of selected cars and posted them to flickr.
It was great to see the improvements in many domestics. If I was in the market for something new, the Australian-sourced, Holden-based Pontiac G8 would be a contender.
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I’ve been a huge Rush fan for many years now, so it was great to receive a tidbit of news in the mail today.
Rush’s next studio release titled “Snakes & Arrows” is out May 1, 2007 and a single titled “Far Cry” is out soon (FMQB.com pegs the single radio premiere as March 19, 2007)
Drummer Neil Peart posted news on the album’s progress back in December.
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The beginning of February brings the annual daddy-daughter dance at the girls’ school. The good - Anne’s first outing to the dance - came along with the bad - Emily couldn’t go (doctor’s orders) because she was still getting over her bronchitis / hacking cough.
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I ran across a reference to “Quintessence - The Quality of Having It” by Betty Cornfeld and Owen Edwards in a Design Observer post a few weeks ago.
The book starts with a five-page discussion of “Sense and Quintessence,” followed by 65 one-to-two page essays of “quintessential” products. My original intent was to get some insight into the attributes that give some products that inexplicable “it” factor via these essays - in a hope to, in turn, apply some of “it” to design - but I found the introductory discussion much more fascinating, useful, and moving.
Some excerpts:
(Read the article)
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I love running across tools that do a few, focused things very well - especially when these tools are available from any computer connected to the Web.
Picnik.com is just such a tool.
Picnik is an online photo editing tool that allows you to do typical things like resizing, cropping, removing red-eye, etc. Modify photos you upload from your computer, from an online photo sharing site like flickr, from your Webcam, or from any other Web site. (I submitted a suggestion to allow the use of images from the clipboard as well - I’d find that extremely useful).
In addition to being functionally good, the site also has a nice, simple, pleasing design. I’ve always abhorred the overuse of Flash (”…hey, let’s use Flash for all site navigation - because it’s cool, and because we can…. and….maybe we’ll win some prestigious design awards…”) - but picnik uses Flash in a restrained manner that works without getting in your way or without drawing too much attention to itself.
Highly recommended, give it a try.
Sidenote: I continue to find my rabid predilection for Web-based tools amusing, since I spent nearly 9 years @ InstallShield furthering the cause of streamlining the “installation” of applications - and now I go to great lengths to avoid “polluting” my computers with “installed” apps.
[via Download Squad]
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