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A LIFE in pictures

Thursday, 20 November 2008 — 1:06pm

Like everyone else on the Internet, I’ve been perusing Google’s archive of images from LIFE. The photograph above is of Winston Churchill visiting the troops in 1939. Churchill’s name is one of the most fruitful search terms I’ve tried thus far: there’s Churchill savouring a cigar at Chartwell, Churchill and Nixon, a gallery’s worth of the Grand Alliance at Yalta, posters for the 1945 General Election, and more.

A handful of other finds:

The collection isn’t limited to photographs: you can find portraits, illustrations, magazine covers, and early daguerrotypes. At some point, though, you should get back to work.

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Deskpaper

Monday, 25 August 2008 — 4:19pm

Isn’t it strange that we still refer to desktop backgrounds as wallpaper? Wallpaper doesn’t go on desks. Then again, the desktop metaphor has become such an integral element of user interface design that one hardly thinks about what it represents.

Nevertheless, I would like to draw your attention to the latest addition to the site: the Wallpaper Gallery, a selection of desktop backgrounds that I whipped up from my point-and-shoot travel photographs. I think they are rather good, though they’re nothing that would turn any heads next to the awesome creations at InterfaceLIFT. I only have them in widescreen for now, seeing as how my notebook has a 16:10 monitor, but I’ll get to cooking something for you fullscreen types soon enough.

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The Great Service Announcement of 2008

Monday, 23 June 2008 — 12:57pm

Glancing over the WordPress management panel, I see that I have no less than ten (ten!) half-finished posts that I never saw to completion. This is my usual excuse for neglecting to populate this space with my commentary, but it’s high time to admit that the direction this site was taking—as a whenever-I-feel-like-it dumping ground for tangled thoughts that spiralled into pools of greater complexity and extravagance—was becoming, shall we say, a bit on the unsustainable side.

To the end of resuscitating this website, which has, to be frank, fallen from the little glory it once had when I tended, watered, nurtured it like a garden of knowledge and meditation, I’m going to be making a few changes. While I’ve been preoccupied with a few unannounced “projects” that are consuming most of my time, the current plan is to introduce some regular features of a more manageable, bite-sized scope (by my standards, anyway; “bite-sized” can be a lot when you have a big mouth).

It’s also safe to say that I will occasionally let some analyses spin out of control, as I honestly can’t help it, but I intend to break most of the longer essays into segments, so they at least have a chance to see the light of publication in part, if not in full. I’m also doing this because readability is, admittedly, becoming an issue. Maybe I’ll even insert a few pictures.

The first regular feature that I plan to introduce is a book-of-the-week series, inspired by the 52 Books in 52 Weeks series at A Modest Construct. It will commence as soon as I finish the book I am currently reading, though whether or not I’ll carry it through the looming spectre of the National Scrabble Championship remains open to question.

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that being “current” is something that I’ll leave to the rest of the, what do they call it, “blogosphere”? It’s good for the Google hits and incoming links, but not so much for the quality of analysis that I’d like to provide. I don’t mind being late to the silly-hat party if it means I’ll show up with a very silly hat.

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Notes on Obama: a wager

Wednesday, 4 June 2008 — 4:15am

This space is typically free of politics, and it will remain that way. But I’d just like to air a little something about the race for our neighbour’s Presidency: since February, I have been telling people that regardless of whether he wins in November—indeed, regardless of whether or not he won the Democratic nomination, as he did tonight—Barack Obama will be TIME‘s Man of the Year.

The feature has become a bit of a farce over the years, and, like the magazine itself, has little of the glory that it once did when it actually believed in the conviction it promulgated, that history is a procession of Great Newsmakers. But nobody in recent memory has fit their criteria better. 2008 is less than half over, but barring a truly monumental world event (what, I can’t imagine), it isn’t even going to be close.

I’ll put big money on it. I recommend that you take the bet; I need the funding.

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LEGO, Escher, Bach

Monday, 28 January 2008 — 5:08pm

The LEGO brick turned fifty today, which makes it fairly young if you think about it. Personally, I find it quite jarring to reflect on LEGO from a historical perspective at all. As one of the… four activities I have any recollection of doing before the age of seven (the other three: reading Schulz, creating HyperCard stacks on my Macintosh SE, and knowing everything there was to know about dinosaurs), clicking those bricks into place and struggling to pry them apart with my little fingers was something that was always there, and always needed to be done.

It’s not something I ever outgrew, strictly speaking; my interests merely gravitated elsewhere to things no less appealing to the obsessive-compulsive. I have the utmost respect for the people who steadfastly refused to stop playing with LEGO bricks, and it grows every time I see an accomplishment like Andrew Lipson’s sculptures of Escher paintings in impossible spaces, or tributes like “The Knights of the Round Table”. The further apart you are from your childhood, it seems, the higher the tide of nostalgia.

Continued »

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