Helvetica is the most ubiquitous typeface in this era.
Are you a typophile?…a typomaniac? At the remarkable and inspiring Future of Software conference held at Adobe this week, we were privileged to view a screening of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica. Helvetica is a “film about a font”. Really?? A film about nothing but a font?. If you are a graphic designer I highly recommend the documentary - you’ll find the film to be an invaluable historical record.
After watching the film, I can’t get away from Helvetica. It’s everywhere I look! As observed in the film, Helvetica is the “perfume of the city”….you don’t notice it, but you’d miss it if it wasn’t there. And considering it was invented over 51 years ago (by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann), it’s incredibly timeless. Helvetica is the tofu of the font world. It adapts to its environment and allows the content to infer the meaning, as opposed to most typefaces. Helvetica is about the negative space, “figure-ground relationship properly executed”, the space between letters, rather than the positive space. It’s a purely neutral font, clean, efficient.
When I look at a street sign, or advertisement now, and when it isn’t Helvetica, I have wonder what it is…. Have you seen or used those cell phones that can listen to any tune on the radio or TV and identify the artist and title of the track automatically? Well, there’s a damn cool site (and probably more) out there that can actually tell you what font or fonts are used in an image. You simply upload the picture you are curious about to the site and it will detect the glyphs within and report back to you the probable typefaces that match. One such site, MyFonts.com, provides a really nifty “What The Font” feature. Give it a try.
So, now that you know Helvetica is lurking everywhere… have you ever heard of the Trajan font? No? Guess again. Watch this absolutely great video:
…what it feels like to be poisoned by food.
Ugh. What a rough couple of days. Decided to have a healthy fish dinner with friends. Took a few bites of my Halibut, followed by a fourth..only the fourth tasted like I was biting into one of Davy Jones rotting tentacles. So nasty. I returned the dish and the chef confirmed it was bad but it was too late. 25 minutes later I was vomiting. Made it back to my hotel and continuing getting sick (think dual exhaust) - and by four a.m. I was completely unable to walk due to dehydration. Hotel security called an ambulance for me and I was off to the hospital to replenish the 25% of the fluids that I’d lost. Another twenty four hours later I could finally stomach water — don’t wish such an experience on my worst enemy…
I will be travelling to San Jose today to attend a week long internal developer’s conference at Adobe. In preparation for some minor compiler surgery I will be digging into the compiler guts on my flight there. I did learn this morning that a good portion of the compiler is based on Apache Velocity, so I’m snagging some research material and filling up the laptop.
While in San Jose I will also be attending a day long Hydra boot camp. If you aren’t familiar with Hydra (name to change soon), you can start here, or just Google around. Essentially though, it’s a shader language that will allow you to write to-the-metal (well, soft-metal anyways) pixel shaders for raster image manipulation. The sneak peaks making their rounds internally of potential use cases have been mind blowing.
So, lots to learn this week (and still make headway on my rework of the Flex State model).
Last week I learned:
Internet Explorer will finally nix the ‘click to activate’ behavior it’s had for years.
Sorry, I forgot to post this earlier, but last week I did receive confirmation from Microsoft that they have in fact settled their browser plugin grip with Eolas and will be soon releasing an update that finally rids the world of the ‘click to activate’ step for interacting with web based plugins (inclusive of Flash). But hey..fwiw, don’t stop using SWFKit and family, they are still a much cleaner way of embedding.
They Might Be Giants are still cranking out some seriously rad tunes… even though most are now for three year olds.
Throughout college one of my favorite bands was always TMBG (They Might Be Giants). Ana Ng, Don’t Let’s Start, Birdhouse in Your Soul… super eclectic alternative tunes that fit my personality. It was only recently that I learned that a good number of the tunes I hear daily as the father of a two year old, were written and sung by the band. The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse closing tune “Hot Dog”, and the opening theme was recorded by the group, which came as a surprise to me, I hadn’t realized they’d crossed over to this other genre.
Listen to Hot Dog, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:
Turns out they’ve been out of the exclusive pop world for quite awhile. They also recorded the catchy theme song of Malcolm in the Middle - apparently which won them a Grammy.
So, these were all interesting revelations a year ago or so..but then… it happened again. My son Jack has been singing this song “Zeroes” over and over again. It’s a freakily addictive tune about the number zero from the Disney Channel.
Listen to Zeroes, Here Come The 123s
I decided to look up who sang it and lo and behold, there they are again, TMBG, with a whole series of spots on Disney called “Here Come the 123s”. The tunes were released as a precursor apparently to an entire DVD called “Here Come the 123s”. The songs are so well done, and are as good as any of their mainstream songs were back in the day. And I don’t feel guilty at all driving down the road singing Nonagon, or…Eight Hundred and Thirteen Mile Car Trip…
Listen to Nonagon, Here Come The 123s
So all this kid music apparently has done them well. The album they released prior to Here Come the 123s (Here Come the ABCs), was certified gold! Only one of their mainstream albums (Flood) was as successful.
Mark my words, Here Come the 123s will be equally as popular — it’s crazy good. They Might Be Giants have been video podcasting previews of their new numbers DVD on iTunes and my son just loves it. Unfortunately some of the better videos are no longer available, looks like even if you subscribe you can only download the most recent three..but give it a try if you have young children.
Listen to One Dozen Monkeys, Here Come The 123s
Oh…and can’t forget, they recorded the opener for the Daily Show…
I was originally under the impression that I would have to purchases a subscription based service to make use of the GPS feature on my Blackberry Curve (either to access maps in real time or report my location to my personal site). Well, thanks to Doug McCune I found out that there is a great (and free) application from Mologogo that installs in no time flat. The app will display maps from either Microsoft or Google, and optionally feed your GPS stats (including elevation, etc.) to an URL of your choice. This allowed me to for instance embed a map of my location here. Any time you want to know where I am (and I have my cell phone with me), the map will reflect my realtime location. Doug’s inspiring post can be found here.
Some gotchas when I was trying to set things up:
The download on Mologogo’s main site wasn’t auto-install enabled for my Blackberry (.jad file), but if you go to http://bb.mologogo.com there’s a compatible installer you can navigate to with your Blackberry.
When setting up Mologogo to send data to an alternate URL it’s not enough to configure your profile on Mologogo’s site, you must also set the URL in the Mologogo app settings on the phone.
Earlier in the day Mologogo’s website was down, and I wasn’t able to log in. I ended up surfing around and found another similar service called BlackberryTracker. There app also worked like a charm on my curve, and after you’ve registered for a developer key you can use their API directly to access your saved location data - so you don’t need your own server. Works pretty good but at the time of this writing their developer site is down (so you can’t get a key). But all in all much faster (less slick) application.
For what it’s worth, the best tutorial to get you up and running and embedding your location on your own website or blog can be found in this wiki article.
Today I also learned:
There are some gotchas if you change jobs mid-year.
I ended up finally gathering up all my W2s, 1099s, 1098s, etc. and firing up ol’ Tax Cut. To our surprise it turns out we’re getting back a bit more than we thought we would. A welcome surprise, certainly better than if we found out that we owed. I really didn’t know that if you’d maxed out your social security contributions, then moved on to another employer, the new employer really has no clue, so continues to keep withdrawing social security. Good times.
When two roads diverged for me in 1995, the road not taken would have led to interesting things.
Just ran across a game preview for Iron Man, pretty sexy. Then I realized that the development team was none other than Secret Level in San Francisco, now Sega of America’s premier studio in the US.
I was with the company back in 1995 when we worked out of the basement of a rented home in suburban Maryland. At they time they were known as HyperImage. Me writing MFC map editors for an Atari Jaguar game, and they living off cup of noodles. My how far they’ve come! When I was asked to continue working without pay (along with the rest of the startup), I possibly should have stuck it out.
The economy is hosed.
Just decided to peek between my fingers and check out how my 401k is doing. Holy spiral staircase of doom Batman! I’ve lost 8%!! of my retirement savings in less than a month! Oh dear. Time to retrofit the mattress for a change purse. I’ll be working until I’m 80.
So the television I bought over the weekend dropped in price by $200.00. Just like that, a couple days later! I really need to remember to check sale prices after I make a big purchase like that. Luckily my father sent me an ad for the deal, so I was able to call Circuit City and get the refund. Now…what can I buy with all this extra cash I have floating around?
I’ve had a media center all this time…
I had no clue what Front Row on Mac OSX was until I accidentally hit command-esc today. What the… puts Windows Media Center to shame, and themz some good HD movie previews!!
So back in October DirecTV decided that they were no longer going to support the HD TiVo based DVR (which I and everyone else I believe, LOVED). All new HD channels would be MPEG-4 and to decode them, you would be responsible for upgrading to a 5 LNB dish and their new (first generation) DVR. Even worse, customers have to PAY for this extreme downgrade (almost $300). Alas, to say the least, the new DVR is the buggiest device I’ve seen on this earth to date.
So I’ll spare you the gory details, but tech after tech came and couldn’t figure out the issue. I suggested swapping out my demon spawn for a new device, and magically most of the issues went away (though it’s still only “less buggy”). The tech told me that I would receive an RMA, box, and shipping label in the mail within the week. If I didn’t send it back I would be billed for the price of the new machine. Well… A week passed, then two. Then a month, then three months.
As you’ve read, I just upgraded my family room to HD, but I didn’t have a receiver, so I decided to take the demon spawn out of the closet, dust it off, and fire it up. Unfortunately it still has “the syndrome” it had months before but hey, I could watch TV.
Then the idea struck…
I called DirecTV and asked them if my account was in good standing and if I owed them any hardware. They said nope and that everything was in order. Hmmm… I decided for fun, to mention the technical issues Demon was having and the tech was kind enough to, after trouble shooting, send me another! So come Wednesday, I will now have three DVRs in my home (for the price of one). Of course, I was advised that I would need to send the non-working device back, or I would be charged for it. No worries, that will leave me with two.
So that’s how I turned one DVR into two. I won’t go so far as to say I’m stealing. I’m just borrowing it until they send me the Fed Ex box one day. ;o)
