Arlan Specter surprised everyone yesterday by announcing that he was switching to the Democratic party. This was received with much happiness by most Democrats, and gave Michael Steele a chance to prove once again that he never should have even been considered for the RNC Chair position.
Watching this video, though, Specter makes it sound like he only switched parties because he was frustrated with the poor campaign strategy that the Republican party has shown in the last two election cycles.
It could be that it was this poor planning that pushed him over the edge, but I can't imagine this video clip is going to serve him very well in the Democratic primaries. Switching parties just because you don't want to run in the Republican primary race isn't going to go very far with voters.
This isn't an overlay for a video stream, but more like a derived three-dimensional view that's dynamically generated for a particular point of view. I'm not sure how you'd figure out where the viewer actually is, but it's certainly a cool demo.
Here's a design for a Moleskine cover that takes the cover pocket from Kokuyo's Campus cover, its notebook attachment method from the Midori Traveler's Notebook, and its elastic slot from GFeller's Moleskine notebook. I was originally going to do this in leather, but at least the first version is going to be in felt.
Merlin points out one of the great The Show episodes and I liked it so much I decided to embed it here:
Ze is absolutely right. If you don't ever follow through on your ideas then you'll never have to take a risk on failing and you can swaddle yourself in the comfort of the idea without ever doing the work to execute it.
I've always been a reader. Whenever we move we end up carting along huge numbers of boxes filled with books. Our apartment has multiple bookcases including one Expedit that has books stacked two and three levels deep.
For the last couple of years I haven't been reading as many books as I usually do. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm married now, and my wife and I will often go to events in the city, resulting in less time spent sitting around the house pawing through a book.
The other big reason is that Adrian was born nearly two years ago (!!!) and I spend much more of my free time parenting and pushing him on the swings. I would never think of trading that time for reading time, but I still miss it.
The real reason I'm reading less is that I lost my reading focus. Where I used to burn through books at the rate of one every couple of days, I realized in December that I had gotten to the point where I was in the middle of a dozen different books and I wasn't excited about reading any of them. Reading had become drudgery and something that I only did right before falling asleep.
The thing that has changed that for me is Facebook. Or, more precisely, I've been reading more. Living Social. It's not the greatest app in the world, and it can be extremely slow, but the way it tracks active reading queue keeps me on task and also gives me a sense of accomplishment.
Even though my queue usually has at least half a dozen books in it, I'm usually only a reading one of them at a time. When I'm done I get to check it off my list and think about the next thing to read. Sometimes I like to think about it as though I have a brand new video game called "Reading." Every time I finish a book I get a point. It doesn't have the constant adrenaline rush of TF2, but I'm learning a lot more playing it.
I'm also setting aside at least two hours a night to read, and sometimes more. Whereas, in the past I would put Adrian to bed and then browse the web for several hours, I'm brewing a cup of tea and sitting down in my comfy chair with my lastest find. Most of the books I've been reading are relatively short at two to three hundred pages, and if I'm enjoying the book and giving it the right level of attention I can burn through it in a single evening.
I also find that when I'm reading four or five books a week I have a different focus and expectation on what I'm doing. I don't assume that a given book is going to be part of my life for a long period of time. There's more freedom knowing that the next book is right around the corner and I'm happy to take a chance on something that's outside of my comfort zone.
I'm a programmer not a designer, and although I know good design when I see it, I have not talent for creating graphic design elements. One of the areas that gives me the most headaches is choosing colors. Once I get past using black text on an appropriately contrasty background, I'm lost.
I've relied on color pickers for quite some time to choose color schemes for sites I'm putting together, but I've never found one that is as robust as Kuler. Adobe seems to be employing some new ideas related to user interactions with their products. Lightroom doesn't resemble a typical application so much as it does a different computing environment, and Kuler continues that trend with an intuitive and useful interface that doesn't seem different for different's sake.
