I just had a very interesting experience at the aptly name “Dirty Dog” car wash. I didn’t plan to actually wash my car, as ominous clouds loomed in the distance, but merely to use their vacuum, because the mechanics who worked on my car seem to have gotten quite a bit of dust and dirt in it. The first thing I noticed when I drove up was that there were hundreds of birds all around. The irony of this struck me immediately, but it became even more interesting when I saw the giant vat of birdseed in the middle of the car wash grounds. How insidious!

It reminds me of a Three Investigators story I read as a child where the workers at a local glass shop went around the neighborhood breaking windows to create business for them (and hurting the economy), but of course Jupiter and his cohorts found them out and all was well again.

This however, took the ploy to new lows, using unsuspecting birds as the innocent agents to soil the neighborhood’s cars. Perhaps if the owner of the car wash (I’ve met her several times before) had been doing this from her backyard it could have been justified as a personal preference for birds, but it seems a tad obvious to feed hundreds of birds at the car wash. You’d think this would have a negative effect on the business since it increases the chances of someone getting ‘bombed’ right as the exit the wash itself, hardly a pleasant experience. It would be more interesting if the plan (if there is one) is actually backfiring, and causing the birds to stay more in the commercial area where the car wash is located as opposed to the surrounding neighborhoods.

Whatever the outcome, I proceded to spend a handful of quarters meticulously vacuuming very nook and cranny of my car. After I finished I started looking at all the car things the wash offered to add that extra sheen to my newly cleaned car. What caught my eye was the “New Car Smell” fragrence dispenser they had right by the vacuum. After the bird episode I appreciated the irony of putting this in my car, as those who know me will attest I have what I like to call a “mid–eighties Mercedes.”. The instructions said to apply it to the carpets and under the seat, so I stuck the dispenser under one of my seats and put the quarters into the machine. It started dispensing a mist of fragrence from the head. As I went to it to start spreading it around, I was almost knocked back by the stench it was spewing. I was expecting new car smell; I got old gym stench. As fast as I could I removed the apparatus from my car, but I could see from the glistening that it had already gotten all around the driver side of the car. I guess you get what you pay for! Excuse me, I have to go loop 610 with my windows down . . .

Update: It seems to have been as ineffective as it was unpleasant, and thankfully now I can detect no traces of the smell anywhere in my car. Whew!

I just barely survived a highly coordinated picture attack from a band of ruffians. Fortunately a quick reference to a 1999 yearbook seemed to even the score. War is hell.

We just had quite a storm here and the power is just now coming back on for any reasonable length of time. I got another whole set of photos from both before and during the storm that came out interestingly, there will also be a part II of the “Sights Unseen” which will contrast the brightness of the morning with the violent calm before and during the storm.

Behind the Typeface – I love it! The Cooper Black you never knew.

I now have definitive proof that Microsoft tech support is evil. I haven’t decided what authorities to contact yet, perhaps I can find a good TIPS informant to help me out. We must smite this evil!

I’ve never liked these things, and I think this is a great idea. Anyone want to trade? 🙂

Monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity. This is a “joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics,” and it looks like it is going to be a great source of information in the future.

Since when did they start calling toilet paper ‘bath tissue’ in the grocery store? Not to mention they moved everything around in the Randall’s I’ve been going to my entire life. It was strange, and unfamiliar. I’m starting to have second thoughts about staying in the dorms next year.

RIAA Web site disabled by attack – Ha! Sounds like “an innovative approach” to me :).

“Don’t they have something better to do during the summer than hack our site?” asked the RIAA representative, who asked not to be identified. “Perhaps it at least took 10 minutes away from stealing music.”

I just read a chilling outline for a story based around computers and the net assuming Hilter had won WWII. Makes you think about CBDTPA and other proposed legislation in a different light.

Inspired by Textism, I have decided to personally abandon all–capital acronyms and words. It really breaks up the flow of the line to have a word that stands above everything else and hinders readability, so through the beauty of CSS I have approximated SMALL CAPS, an underused typographical tool. I’m also taking this oppurtunity to make better use of the <acronym> tag, which I use occasionally but not nearly enough, this time inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent series on accesibility. An acronym will look like this, HSPVA, and when you hold your mouse over it should tell you what the acronym stands for. Tonight I’ll go through client sites I’ve designed and apply these concepts there as well. I hope you appreciate it, and now you know what it is so you won’t be like Julie and think it’s “tiny shouting.” 🙂

In other meta–news a new toy review (first draft) is up, and an FAQ

Brad Delong has a nice write-up of modern frustration with the monetary aggregates called Vulgar Monetarism. It addresses a number of important points, and its main flaw is in ignoring the more modern (this decade) measures of the money supply. If anyone in further reading I just found a good paper called How Should We Define the Money Supply ? – Austrian Versus Monetarist Approach.

In summary, the day was wonderful. The company was pleasant, the boat was spacious, the pictures came out great, and I even caught a fish. With all that, the highlight of the day was definitely the jet skis, which I probably spent about 2 hours or more on. The Yamaha WaveRunner I was on had a speedometer, and I’ve decided there is nothing quite like speeding across a glass–still lake at 52 miles per hour with the wind cooling the healthy sun shining down on you. I am so tired I can hardly type, so it’s going to be an early night for me.

It’s waaay to early in the morning and I am preparing to spend the rest of the day on a boat catching fish (or at least trying) with a line and hook. No power, no A/C, no connectivity. Taking camera so look for some snapshots tonight. Until then, I bid the civilized world adieu. 🙂

One thing they still need to work on though is there posters. From a design standpoint, many of their posters have shabby typography and often consist of nothing more than putting a few star faces dominating over a simple element from the movie. There is little in the way of intrigue or elementary design elements that capture you attention, besides the blaring face of a super-star you’ve seen ad nasueum in magazines, newspapers, and on the web. One of my favorite posters I’ve seen in a long time is this one, which is really a work of art. Ocean’s Eleven is obviously a movie with tons of star power, however the poster actually cuts off their faces, leaving us with a strong sillouette of their lower bodies and a large, slanted 11 that leads the eye downwards to their illustrious names. The overfeel is one that matches the movie, cool and debonair, and the typography really matches that. A lot of the same elements are present in this poster which has similar feel and colors, though I don’t think is really avante-garde enough to capture your attention like the first one. Then, they lost it with the typical and clichéd lining up of the biggest names in the movie, each with a unique and strange look on their face and in an odd position. Finally they totally messed it up with a poster that completely throws away any of the better elemetns in the earlier posters. First, you have the same tired names paraded at what I’m sure what thought of as an eye-catching angle, then, more seriously, they have completely mangled the logo in some strange half-faded font which looks better suited for O Brother Where Art Thou than a hip Las Vegas-centered movie! The colors, mood, and most importantly the typography in the last poster don’t match the movie at all, and could have come from any cookie-cutter design shop in the country. Next time you’re at the theatre take a look at the line of posters on the wall, and you’ll be amazed at how similar and badly done they all are; we really need more with thoughtful and well-executed design like the first one above.

Whenever you or I have the privilege of giving a movie theatre around six or seven dollars just for a ticket to see a movie, the American consumer is frequently getting less for his money. I have not been to a movie in the last four months or so that did not start with at least five minutes of commercials. Not previews, blatent commercials, be it for Coca-Cola, the Army, a video, or some other item that has little to nothing to do with the either the movie you’re about to see or a movie not released yet. I’m sure that the theatre recieves oodles of money for every ad shown to such a captive audience, yet they have not chosen to pass any of this profit on to consumers in the form of lower ticket prices. The movie industry is not weakening, in fact quite the opposite is happening, with there being more blockbusters that make more in their first weekend then some movies have made in their entire existence. If the movie theatres shifted the price of the tickets down it would increase quantity demanded and potentially push long term demand higher in the long term.

One reason I’m not complaining too much \though is that I have been repeatedly impressed with the quality of many of the movies in theatres lately. Sure, the occasionaly flop with no plot makes it through, but by and large I’ve been seeing well-developed stories with dynamic characters and impressive cinematography

Oh how I like it when they make the spam clever:

Amazon claims they ‘lowered the hurdle’ with their free shipping offer….at Buy.com we just ran that hurdle over with our free-shipping truck.

I’ve been very popular with the UPS guy the past couple of days, getting a package yesterday and two today. The package yesterday was a small one from SonyStyle, and is a second battery for my GRX-570. This is nice because espescially as work other places than my desk more and more using the 802.11b my battery life on the Sony, while certainly better than the Toshiba that preceded it, is still a limiting factor. This requires unplugging the combo drive from the hot-swap bay, but doubles thet time I can spend out. The main concern right now is a can’t find the little plastic piece that covers up the rest of the bay when the battery is in there. I’ll put up some pictures tonight.

The other packages both came from Fossil. The first is a wallet that I saw in their online store and just couldn’t resist it. On that note they have one of the best designed and easy-to-use online stores I’ve ever had the pleasure of being exposed to. So in summary I was a good capitalist and voted with my wallet. (haha)

The second is actualy one of Fossil’s new line of PDA watches. This is, quite honestly, something I wouldn’t have paid for but they sent one down that I am going to review for HPUG. More on that later.

From Rachel: NPR : Wait Wait — Which Newsmaker Are You?

YOU’RE BILL CLINTON

You’re smooth. You can sell anything to anyone. You can tell lies with a smile that’ll melt the hearts of those you’re lying to. At the same time, you require boat loads of unconditional love to compensate for your deficiencies. People spend their entire lives and fortunes trying to bring you down. Someday, they might just succeed.