Delta Tango Bravo

When I finally broke down and bought an iPod last fall, I bundled an iTrip with it sepcifically for road trips. Last week, I drove up to Ottawa in a rental car and had the first opportunity to really give my iTrip a decent trial.

The one thing I had really been concerned about was the lack of open frequencies around Toronto. In order to tune in the iTrip you need a completely open signal (all static) and around the city there are almost no bands that don't have at least bleed-over from a radio station. However, I luckily discovered that 87.9 was free and got a clean signal all the way out of the city. If you live in New York, Chicago, or another very large city, I'd be surprised if you could tune it in at all. Maybe one exists already, but it'd be great if there were a regional map of open frequencies so iTrippers can easily tune in without searching the airwaves.

Overall, I was very pleased with the performance of the iTrip. The audio quality isn't perfect, but it's very listenable. The battery draw is also extremely low, so you get tons of playtime. I wrote a more complete review over at the silverorange stuff site.

I need to buy new toner for my Canon i950 color inkjet printer and I'm curious if anyone out there has experience or advice about purchasing generic cartridges. The normal manufacturer's cartridges cost about $20 CDN each and there are six of them in this printer so it really adds up. Are the generic ones available on places like eBay (like these), that cost less than a quarter of that amount, of decent quality?

Yesterday a friend and I got a chance to see the new Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It's a fantastic collection of photographs, film, and preparatory sketches of their wrapping and landscape alteration projects including famous projects they've done such as the Reichstag, the Umbrellas in Japan and the USA, and the Valley Curtain in Colorado.

I actually thought the most interesting part of the exhibit was the variety of sketches and models that Christo and Jeanne-Claude designed to convince local officials to permit them to carry out their art. The shear scale and public nature of their works require an incredible amount of political savvy and planning to get people on board in order to make the projects a reality. So it's imperative that the artists are able to convince people to get behind the projects―something they haven't always been successful at.

The proposal pieces on display at the AGO are examples of beautifully executed proposals. Most of them consist of shallow transparent plastic cases containing marked maps, large-scale sketches often overlaying photographs of the locations, engineering notations, and samples of fabrics that might be used in the final work. They convincingly combine the tactile quality of the final work with these fabric samples, the technically possibility of achieving the project through the engineering notes, and a vision of the final work through the combination of photographs of the existing scene and sketches of the proposed work.

The production of these boards is artistic in itself, but I think the lessons of their pragmatic purpose are important to keep in mind for web developers and others who sometimes have to convince clients of the value of their ideas. The beauty of these proposal pieces is in their ability to effectively help their audience envision the upcoming work.

The exhibit at the AGO is free once you've paid regular entrance to the museum and if you're a member it's completely free. Definitely worth a few hours of your time. Now, I just need to coordinate a trip to New York in time to see their new Central Park Gates project. Scroll down on that page for lots of preparatory drawings.

I've probably bought about a half dozen books on typography over the past two years in an effort to broaden my very basic knowledge of type. It's not like I want to form a foundry myself or anything, I just have very little background in type having worked almost exclusively in web design where type options are very limited in a lot of ways. One of my parents kindly bought the book Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works off my Amazon wishlist for my birthday. It's exactly the explanation of typography I've been looking for.

All of the other books I've purchased have been beautifully produced and informative but most of them have gone into too many specifics for my level of understanding and don't deal with practical application very much. That's no fault of those books, it's just that I was looking for more of a typography handbook. Well, Erik Spiekermann and E.M Ginger nailed it in Stop Stealing Sheep. It's filled with well-written and often humorous explanations of the history of typography, the use of different styles, and an explanation of some of the serious faux-pas the budding designer should know about. It's just the right size to flip back through when you want to refer to a point and it covers all of the major areas well enough to whet your appetite to learn more. The authors also include tons of examples of classic faces and their variants so you're given a basic understanding of how some famous faces are derived from each other,which helps you make informed decisions when choosing what face to use.

All in all, a great introduction to typography and I'm sure my copy will be well-thumbed in the next few months. On the side, it provides some nice small-talk fodder such as witty references to the title phrase of the book which was taken from famed type designer Frederic Goudy who once warned, "Anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep."

I'm off for Paris this evening to spend Christmas with my girlfriend and my twin brother. I somehow highly doubt that Christmas in Montmarte can possibly disappoint. Merry Christmas everyone and safe travels to all of those on the road during the holidays.

This evening I dropped by a local news stand on Yonge Street and picked up today's New York Times to see the Firefox ad everyone's been anticipating. I've been doing some minor critiquing of the preliminary designs with Steven, but I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw it printed on newsprint at that size.

Wow. It looks absolutely fantastic. Two full facing pages with a good simple clear message. Congratulations to Chris Messina, Chris Beard, and all the other people (named Chris or otherwise) on their fantastic work on this ad. There were a lot of challenging and unique factors in creating this ad and I think they really nailed it.

If you haven't had a chance to check out the ad in person (which I'd highly recommend) check out the images available at SpreadFirefox.com.

Here's the latest addition to the ever-growing collection of great favicons from around the web. These favicons are culled from all kinds of sites, but I've recently gotten into Photoblogs and there are a few good examples of favicons taken from some of them including In the Rain, East 3rd, and the pixelly A Photolog.

There's also been an interesting new development in the use of favicons recently in Favatars on several weblogs. Essentially, when you make a comment on a weblog and include your web address, then the site looks for your URL, grabs your favicon, and displays it with your post. It's an interesting way of adding further identification of the posters in a thread without putting any obstacles in the way. Pretty slick. I noticed today that Jon Hicks has implemented it in his comments (as someone kindly just pointed out, Jon is using gravatars not favatars).

My sister came up with this amazing plan a few months ago, and for a few heady days we thought that we'd strike it rich. Originally, the concept was for a pair of undies that said "May Contain Nuts." I mean, that's pretty good and we laughed for a while, but then the brilliance occurred to us: "This Package May Contain Nuts."

Intoxicated with visions of get-rich-quick schemes, we failed to research if this idea was ours alone. Alas, unfortunately such hilarity could not be kept under wraps for long and it appears some lowly novelty retailers beat us to the punch. So, I share the idea with all. In need of a quick Christmas project to give a loved one? Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like home-made hilarious underwear.

Luckily some people are more aware of local events than I am. Yesterday, my friend Melda gave me notice that chef, author, traveller, Anthony Bourdain was going to be in Toronto today to do a book signing so we headed out north on a cold blustery day to attend.

Bourdain is chef at Les Halles in New York and has a foody travel show on television. Anyhow, the man is a fantastic storyteller and his tales of cooking and eating around the world are very entertaining even for those of us with little ability in the kitchen. At the book signing, he had some great honest answers to questions from the audience as well as one story that involved Anthony, Emeril, Jamie Oliver, Martha Stuart and a crack pipe in the hot tub, which alas turned out to have no basis in truth. Bourdain also seemed genuinely pleased when an audience member informed him that he had cured her of vegetarianism. I believe his general response was "ah, my book has been a success!"

Aside from the dick who was organizing the event for the bookstore, it was certainly worth the couple hours of waiting. If you've got the chance to catch him on this book tour, it's worth checking out.