creating ideas

Wow. So the Winnie-The-Pooh business continues. Amazingly. We thought the point had been made, but we guess not. Another WTP pic appeared on the company fridge last week. When it was uncermoniously replaced with the building’s new parking lot rules, it took up residence on the lower door. Which we all know is the spot of disgrace for refrigerator art. Alas. But then a brand-new fresh-from-the-printer one appeared on the door to the hallway that leads to the restroom. And that was nice, too. Yes, Winnie the Pooh does oversee everything. And don’t we all feel better for knowing that?

Today we have been loving a movie made by the good people at belief, a studio in Santa Monica, CA. They made a movie about the desk’s relationship to creativity. It is called The Common Desk, and it’s a playful, insightful look at creating a workspace that will help fuel creative ideas.

Perhaps the WTP pranksters should redo their desks.

Ya know what would be a good prank? Free tacos for everyone. With salsa, and guac, but no cheese. That’s what we are all about.

some people

Some people get their kicks working in mystery and spreading fear. Back where we come from, if you had something to say, you said it.

Edit: We are famous. Turns out some yucksters at the office had nothing better to do than check out a 5-year-old pictures of us from the Mirror Project. Wow. Gee, we had no idea we were so interesting to you.

In fact, the joke was so obscure (Internet years are like dog years, you know), that we had no idea they were quoting us. Until they realized they would have to explain it by writing our alias. And then we had to look up the line. If you have to explain the joke…. Nevertheless, we are touched. This is like an after-school special.

Good guys

penn jillette: the rock

Through one of those weird internetty trails of story to story to page to page, we found out that Penn Jillette has a podcast. We dig it.

The podcast is a snippet of his 1-hour daily radio show (very annoying setup to actually listen, but that’s corporate America for you; have to know the demographic) — 1-2pm Central — from a station in NYC (though he lives in and broadcasts from Las Vegas. It’s maaaaagic!). We don’t mind so much. Another of our favorite podcasts, Studio360, does the snippet thing, too. And, after tuning in to the actual broadcast, man oh man are we glad we just get the 10-19 minute snippet! That radio station is noi-sy!

Anyway, we are enjoying his podcast. During a recent show, we found that he did a series of Ford commercials with little tricks in them, most famously is the balls in cups trick, except done with clear glass cups. We never saw the commercials live, of course. So, again, in one of those oddball internetty ways of the world, we had to find them online. And thus, theoretically, pay to see what we are getting for free. Whoever can figure out that economic system will win a Nobel Prize.

YouTube has all the commercials. Including the balls in cups one that got Penn and Teller kicked out of the Magic Castle in LA.

software: background switcher, project alternative

Our friend Big Poppa E has a Mac notebook computer. And mostly, we do not covet it. Except one night, we spied that it changes the background on his desktop every once in a while. We tend to think that things like that are distracting, but still, it would be nice to do.

Enter John’s Background Switcher, which does it for you, for free, on your Windows box. And it can poll from flickr, the web, or elsewhere on your computer. Neat!

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We cannot load up MS Project on our computer. We don’t know why, but we can’t. We have been using an open source project manager for a while, but it leaves much to be desired. But we found a nice free alternative, Open Workbench, that gives a lot of power and flexibility. Very nice.

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Bonus link: We work in a slightly-noise-but-not-so-horribly-noisy office. There is a dull background noise that varies just enough as to be noticeable. What’s a taco to do?

Pink Noise. Honestly, we thought pink noise was a joke we heard once on a Kleptone’s album. But it’s not. It’s not quite white noise. There is variance to it. And here comes the pink noise generator. These handly apps create a small section of pink noise that is easily looped. We prefer pink noise #1, which is 2 minutes long. The #3 loop is too long for us at 6 minutes.

myspace: the phone

Holy spit.

Yesterday, we talked about myspace and identity (see the danah boyd link). Then, while checking on something for Ed, we came across some information last night that sorta blows our socks off. There are going to be myspace telephones.

We admire this sort of convergance. In the back of our minds, we always wondered what the other side of a major media conglomerate owning a ppopular social networking site would be. Whoop, there it is. Earthlink and SK Telecom (South Korea) are putting together mobile phones that integrate fully with myspace. One can only assume that they work equally well as cellular phones. Or perhaps they land in our other favorite topic, mobile VOIP.

When we saw the mock-ups on benbarren’s flickr pages, we thought for sure they were just idle sketches. Because they look really neat. But surprise of surprises, that is what they really look like. Check out Helio, the company that is putting out the phones. We’d like ours in black, please.

how to bury your dead

This news piece was so incredibly sad, we waited 9 days to post it. From Reuters, the government is preparing for the upcoming pandemic of avian flu. Are they stockpiling anti-flu vaccines? Are they making the world country cleaner, safer? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Presenting: How to bury your dead. In your backyard.

“We talk about how people should bury their dead in their backyards, how far from the septic systems,” said Dorothy Teeter, director of the King County public health department in Seattle. “In case you’re wondering, it’s $20 apiece for high-quality body bags.”

But while you are still alive, you might enjoy your music online. Here’s something we’ve been meaning to try out: Picard from MusicBrainz. It promises to help you organize and tag your mp3s. Okay.

Also, while you are still above ground, you might check out MIT’s free open courses. You think “burying your dead 101” is a course? Don’t bet on it.

the watchmaker’s notebook

This is one of those things we would like to keep to ourselves, it’s so wonderful. It’s beautifully wonderful, and we love it. It’s Ron DeCorte’s Notebook, a place where he examines the fine art of the tiny timepieces on our wrists. He takes apart finely made watches and explains what is so wonderful about them, what makes them unique, and points out the fine details that the common observer would most likely miss. And in addition to the individual timepieces he examines, he has a more generalized guide to watches called TimeZone’s Watch School. There, you can learn about the mechanics of watches, their pieces, and how they work.

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We are amazed with the rise of social networking software. There is so much of it, and it has really taken over as the BigApp of the day. No real big surprise there: humans are made to connect with each other. Even the early BBSes were about connecting with other people and sharing lives. The current category killer is MySpace, which took Friendster by surprise (though for those of us who were on Friendster at the time, not much of a surprise with it’s “who is going to buy it?” and “why the heck is it so slow?” discussions that were rampant). With MySpace, you know who owns it: Fox. It’s already a sell-out.

For millions of teens, that doesn’t matter. They are creating their identity through and with MySpace. Danah Boyd has an interesting article that discusses identity on MySpace.

The First Season of Grey’s Anatomy has a MySpace page. We think it’s disengenuous that it would try to friend us.

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And speaking of things that aren’t there, lifehacker (*heart*)  had a download of the day recently that was all about Microsoft’s Virtual PC. The Virtual PC allows one to run instances of applications without, theorhetically, messing up one’s own system. Joy.

Some software, of course, you don’t even have to install on your own machine. Richard MacManus just wrote an article of “best of breed” online office apps (that is not to say they are all “free”). We are willing to give writerly the old college try.

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And then there is productivity. At our company, we go to a lot of meetings. A lot. And they aren’t always wonderful sparkly good ones where information is generated and passed on. Of course not. Not every one is golden. But 43 folders has a nice article about 9 tips for making your meetings for productive. We know we need it. Because we Americans are working more, but getting less done. Ouch.

link grab bag

Lots of links on the dashboard today. And recently we read that clutter is a sign of procastination. Which is something we really need to get rid of (actually, both procrastination and clutter on that tip).

So let’s start. Psychology Today has an article entitled 10 things to know about procrastination. The first 5 weren’t that interesting… then we got to #6:

Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” Or “I work best under pressure.” But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying “this isn’t important.” Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.

Sound familiar? Ouch. One link down. See? We are getting to done even faster now.

Now we have a few tools that look interesting:

• Our first tool is a visualizer for your Windows directory. If you run TaskManager a lot as you plug away, this might be a good tool for you: WinDirStat.
• If you need to edit file properties for audio files, AudioShell might be a good tool for you. We didn’t need to fix up a lot of things until we found a set of mp3s that iTunes did not like, which we whittled down to the “Original” tag. If AudioShell can help you change that flag, then there isn’t anything you can’t iPod.
• The DIY Planner is a set of downloads that help you create planners on good old fashioned paper. If you are into that sort of thing.
• The Democracy video player touts itself as a supreme badass in playing videos. That is can download in the background and then play videos seems really promissing. But we aren’t holding our breathes. We still love the VLC player. Edit: BoingBoing explains that the video player for Democracy is the VLC player. Democracy just bundles it with RSS and BitTorrent sharing.
• Here’s an extension that is vitally important to GMail. This Greasemonkey script stops all that “add contact” popup nonsense that google recently added to their email app.
• And lastly in the tool department is an uber-collection, the TTCS OSSWIN open source “CD”. You might recall a few weeks back we talked about the OpenCD, which collects many of our favorite open-source apps, but the TTCS collection also looks promising.

Now that we are seguing into lists of links, we can’t leave without mentioning Yahoo’s “UI Library”, a collection of interactive and other AJAXy UI tools that one can use/mod for website deisgn.

GCast looks like a nice tool for creating podcasts. It might just even trump our other favorite podcasting software, Odeo. What we most especailly like about GCast is that it has a stand-alone player you can embed into your website. We like that. A lot. Plus, they tie in nicely with their (GCast’s) other service, GarageBand. And their connection helps you key into podcasting music. Which we also like.

Lastly today, we have the video eater site, VideoShift, which culls online video from GoogleVideo and YouTube and presents it in a digg-like format. OUr currentl favorite line of videos is the TechTalks at Google. (Oh, and that one about zero-config with Bonjour networking? Don’t believe it for a second.)

There. All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

php nuke themes: finding themes online

Here is a drive-by post to capture some info on php nuke themes. These, right now, are for us the most difficult thing to conquor. CreatingOnline has some free (and paid) themes to download and mess with. The official php nuke site, of course, has its whole themes section, but we haven’t found much good to work with yet. We tried Spidean’s AutoTheme, which we had greats hopes for. It allows you to plug in their theme and tweak it as you go, but the downside is that their interface is very kunky. But then, when its free you get what you pay for, eh? And we have liked what we have found at Designs4Nuke, regarding their downloadable themes. Lastly, there was some stuff on Portal Themes that looked interesting too.

font it up!

Friday afternoon, quarter to 5. Cool Staff Account swings around asking if I can make a chart for him. He’s got a mock up on a piece of paper, and he assures me that yes, there are 2 x-axes on this chart and that yes, there is a line with the same name as one of the axes. “It’s not mine, really,” he says. “It for someone else.”
So it’s a drawing of what a chart would look like if charts could look like that. Like in another reality. But ours is not to question why, right? As I drew boxes and lines in pretty colors and shapes for CSA, he said pointing a label, “Could you font that up?”

Why yes, yes I can.