William Eggleston - Los Alamos Portfolio
I think this is the most fabulous “out the airplane window” photo I’ve ever seen. I love flying and am so looking forward to going to Arizona for the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show next month.
Photo by William Eggelston. To see more from his Los Alamos portfolio, visit www.egglestontrust.com, go to Portfolios, and scroll down to Los Alamos.
Liberation by Brian Slattery (via The Contextual Life)
Or, How to Clear Clutter
My New Years resolution centred around getting more organized… streamlining things. And it’s been less of getting organized than it has been a paring away of things disorganized. In the spirit of community service, I’m sharing my method of de-cluttering. *Results may vary.
1. Take all the clutter that’s collected in miscellaneous piles and corners. Put it in a box. Admire how nicely the right angles of the floors, walls, and furniture meets. You will immediately feel better.
2. After a week, or two, you may want to go through the box and will probably toss most of it. File the rest and deal with the things that will a. accrue interest or b. cause physical discomfort if not dealt with.
3. If it’s been on your to-do list for more than a year, it’s either a. something you’re avoiding and will feel much better about if it’s just done (and probably not a quarter as difficult as it seemed like it would be) or b. a total write-off, and no matter how interested in it you once were, it’s time to set it free. Free like the wind.
4. I have freed my email inbox by ruthlessly unsubscribing from all newsletters, and by pre-sorting my mail. Spam, obviously, goes to the spam folder. Certain e-blast lists that I keep up with go directly to an e-blast folder. A graphic designer listserv-type list that I’m subscribed to goes straight to a Listserv folder. Anything that makes it to my inbox is from a real, live person who is contacting me about something relatively pertinent. Anything that needs to be saved gets saved to the docket folder as an RTF file.
I also turned off all email notifications. The only way I find new email now is if I go looking for it. This alone has helped my work-flow concentration immensely.
My old goal was to keep my inbox down to 100 emails or so… it was a very bad version of a “to-do” list. The new inbox, thus far, gets cleaned out down to zero every week or so.
That’s it for now… more dispatches from the dustbin likely to follow.
Happy New Years!
Taschen has done a new Grimms’ Fairy Tales, with a retrospective of 130 years’ worth of illustrations, and Brain Pickings has a review here with lots of yummy images from the book. Here are two of my favourites:
Having recently ported my working environment to a new Mac, I’ve just spent the better part of a day adding all my productivity-enhancing programs back into said work environment.
(Notice I have resisted calling them “apps”, although one is, in fact, an App. Apple now has an app store for Mac computers, which makes sense as the new Lion OS has a look and feel that borrows heavily from the iPad. My Libraries folder wasn’t even visible – I had to input a line of code into the Terminal to un-hide it.)
The list is unapologetically un-fun (okay, mostly un-fun). These are all free or cheap downloads that make my life easier and are hence worth their weight in digital gold. So, without further ado, here is my Top Eight list of must-haves for the working iPerson:
Scrivener
www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Scrivener is for writers. Fiction, non-fiction, notes, drafts – it handles it all. No longer will you be a slave to folders of miscellaneous word doc drafts. If you are writing anything that spans multiple pages, do yourself a favour and check it out.
Suitcase Fusion
www.extensis.com/en/products/suitcasefusion3/overview.jsp
Enough has been written on the failings of FontBook that I need not cover it here. Suffice to say that while Lion’s OS has made a few minor improvements, it’s still a far cry from efficient. There are of course other options; I’ve always used Suitcase so I chose to stick with the program.
Evernote
www.evernote.com
Think of Evernote as a kind of digital sketchbook that clips photos, web pages, PDFs and adds searchable text to your handwriting. If you have an iPhone, you can take pictures for your notes and add them as well.
Twitter App for Mac
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/01/twitter-for-mac.html
A little Twitter app that runs on your desktop. This one is available through the Mac App store. I have thus far resisted the lure of 24/7 Twitter availability, but my deterrents are being slowly eroded. This is the anti-Christ equivalent of a productivity enhancing program – ahem, “app”.
Firefox and Firebug
mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new and getfirebug.com
I like Firefox but mostly I install it for browser-check/bug finding purposes. Firebug is awesome; you can turn off CSS declarations one-by-one and troubleshoot without having to completely tear apart your code.
NeoFinder (formerly called CD Finder)
www.cdfinder.de
Remember when cataloging programs that could show you a preview of an image file cost several thousand dollars (*cough* Cumulus)? It was only about, oh, ten years ago. And really, there wasn’t even a viable option as recently as five years ago (that I could find). There were lots of programs that would sort and catalog files on your computer, but they all wanted to make copies of your files and store them away (much like iPhoto, shudder) which I find highly annoying.
The best solution I found was CD Finder, which gave you a searchable database of your archived disks and any drives you wanted to add, but didn’t have the capability to show image thumbnails. I used CD Finder (now NeoFinder) to catalog my old job files that had been burned to DVD and, besides that minor quibble, it worked great.
That minor quibble has been resolved. With the advent of huge photo and video files, external hard drives are becoming a necessity, but I’ll probably always archive my design job files to disk. NeoFInder takes care of both of these situations AND now shows a preview of the image files as well. All I can say is, YESSS! and, it’s about time.
SpamSieve
http://c-command.com/spamsieve
Have spam? Get SpamSieve. Super bayesian spam filtering for Mac Mail.
OpenOffice
www.openoffice.org
I’ll probably get the iWork and/or MS Office suite at some point – but right now, all I need is something to open and save Word docs with. OpenOffice is a free, open source suite that includes your basic word processor, slideshow, and spreadsheet combo.
This is a neat idea – two complimentary “sketch” fonts for doing layouts, or whatever. It’s now easier than ever to make stuff that looks authentic and hand drawn, without wasting all that time on actual drawing! No, but seriously, I think these are kind of cute. And they’re free – download 3dumb and 2dumb here.
One of the classic problems of creatives who work alone – be it writers, painters, graphic designers, or whoever – is clearing a path through the daily administrative clutter to providing themselves with uninterrupted time to really work, to delve into the creative process.
Email is the biggest problem for me. I like to clean out my inbox regularly. This means I have to do something with each piece of email that comes into my inbox, which often results in trips down the rabbit hole every morning, with distractions that may be legitimate (or otherwise), but are very seldom urgent.
Some of this happens because I don’t want to “lose” things in my email inbox. Often, email that traveled below the fold was ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ and either became an emergency when it surfaced again, or settled to the bottom in a catch-all muck of ‘something I need to read/take care of eventually.’
Then I had an idea: Not having a secretary is no reason not to ACT like you’ve got one. Tasks need to be delegated; if that person they get delegated to happens to be me at a future date, so be it. It’s all about managing the inflow.
Email now gets sorted into three folders: the Secretary folder (which I called Secretariat because he’s a famous racehorse and it soothes my creative ego), the Reading (ie “read later”) folder, and the Website Updates folder.
The Secretary folder Anything of a non-urgent administrative nature gets filed into the Secretary folder. This includes items that need to be scheduled, sorted, printed, filed, etc etc. My criteria is, if I had a secretary, would I give this to him or her to do?
The Reading folder Anything that comes to my inbox which looks interesting and I want to read/think about later. This includes the majority of blog newsletters that I’m signed up for, or interesting links that people send me.
The Website Updates folder I get a fairly significant amount of email that needs to get posted on either a client’s website, or on one of the magazine sites that I manage. It gets filed here.
You can probably figure out your own categories. The benefit is that once the tasks are sorted, I am free to decide if I want to focus on the admin tasks, or get into the creative tasks. And with the admin tasks, if not done, at least cleared out of the way, I am mentally 100% free to work on the creative tasks.
‘Cause that’s what it’s all about, right? I’ve always thought that designers should be able to design abstract systems just as well as they design paper or website systems. So design a system that will hack your brain and allow you to get down to work!
The 20th century had Lord of the Flies; the 21st century gets The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins).
The Lord of the Flies stripped away the trappings, mental and emotional, of civilizing influences. It was a window into a very private world – who are you when no one in authority is watching over you?
The Hunger Games gives you a window on a similar survival situation, but there’s no privacy and the main character is always very aware of that fact. Caught in a televised fight to the death with her fellow tributes, Katniss Everdeen knows there are viewers and she knows she needs to do her best to manipulate them, right from the start when candidates are presented to the Capitol and to the games’ overseers.
Seriously, this book could not have happened without the advent of ‘reality’ television. Just like on Survivor, the strategy is not about how to survive – it’s about how to win, and how much of yourself you’re willing to change in the process.
The dystopic novel ties in to a few plot themes; the main one is the ‘fight to the death’ as entertainment for the masses, which goes all the way back to the Roman coliseum. There is also a tie-in of the ‘lone gunfighter’ theme, of someone already accustomed to fighting for survival (and hence taking it much more seriously than any well-kept, well-fed person), who is forced into a situation he or she doesn’t want to be in, all because of the whims of a madman (or mad society, in this case). And, props to Arnie, the mass-televised-game aspect (usually played with criminals to give it some kind of moral justification) isn’t new either. The Hunger Games also draws on Ancient Greece’s Minotaurian myth of sending young men and women to their doom, as tribute to a higher political authority. But it’s how the “game” is played that gives it a modern feel.
There are opening ceremonies directed by stylists, televised interviews (complete with a Regis Philbin sound-alike), training demonstrations. Strategy is first and foremost. Contestants need to impress the viewers so that they will be ‘sponsored’ – sent gifts of help during the games.
Katniss’ strategy sets up both a political threat to the justification for the Games, and a love triangle in her personal life, which sets the stage for the next two books in the trilogy. This is technically a YA (young adult) book, so expect it to be that level of challenging. Because this is a strongly first-person novel, one of the questions that isn’t really addressed is this: if we as readers are gaining entertainment from a story about this game, are we complicit in the notion of violence as entertainment? But if you’re a fan of dystopic fiction, overall, this one’s worth a read.
So, I’ll preface this with my Twilight stance, like any person mentioning Stephanie Myer’s stories seems to have to do. I haven’t watched the movies. Haven’t read the books. And, perhaps because I’ve already been through an Anne Rice infatuation when I was a teenager, I have no current plans to do either. But for some reason (okay, nevermind, I know why), this series seems so ripe for parody. I mean, check out the LOL cats version.
I get all the entertainment I need from reading stuff like Chris Sims’ review of Breaking Dawn:
…it’s a thought-provoking movie, in that it raises a lot of questions in the mind of the viewer. Namely, what kind of sin could a man commit in a single lifetime that would cause his employer to make him walk up to another human being and say “One for Breaking Dawn, please”?
But now to the point of this long-winded post. (Preface over). Sims also did a review of the Twilight graphic novel adaptation and I thought the artwork by Young Kim was quite lovely so I’m posting them here:
Twilight, graphic novel edition.