Sunday – Wall-E and Expression Attempts
Wednesday – Newark Liberty Int'l
Finally have access to my scanner!
Apple settles, to make SF store accessible
In law school, I learned about some pretty ugly human behaviour through the criminal and torts cases our class read. Sometimes I couldn't understand what could bring people to the level of a torts suit, and often I could only shake my head, because as my professor said, "in a lawsuit, the only people who win are the lawyers." So when I learned of the settlement terms of the August 2007 lawsuit against Apple by two plaintiffs, I was pleasantly surprised. The plaintiffs, using wheelchairs, had trouble accessing the San Francisco Apple retail store. Instead of seeking monetary compensation, the plaintiffs asked for something that would actually fix the problem.
As a result of the settlement, Apple will improve the accessibility features of the store and train employees in serving people in wheelchairs. It is nice to see that sometimes there are proactive solutions to lawsuits.
Full details: Consent Decree and (Proposed Order) (PDF), (via Ars Technica)
Tuesday – Seagulls at Hyde Street Pier
Left: At Hyde Street Pier Historic National Park
Right: I am beginning to be convinced that perhaps seagulls are not, as we thought, the most attention-deficit birds of the sea. Today two of Nature's such creatures flanked me, standing guard quite patiently for nigh on a half hour. They were so close I could have reached out and stroked them. When apparently bored of watching me luncheon, they groomed their feathers absent-mindedly. Why they cry out when there are no other birds visibly present remains a mystery to me. I wonder how long this construction can continue, and if I ought to move my place of study somewhere quieter where I can hear the waves better. I hardly think a walkabout would be entirely out of the question. Waters are fairly calm today anyway. And the afternoon sun warms up the bay and cypress trees and makes the air smell so sweet and pine-y. Fresh, growing.
UGO Safety Brake for strollers
Whenever I think about baby prams, I envision that scene in The Untouchables with the pram rolling down the staircase in the middle of a shootout. My college roommate recently had a baby boy, and with a middle name like 'Danger', I fear for his pram days. James William Wansey, a student at the University of New South Wales, made the James Dyson Award shortlist for his UGO Safety Brake. His description says:
The UGO safety brake is an automatic brake system for strollers and prams that ensures that the stroller cannot roll away accidentally and cause injury to a child. The design relies on a wireless communication between the wheel hub of the stroller and the hand-held unit which is worn by the parent. When the stroller and the parent separate by more than two meters, the wireless connection is lost and the brakes pulse to bring the stroller to a stop. The brake system is powered by the rotation of the wheel and is fully contained within the hub of the wheel.
Wansey claims that 10% of children treated for stroller-related injuries in ER in Australia are from roll-away situations. My only response is, why wasn't this invented sooner?
UGO Safety Brake (via Yanko Design)
Saturday – Tailouring & Yoko Shimizu
Left: Model from a British tailouring house I can't remember for some reason.
Right: Back cover of P. Craig Russell's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters, drawn by Yoko Shimizu. Rather appropriate for Valentine's Day, I feel.
Inner Message Ring
St. Valentine's Day is approaching, and while this may not arrive in time for the holiday, isn't every day special when it's with your sweetheart? </sappy>
The Inner Message ring leaves an imprint on your finger after you have worn it, and the designer appears to be taking custom message orders. I have to say this is a great example of design directly interacting with the user. I don't know how long it takes for the impression to appear, however, or if it would be painful, but I do like the idea.
Order information, by Yoon Jung Yun (via Core77)
Wednesday – Random
Left: I'm not leaving until I get a bellyrub.
Right:
Feet say: 'Why can't you draw us?'
Bottom right, orc is labeled: 'Orc male pattern baldness. The reason for the last 5 campaigns.'
Bottom right, orc is thinking: 'Must have Rogaine!'
Bottom center, elk is labeled: 'Because even elk need to feel beautiful sometimes..."
Going to have a proper scanner soon!
Monday – Dada
Nonapologist prawn, exhibit A: 'Being boiled alive does not mollify my rage at being captured!'
Headcrab: (thinking) 'Brains!'
At right, bottom: Vertical integration is no excuse for blazes of Dadaist glory! Dadaism...the product of feeble graspings at coherency out of incoherency indulged...ultimately recursively insolvent and bound to bring shareholder suits over reckless abandonment of substantive duty in a leveraged signifier-signified buyout. Remember: being a headcrab does not preclude being beautiful!
Sunday – This Side of Paradise
"The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere...Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the grey walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages. The tower in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession...The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light."
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Saturday – Greece and Sheep
On the left: "It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously coloured as the agates and the carnelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they turned off the Corniche d'Or and down the Gausse's Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of acqueducts..."
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
On the right: The opening bars to the theme song from OKHC, then... 'Mozart!' she moaned in her agony, sick. As the world gyroscoped inside her head, she fancied she could hear the pulsing of her stomach in the interval between each passing car's whisper, streaking past her ears like shimmering silver comets in the cool darkness of the night. She closed her eyes and sought stillness, but could only find it above. The nausea swept through her on the coattails of dismay as she wondered if the raw cake mix was more than mere funfetti, if it was in fact, dreaded salmonella.
Friday – Lion and Mad Hatter
'My dear Royal Highness, the truth is in the details.'
'Hurm hurm, you may be right, Mister Haberdasher.'
Though I was conferring with a friend and apparently the last accepted common use of 'haberdasher' for a hat-maker was in the fifteenth century? Am I simply incredibly outdated? Apparently the correct use is 'milliner', which sounds faintly too agricultural.