“It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country…to decide the important question..whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
Archive for February 2009
Only recently have I heard of Moleskine – an artistic style notebook brand. I was intrigued but held off being too interested because of price – they’re fairly expensive. When I found out they’re available in the BYU bookstore I gave in. I thought I might as well try them.
I purchased a set of three of the Cahier – small, gridded paper with a soft, brown cover. Here are my first impressions:
Likes: The size is good. I got the small size because I wanted to be able to carry it in my pocket. I’m taking a cue from my co-worker Ben on this one – he carries his in his shirt pocket. Pocket-size means I can take it everywhere and use it when inspiration strikes. The spine is stitched instead of stapled. This hand a nice handcrafter quality to the notebook. And I like having the grid lines when I want to sketch so I get good proportions, alignment, etc.
Dislikes: The grid lines are way too dark. There wasn’t a sample open at the store so I just had to commit to the purchase before seeing the grid lines. Now I wish I had just purchased the notebook with blank pages – the grid lines are that dark. And they were very expensive. 3 notebooks cost me over 7 bucks and they’ve only got a few pages in them.
Conclusion: I’ll use these until they’re full – no sense in wasting them. And then I think I’ll actually make my own. I can purchase grid paper with much lighter lines. I can wrap it in heavyweight stock for a cover. I can stitch or staple it myself. It will be much cheaper and much better. I’ll write a follow-up when I get to that point.
Aside: Along with the notebooks, I bought a nice pen – Zebra Sarasa 0.7. I really like it. At $1.50 it was a good deal.
Nic pointed me to this wonderfully simple little utility for locking your screen on Mac OS X. I had built my own solution using AppleScript and Quicksilve custom triggers. However, it didn’t prevent the normal screen saver from launching if I had already started it. Hopefully, this overcomes that shortcoming.
Web Directions North was wonderful. Excellent, articulate, timely, friendly. The best conference I have ever been to. It was that good. I will definitely be checking out the line up next year and plan on attending if it stacks up to this year.
I was really looking forward to meeting Manu Sporny of RDFa fame. His session didn’t disappoint. I really feel this is the most important future of the internet and am interested in it’s successful advancement – even helping if I can.
I also enjoyed CSS and design presentations by Elliot Jay Stocks and Dan Cederholm. Both encouraged use of advanced CSS techniques. I made a list from Dan’s presentation of techniques to experiment with. This is important for me to evolve my skills and keep current.
The Ajax: State of the Art presentation was well done and well worth listening too. They showcased a web based text editor that uses some pretty advanced web skillz – Bespin. Proposes some interesting new capabilities: command line integration, available everywhere, etc. It will be interesting to take it for a test drive when it is available.
I also captured interesting notes from Brian Fling on mobile development; Kevin Larson on reading research; Dan Connoly on the State of the Web; and more.
The closing keynote sent us off with words of encouragement and confidence. Really that was the theme of the conference, “Ignore the gloom & doom and make a bright future”. It was great to associate with like minds who are positive about the future.
Now I’m looking forward to getting home, kissing my wife and patting my children on the head. Goodbye new friends and I’ll see you soon on the intertubes.