Didn't know whether to file this under glasswork or gadgetry, so I'm opting for both. The Glass Orchestra, in Toronto, plays exclusively on glass instruments, most of which the members design and fabricate themselves. Think of it as musical water glasses, on steroids. They've got some MP3s on the site you can listen to, sound a bit like a cross [...]
So Johnson & Johnson, a family company, is suing the American Red Cross for trademark infringement of its red cross. This oughta be fun. 112 years ago ARC founder Clara Barton (apparently unwisely) agreed that J&J had exclusive rights to use a red cross to sell bandaids and first aid kits and the like. Now the Red Cross has gotten [...]
The state of New Hampshire just went to court to defend one of the first laws prohibiting the use of prescription-writing data to market drugs to doctors. The plaintiffs, healthcare market research companies, argue that the law is a First Amendment violation. (Given New Hampshire's fierce love of freedom, that's gotta hurt.) But it's an interesting and potentially landmark case [...]
Turns out FreddieMac doesn't always play well with my other digital children. I got Freddie back in October and things had been going pretty well...except in the area of wireless. When I'm not traveling or visiting friends and family, Freddie stays on the desk, where she's been turning wireless networking into Russian roulette. My Verizon FIOS connection uses an Actiontec [...]
Do you ever wish there were some kind of absolute truth machine? One where you feed the words into the hopper at one end and at the other end a bell dings and a screen pops up saying "Yup, it's true," or "Absolute, total BS. Ignore it." I sure do. It would save so much time. When I was in [...]
It’s Halloween and we all have our ghost stories to tell, right? Here’s mine. A long time ago, I managed networks and BBSes (a kind of early online community) for a research group in our local agricultural college. Our charter was to persuade farmers, agriculture teachers and the ag industry in general to use the computer to gain competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
In a previous note I looked back at many (alas, not all, due to some server losses) of the designs I've made for Morganica.com over the years. At the end I'd said we'll see how this evolves as the new design settles into its paces. There's a point at which you stop testing and simply float the bloody thing (which [...]
The thing about the Web is it evolves. Every time I hear a colleague say, “well, I’m still trying to finish the (content, design, IA, whatever) so I can launch it,” I pull out soapbox #143: “If you wait until it’s finished…well, you’ll be waiting a long, long time. Just get something out there. Make it perfect later.” So, naturally, [...]