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Ivan Ho!

Sorry for the lame post title, but check it out—comics artist Ivan Brunetti has a daily doodle blog.  (And for the eagle-eyed out there, yes I’m aware that my own daily doodles have been on a repeating monthly loop for a while… new scans are coming shortly).

Update:
I wrote a more extensive post about this and more of Ivan Brunetti’s site on MetaFilter.

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Sorrow Redux

Cin over at Learning Daily points out that I am not alone.

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Sorrow

I barely had time this week to breathe, let alone do an illustration for Illustration Friday, but I managed to sneak in a simple one.  This week’s theme: sorrow. (I can’t take anything seriously, can I?)

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For Service in English…

I called Bell to disconnect my landline today since I plan on using my cellphone as my primary (er, only) phone.  After sorting through the details and confirming my cancellation and dismissal of their services, the Bell Employee said, with no hint of irony, “Thank you for choosing Bell.”

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Red Letter Day

For the very first time in the history of graphic design, the following words were spoken today:

Could you make our logo smaller?

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Memmmmory…

<geek>

I’ve been working on some freelance illustration and font-design this weekend, and a bout of computer frustration just led to another sudden impulse buy (which would be far less frequent if the nearest Apple retailer wasn’t two blocks from my house).

I finally upped the RAM on my machine from its default 256 Megs to a nice whopping Gigabyte. However, once I installed the two sticks of RAM, my system profiler says I have 2 Gigs of RAM.  Did the salesperson inadvertantly give me twice the RAM for my money or is my system just reporting it wrong?

Either way I’m not complaining.  I’ve never had a computer run this smoothly.  It’s like having lived with extreme sinus congestion for years and finally being able to breathe!

I love Apple as much as the next geek, but they seriously need to reconsider how much default RAM they install on their machines.

</geek>

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Flight

I got my Illustration Friday entry done a day early.  This week’s theme: flight.

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Luv

A while ago Kat shared with me some heart-wrenching Valentine’s Day poetry.  And now I share it with all of you:

How to Write a Love Poem

Plus! My friend Alyson just e-mailed me a Valentine poem of her very own.  It made my heart go pitter pat, so I will share it as well:

I have a friend named John Martz
He has lots of Smartz
and it is only seldom he Fartz.
Happy day of the heartz
To my friend John Martz.
The man who seldom Fartz

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Finally, there is one man to watch out for this February 14th: GENERAL ZOD!

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Year of the Rooster

This week’s Illustration Friday theme: Year of the Rooster.  So long, Year of the Monkey!

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Overheard on Bathurst Street

“I will not eat that cat poop!!”—man on his cellphone

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No Sleep Til Brooklyn

Not a very good likeness, I know, but I’m currently entering my 27th hour of no sleep, and waiting for the delirium to set in…

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Artpad

Check out this great timewaster (link stolen from Brett).

Have some fun, and post the links to your masterpieces here!

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I Heart Tags

Allow to me to wax nerdy here for just a moment and declare that I love metatags.  Sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and now even Metafilter, are embracing user-created tags, or keywords, to organize content by type—not through hierarchical categories, but through organic tags.  Want to find popular bookmarks related to both design and sex?  No problem. Photographs of bananas?  Done. Metafilter posts about David Hasselhoff?  Er… why not!

This Wired article refers to this new form of information architecture as “folksonomy”.  I think tagging is extremely powerful because it’s a form of organization that removes any sense of system and order in favour of something far more intuitive, flexible, and social.

I use Del.icio.us now for all my bookmarking partly because I want to access the same bookmarks from multiple machines, but also because tagging allows for more powerful organization and searching than assigning links to individual categories.  And maybe I’m just a geek, but this kind of social systematics is just fun.  And the Del.icio.us inbox is amazing—it allows you to “subscribe” to tags, so anytime another user tags one of their bookmarks with a tag you subscribe to, that bookmark gets put into your inbox.  It’s a great way to discover new sites.

My technology wish for 2005 is to have tagging implemented into iTunes.  MP3s already have their own metatags, but limiting songs to one genre tag is restrictive.  What if a song is country and alternative?  Soul and an oldie? Hip hop and polka? I want to be able to assign tags or keywords to my iTunes library so I can create dynamic smart playlists based not only on genre, but mood, lyrics, instrument, subject, nationality… I currently, for example, have an iTunes playlist of songs that I listened to and remind me of highschool, but I have to manually add songs to it.  Why can’t I take “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and add highschool, crunchy, and DanRather tags to it?

Are you listening, Apple?

(Oh, by the way, there’s a plugin called TuneTags, but I’d prefer a real solution)

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