Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

The day we've all been waiting for -- launch day for Windows 7. Let the bloat begin!

A while back I texted youngest son and asked "Should I come for Family Weekend or not?" He replied back "Either way is fine." I took that as the closest I would ever get to an affirmative and made my travel arrangements. The main event on Friday (arguably for the whole weekend) was Mason Madness -- the fall rite that officially kicks off basketball practice for the upcoming George Mason basketball season.  Unlike Texas, where football is the state religion, the eastern seaboard worships (to a much greater extent) at the altar of basketball. And George Mason (which won the 2006 Eastern Regional NCAA Championship) is no exception. The five days preceding my trip I ran a low grade fever, hacking and coughing like death. By that Friday my fever had broken but I was but a shadow of my usual self. Note to the savvy traveler: if you've been under the weather, expecting to make it to the airport to catch a 7:00 AM flight is wildly optimistic. After only one miss...

Youngest son (and fellow Colbert Report junkie) clued me into the launch of a new app from the Colbert Nation which features clips of all of Stephen Colbert's " The Word ." Now you'll never be more than a screen tap away from Stephen's truthiness. This may be the single best reason ever to get an iPhone. You can view the featured (most recent) Word, or choose by date--all the way back to 2005. You can go by the title and by most popular. Or select Random and pull up some long-forgotten Wisdom from any of the past five seasons. Best 99 cents you'll ever spend! Screenshot shamelessly nicked from TheNoFactZone -- best source of information on All Things Colbert. Follow the link for more information and additional screenshots.

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I have seen the future of eBooks. It's the Foxit eSlick Reader . Unlike the Kindle, Sony and other eBook readers which use document formats that lock you down to a single source, this one reads PDFs. While Adobe originally created PDF as a proprietary format, they released it as an open standard on July 1, 2008. While Kindle and its kin are well made devices, the reliance on a single entity is problematic: should the company decide to discontinue the device and end support for the document format, you're screwed. With the eSlick Reader, even if Foxit stops making the unit, you'll be able to continue to get new books, as well as read the books on any other device (including your computer) that reads PDFs. Quoting from the overview page, The eSlick Reader has an internal memory of 512MB and comes with a 2 GB SD card (supports up to 4 GB). Resolution is 600 x 800 pixel. As with almost every other device out there, it also plays MP3s (great for audio books). It also ...

The article is " How To Respond Effectively to Design Criticism " from Smashing Magazine , a site focusing on graphic design. I'm going to have to add this to my weekly reading list. I forget how I ran across the post but it made some excellent points. Fear not if you aren't a designer -- the general principles the author outlines are applicable to any number of disciplines. Far be it from me to quote extensively -- just go there and read it yourself.