Disconnect? Why Not Take Control?
May 20th 2012 10:00 AM By
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After mere decades since it's invention, people get a lot of email. This is evident any time we glance at someone's computer screen and see their bottomless inboxes or triple-digit numbers sitting over an email icon on a smart phone. Notifications remind us every so often that we're not keeping up with the world, and that people are expecting us to respond in the near future. In a short amount of time we adapt and adjust our working styles to combat the communications deluge that pesters us at all hours of the day, but we still see many people around us who have decided it's just easier to ignore the unread counts and focus on what we can see relatively easily. Somebody will either resend an email or call if the matter is important, right?
Zeldman's Design Manifesto
May 19th 2012 3:00 PM By
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Jeffrey Zeldman has recently updated his personal website, and it's created quite a stir in the web design circles. With very large text and a lack of eye candy, he's put content ahead of every other element that we find plastered across the Internet today. This creates a very easy to read site that gives visitors exactly what they want to see, and it's something that I also tried to capture with this site's redesign last month. Why should readers be forced to send things to Instapaper or hit the "Reader" button in a browser to improve the reading experience of a site? It's an embarrassment.
A Quarter Century of Excess
May 19th 2012 10:00 AM By
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As the stifling summer heat and humidity makes its way across Japan, power companies and news stations are strongly advising the population to be careful of how much electricity we use. With the last of our nuclear reactors shut down, the nation is running on the more expensive LNG1 power plants that leave us with an incredibly finite amount of electricity. Power hungry stores, entertainment centres, factories, hospitals, retirement homes, and schools are all railing against the prospect of a summer with brownouts, but there's only so much we can do when the bulk of the population is rejecting the atom. All this said, having only a limited amount of energy available will hopefully result in two consequences that will benefit the nation, and perhaps the world.
Takeshi Kitano's Faulty Reasoning
May 18th 2012 6:00 PM By
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Last Saturday Takeshi Kitano1 openly made fun of U.S. President Obama for coming out in favor of gay marriage. He went so far to say that if same-sex marriage were legalized, then human-animal marriage should also be permissible. I missed last weekend's episode of 7 Days Newscaster, but it was reported in great detail on 愛と苦悩の日記, including some of the reactions from the other commentators on the show.
Focus
May 18th 2012 3:00 PM By
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I was listening to episode 124 of the Enough Podcast the other day and the topic was on ADD or, more specifically, how we focus and get things done. In order for me to be productive I tend to completely shut out the world, losing all sense of time and place, to get things done. My wife hates this. When she tries to ask me a question while I'm 'away', I either don't register the sound of her voice as words, or I get yanked out of the self-imposed isolation so abruptly that I get visibly frustrated or angry. It's not that I am actively ignoring the world around me, though; this is just the way I tend to focus.
