A place for my stuff, 2006

July 31, 2006

All of us have dreams about what we want our area to look like – a personal cubby for reflection, or room designed for entertaining, or simply a space for our television and Nintendo to sit. Some buy it all at once, purchasing a “dream home” when the money is right and the time affords some splurging. Others build their space bit-by-bit, room-by-room. Still, some never get that space at all, never realizing their dream space – their one repose from the usual architecture of life.

In a few days, my dream space will be reality. We’re nearly finished with our library.

I’ve always wanted a library. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by bookshelves. Novel after novel has towered above me for years, from my mother’s living room to the stacks at Barnes and Noble. I’ve lost myself in libraries and used bookstores. But I’ve never really had a space of my own, something I could call a library.

I survived with a bookshelf here and a wall shelf there, but I’ve always desired one place – a series of pressed wood shelves; a reading lamp, comfy chair, and display table; my desk, my computer, my workspace. I’ve wanted an office that doubled as a book depository.

Thanks to another trip to IKEA and years of saving, we’ve nearly finished our basement. And along with this, the library. One wall of books. One cubby for the computer. One comfy chair. Everything will come together to create a hiding place, an area of complete concentration, small enough to feel completely enclosed and shut off from distractions while big enough to not be cramped.

I think too little credit is given to the places where people become creative and relaxed. Some people can escape to a busy Starbucks. I can’t. I can’t concentrate on anything. I need a chair, a clean desk, or a quiet, nearly soundproof closed off area. Now I have one, and I’m more excited than I’d originally thought. After a layer of carpet and the agonizing task of reorganizing my books, it will be complete.

Of course, it will never truly be complete. No respectable living space ever is. It moves with a fluid motion that fills every corner with livability. It changes and re-creates itself based on the whims and experiences of the owner, adding trinkets and throwing rubbage out like a small-town flea market. I’m already looking to add on: a small card catalogue is my first hopeful addition, and an old European map would help clutter a too-bare spot on the wall.

But that’s the future. For what it’s worth, it’s perfect now. That is, it will be, just as soon as I get the Allen wrench out and put these boxes of bookshelves together.

Tags: Books |

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The Beetis

July 28, 2006

Two YouTube videos today.

There’s really nothing funnier than Wilford Brimley. Remixed.

The original Beetis remix video:

And the remix Volume 2:

Awesome.

Tags: Random YouTube |

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Eric 3x

July 27, 2006

I swear this is the last time I’ll do this. But hey – a friend in need, etc.

Eric, former Misc.Asst. contributor and owner of the now (already) defunct This is Fucking Bullshit, has moved homes again, starting a “stupid things happen to even stupider people” type blog: The Daily Pooper.

Actually, I like this idea better than any sports blog he’s done in the past. But that’s because he hates good basketball and continues to underrate Steve Nash.

Anyway, go check it out. It’s the least you can do.

The Daily Pooper

(And the least he could do is link my site, for all the pimping I’ve given his bandwidth over the past year.)

Go Twins.

Tags: Blogging, Friends |

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Re-acclimation of a pasttime

July 26, 2006

I don’t know exactly when it was that I turned into a baseball fan.

Wait. Let me start over.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I turned into a baseball follower. I’m not a fan, by any means. I’m extremely fickle in my rooting. I don’t care about losing teams, and I don’t care about any game before the All-Star break.

The simple fact is this: 162 games is an awful lot. I can hardly keep attention for 82 regular season basketball games, and that’s my sport of choice. No, for me, the season doesn’t start until the All-Star break. After that, the storylines become more crucial. The teams that are struggling are forgotten – as they should be – and the contenders are boosted up. By this point, my three teams of interest (Cardinals [the team of my youth], Twins [the team of my rebirth], and the A’s [the team that exhibits my personal values in effective team construction]) have either forged ahead or can be forgotten about.

We’ve seen recently that what happens in the first half of the season really has nothing to do with how the whole thing ends. The Florida Marlins proved this three years ago when they came from nowhere to win lots of games and eventually beat the Yankees in the World Series.

This year is no different. My inner Cardinals fan backed Albert Pujols’ drive for history as he hammered out home runs faster than anyone had in the history of the game. The Twins were floundering early, saving us all the struggle of watching them lose their division lead with three weeks left in the season. The A’s were playing well from the start, which was odd for a team that makes its best drive in the second half. It looked like a good season to back the Cardinals.

Then Albert went down. And the A’s slid back into mediocrity.

Through it all, the team I always want to support – the team I adopted as my team of choice after spending four years in Minnesota – has given me a reason to watch again. Namely, they’re one game out in the playoff race (and up 7-4 in the bottom of the 9th at the time of posting). They’ve won a ridiculous amount of games — 32 of 40 or something like that. They’ve got two young pitchers that could rival the duo of Schilling and Johnson. And they’ve got the best hitter in the game. They’re scoring. They’re pitching. They’re unbelievable.

I always doubt, but I always seem to come back. Let’s start backing the Twins, friends.

In true symbolic fashion, I’ll be rekindling my newfound love of baseball this weekend with tickets to see the Twins play the division leader Detroit Tigers. The beer will flow like rain, and though I won’t see Santana or Liriano pitch, I’ll at least get to hang out in the cheap seats with good friends and a hot-as-hell team.

Yeah, I’m a casual fan. But it takes time to re-acclimate to baseball’s charms after years of neglect. You’ll have to forgive me – I’m fair-weather, I’m arbitrary, and I’m a carpetbagger. But for the rest of the season, the Twins have a chance to gain another lifelong fan.

And if they by chance win the World Series – well, you read it here first. I’m a Minnesota Twins Fan. So help me God.

Someone had better order me a t-shirt.

Tags: Sports, Baseball, Minnesota Twins |

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Lorem Ipsum

July 25, 2006

This might be lost on many of you. But it’s truly fascinating to me.

In the world of design, there’s nothing more annoying than a block of text that distracts from the overall theme. This happens primarily before any copy has been written whatsoever, when the concepts are initially being fleshed out and a basic structure is needed to move forward. When this happens, a placeholder is needed.

For someone who is unfamiliar with the design business, myself for instance, it would be easy to just write “content here content here” or “this is where copy will go this is where copy will go” over and over again. But in reality, this is distracting. It follows a repeating pattern that eventually shows in a block of text, moving the eye from the natural focus to the copy in question.

Enter Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum, or “greeking,” is a technique used by most designers to create a natural looking block of text without patterns or unnatural breaks. It means nothing, but looks like real copy. It gets its name from the traditional group of words used the most:

”Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

The phrase is from Cicero’s “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC. The grouping shows a more or less natural progression of letter groups, providing a non-distracting copy for design purposes. It’s been used since 1500, being a standard block that could be inserted without the trouble of composing an entirely new block of type.

Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope describes the discovery that this grouping of words – used for centuries – was actually a bastardized version of Cicero:

This news came from Richard McClintock, a Latin professor turned publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Curious about what the words meant, McClintock had looked up one of the more obscure ones, consectetur, in a Latin dictionary. Going through the cites of the word in classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . (”There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .”).
McClintock recalled having seen lorem ipsum in a book of early metal type samples, which commonly used extracts from the classics. “What I find remarkable,” he told B&A, “is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.” So much for the transitory nature of content in the information age.

What does this mean to you, the reader? Nothing. But now you know a little bit of type-setting/design history.

The Lorem Ipsum page (with Lorem Ipsum generator) may help you understand it more, as will the Wikipedia page. If you want to see some more humerous applications, go to Duck Island’s Greeking Machine and choose from the standard Greek, Marketing, Hillbilly, or Technobabble. Or, head over to this Text Generator and enjoy Lorem Ipsum, 70’s television style.

Tags: Advertising/Marketing |