spasticrobot

dwell.com Redesigns

dwell.com has been lovingly redesigned. It's a beautiful and subtle site, full of great design resources and interesting content.

New Dirty Coast Site

My friends at Dirty Coast, makers of fine NOLA-riffic t-shirts and stickers, have just launched their full website. I love the layout and all of the functionality. It's a great example of a well balanced CSS/Flash/XHTML site. They gave me a nice shout out on their Friends and Neighbors page, too!

Go ahead and order a few t-shirts today. The first 200 customers get 20% off and if you order 3 shirts you get a stack of "Be a New Orleanian Wherever You Are" stickers.

Dos Boot

Apple announced today that they are releasing an application called Boot Camp that will allow users to install Windows on their Intel Macs. Lots of people have been predicting that this would happen since the Mactels were released, but it was just something that I couldn't wrap my mind around. Macs running Windows is something I never thought I'd live to see, much less with the aid of Apple developed hardware and software. The decision looks to be a smart one as Apple's stock has already risen 7% in early trading.

Edit: I just realized that this means I can run my work VPN and Outlook on a Mac. That changes everything. I am totally buying a new Mac mini this year.

NYTimes.com Redesign

NYTimes.com got a facelift yesterday. I'm loving both the subtle and non-subtle changes that have been made. It reminds me very much of the New York Magazine site, another site that I'm fond of.

Even though he claims otherwise it seems that Khoi Vinh has made his first mark there a pleasant one.

Rouleur Magazine

Rouleur is a new cycling magazine from Rapha, makers of beautiful and super high quality cycling gear. The layout looks amazing and the content sounds incredible.

The first issue's featured articles include:

• Redoubtable rouleurs - profiles of the rouleurs who have inspired us the most
• Pride and prejudice - a comparison of Record and Dura Ace that focuses on design and emotion rather than practical performance
• Le Tourmalet - an account of the classic climb
• Kraftwerk - a study of the German techno pioneers and their relationship with the ultimate man-machine
• Obsession - photographs from a day of suffering
• Fixed Idea - an essay on the appeal of the fixed gear
• Magnus - an interview with the sinister but likeable Swede

I can't wait for my issue to arrive.

As a sidenote I'd be remiss not to mention just how badass I think the Rapha site is in and of itself. If you are a fan of cycling or web design take a minute out of your hectic day to enjoy the pleasure of their products, features and about pages. They really evoke the drama and beauty of cycling through their simple and lovely design and copy.

SPASTICROBOT is 2!

Today is the second anniversary of this site in its current iteration. I've been running personal sites for almost 8 years now and so far running this weblog has been my favorite web publishing experience. I've got some changes planned that I won't talk about because then I probably won't go through with them but one thing is for sure, I'm looking at leaving Typepad and moving on to either Movable Type or Wordpress.

Stats to date:
Total Posts: 498
Total Comments: 612
Site Visits: 49,901
Avg. Per Day: 80
Past Seven Days: 716

Friendster vs. MySpace

Danah Boyd has written a clever essay titled "Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?" that examines the successes and failures of Friendster and MySpace from social and technical perspectives. Lately I've reluctantly started to embrace MySpace due to the fact that it's the first online space where most of my IRL friends have entrenched themselves.

It's interesting to watch the evolution of social networking websites. They keep getting weirder and more "real".

Bruce Sterling's 2006 SXSW Panel

The kind folks over at SXSW are hosting a podcast of Bruce Sterling's State of the World keynote. It's a classic Sterling rant that focuses on the opposing forces of the emerging Bright Green Future and the Grim Meathook Future. Somewhere in between he talks about Spimes, Web 2.0, life in Eastern Europe and the recklessness and failure of our current administration and their science policy.

Etech Notes

The relatively new Wired blog Monkey Bites is publishing copious notes from this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I just read the notes from Bruce Sterling's keynote on the internet of things or "spimes" as he likes to call them and it's an excellent encapsulation. It will be interesting to contrast the notes from this talk with the sure to be published notes from his talk next week at SXSWi on The State of the World.

March is for Geeking Out

The schedules for SXSWi and Etech are looking quite excellent this time around. Work isn't sending me to SXSW this year and I opted to save up for Spain in May rather than pay for the trip myself. It's a real bummer not to attend but I'm also not in a very productive space for career development or increasing my skills at this point. I still have so much to get back on track just in terms of day to day job and life stuff.

If you plan on attending please take copious notes and post them. (I'm talking to you Haney.)