Poodles of the sea

Every time I get close to seals, they look like dogs to me: their rolling eyes, tiny black noses. They are the poodles of the sea.

Until I saw these photos of real dogs underwater. Wow.

Now I’m not sure what seals look like. Seals?

Much ado about Wonder Woman

She cried for an hour when I brought home the Wonder Woman T-shirt.

I’m always bringing home super hero shirts for my son. Nothing on Earth makes him happier. What, I thought, would be cooler than a (classic) super hero shirt for a girl?

But she would hear nothing of it. She pouted. She yelled. She cried: “I don’t like cool. You like cool. I like princesses.”

I told her just how awesome Wonder Woman is. I offered to show her clips on YouTube. I told her that the girls at school would think it was the coolest.

She would hear nothing of it. I started to feel bad. Clearly, I don’t understand her. I let her down. I told her maybe I could exchange the T-shirt for something she would like.

The next morning, the T-shirt sat discarded. I dressed her. She looked at me for a minute, then asked me to put on the Wonder Woman T-shirt. So nonchalant, like it was no big deal.

Shipping container cafe: I love you

There’s something you need to know about me. I have an unhealthy obsession with shipping containers.

It started when I was a tot on Vancouver Island, staring across the straight at freighters laden with colourful, Lego-like shapes. Up close, shipping containers were cryptic: What are those strange logos on the outside? And what marvels are hiding on the inside?

My fixation continued when I lived in Vancouver and traversed vast yards stacked with giant metal boxes from faraway places. Ahhh…

See. It’s a problem.

And I get pure, unadulterated joy every time I see a new architectural conversion of shipping containers into homes, restaurants, hotels.

The latest: a Starbucks. Made of shipping containers. But oh, what a Starbucks. I’m in love.

(via Good, via Inhabitat… photo credit Starbucks)

 

 

 

The truth about zombies: data entry

“… zombies are real. They work like a slave or a maid. They work on the computers as well, making accounts.”

“What kind of accounts?” I ask. 

“Eh, like spreadsheets, they make Excel.”

I almost choke, and feel compeled to unbutton my collar and ask for clarification, “You say they work on computers making Excel spreadsheets?” Alex’s face is straight. “Yes, they use the computer, they make the spread-sheets.”

– Hamilton Morris, I Walked with a Zombie, Harpers, November 2011

Web people: A culture of self-reflexive testing, tweaking, adjusting

After spending two days obsessively tweaking small details on two different projects, I realized this:

It’s not surprising that people who work in web, IT and digital marketing are often unusually self-reflexive.

We spend our days making things work seamlessly inside complicated and often imperfect systems. Hour after hour, many of us are adjusting, testing, revising, trying new approaches… Sometimes we are using technology and tools to do this. Other times we are working inside human systems that require continual adaptation.

How can we not apply the same thought process to ourselves and the way we live our lives? It’s inevitable that this thought process trickles down into the ways adapt to the non virtual world, causing us to continually observe, test, tweak and try different ways living with ourselves and one another.

Goodbye suburban business enclaves?

“Even leaving aside climate change, very soon the price of energy will make the dispersed, unconnected, low-density city-building pattern impossibly costly. Those jurisdictions and businesses that first create livable, workable, post-peak-oil metropolitan regions are the ones that will win the future.”

Louise A. Mozingo, To Rethink Sprawl, Start With Offices, New York Times

Well it seems obvious to me, but then I don’t commute every day to a suburban business campus. Mozingo wonderfully starts out with the history of the corporate suburban campus, the rationale and proliferation. Then he predicts their demise. Lovely.