When a few boys from Greenwich, Connecticut decided to build a wiffleball field in an unused lot complete with walls, lines, American flag and advertising; they never thought they would have a legion of angry homeowners crying for them to be shut down and sent home to play video games instead.
Nation Geographic has a gallery of beautiful photos of various translucent sea creatures. In the complete darkness of those depths, the creatures seem almost entirely too surreal.
“Today is going to be an unbelievably close final. On clay Rafa reigns supreme but has really taken well to grass this year by winning at Queen’s. Federer is still the master on the grass.”
Brazillian band CSS made their inroads being features on an iPod commercial - watch them in full bloom.
Fantastic news, everybody! Commodity trading for oil futures drove the price of one barrel from $127 to $138 on Friday - expect to see gas around $4.25 by Monday. Soon we will be measuring fuel economy by dollars per mile.
Yves Saint Laurent died today at age 71. He is one of the preeminent fashion designers of the 20th century, easily on par with any other name thrown out there. I am currently wearing my velvet YSL smoking jacket in his honor.
National Geographic has published an aerial photo taken of one of the world last ‘uncontacted’ indigenous tribes near the Peru-Brazil border. Depicted are three people, two of them entirely painted red another painted entirely black, in a threatening stance shouting at the airplane.
Hi, my name is Dakota and this is my website. I am a preschool teacher, full-time student and design mercenary. When I am not busying myself about my various concerns, I can be found on Twitter and Last.fm
No man is an island. These are some of my go-to sources for fresh meat.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot may be the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game. I played the entire campaign all the way through in just a few days while watching every single cut scene. Some people estimate the total number of cut scenes to run upwards of ten hours all in all. Let me say this, it certainly makes for a fun movie even if the plot is a bit convoluted.
After my original playthrough, however, I found myself immediately starting the game again in hopes of a completely different experience. The first time around I went in guns blazing, which works rather well considering the amount of time Kojima and company went into refining combat controls. This time I am going for a 0 alert/0 kill run through - that means no guards can see me and I can’t kill anyone either - including the bosses. I find myself exploring for easter eggs, of which there are countless, and striving for that all important Big Boss emblem. Unfortunately there is no Trophy support yet on the PS3 and I would love to have some credit for these achievements, but meh - the stealth armor is nice enough.
Villages around Reggio Emilia, Italy began a new method for teaching early childhood education shortly after World War II. In the Reggio Emilia approach, students are the focal point of all daily activities - they are encouraged to develop their own intellectual curiosities and be their own compass in the classroom. In turn, the teacher facilitates the process by formulating activities and exercises according to the interests of the children.
This comes from the fundamental belief that children gain the most from learning experiences when they emerge organically from their explorations rather than shoved wholesale into their face. I try to implement the RE approach in my classroom every day. The curriculum and projects are roughly planned out for each day with a definitive theme for the week with my students ultimately taking the lead on how we will do certain things.
This past week for our Independence Day unit, I thought it would be a great idea to make a flag for our class. At first, I would have had the children approach the task of ‘making a flag’ in a tradition approach - probably some construction paper and glitter. Instead, I brought the kids into the art room and said “what should we use to make our flags?” The children, quite to my surprise, chose to each make a stripe of the flag using glossy paper, shaving cream, glue and water colors. The result was one of the most engaging, fun and messy projects that we have done recently.
The psychological and developmental impact extends far beyond a single activity - for the rest of the week, the children (ages 3-5) were talking about how much fun it was to do this project and enjoyed looking at the finished product. While this may seem innocuous, a sense of continuity from day to day is something many children struggle to develop. The concept of yesterday and tomorrow are slow coming. When they are given the opportunity to work on a project for several days, they grow a greater appreciation for the finished product and develop a sense of continuum.
If there is something I can appreciate it is good industrial design. The thought that goes into choosing materials and fine tuning dimensions is something I always take into consideration when finding a product to drool over.
The KOR Hydration Vessel is, admittedly, a result of the hydration nation meme started with Nalgene. Unlike Nalgene counterparts, the KOR water bottle has no BPA - a chemical additive found in some bottles that has been banned in several countries due to health concerns. It also features a unique top mechanism that allows for one handed water drinking (who would have thought it possible).
The Blackberry Bold is slowly making its way into the hands of consumers and Crackberry has a video review of a pre-release unit. It features a full QWERTY keyboard, VGA display, brand new visual refresh for the OS, 3.5mm headphone jack and external storage. It also features a 2MP camera and all the great Blackberry features you know and love.
One problem, the phone will be about $700 if you want to buy one unlocked. AT&T is expected to offer to BBB at a discount of at least $300 with a 2 year contract. Realistically, it will cost you more than the iPhone no matter how you slice it and with the iPhone 2.0 enterprise features it will be difficult to justify staying with BlackBerry unless you wish to use it on a different network.
Vermont may be just in time to the iPhone 2 party after all. When Verizon purchased Rural Cellular Corporation late last year, Senator Bernie Sanders intervened on the legislative level claiming that it would effectively establish a monopoly in the state of Vermont. Currently there are only three choices for service in the state - Verizon, Sprint and Unicel. With Sprint already leasing time off of Verizon owned towers, the takeover for Unicel/RCC would put every tower in the state firmly under Verizon control.
As a compromise Verizon agreed to sell off parts of Rural Cellular, which has properties all over the country, including their GSM network in New England. In effect: Unicel subscribers will become AT&T subscribers - any RCC subscriber on a CDMA network will be moved over to Verizon.
According to sources RCC, the handover of GSM towers and subscribers in Vermont to AT&T and Verizon has been given a definite time line. Although originally scheduled to begin on June 2nd, we can now expect to see an AT&T presence in Vermont on or around July 15th. Details were not given as to whether this is when the public announcement of the transition will take place or when AT&T will officially become present in the area.
There is some bizarre ultra-nationalist crap being thrown at Dunkin Donuts of all things because they ran another one of their Rachel Ray (idol to over-caffeinated soccer moms everywhere) commercials - but this time she is wearing a scarf. Not just any old scarf, but a Middle Eastern looking one (or 2003ish New York depending on who you ask). Seriously, people?
Since launching our redesign, I have been closely monitoring user-agent usage statistics from our visitors. The result? Only 2% of users visiting Cassler.org over the past month have been using Internet Explorer (any version). A whopping 73% used Firefox (about 15% of which was Firefox 3 and it’s various beta releases) and another 20% used Safari. As I mentioned in our kick-off post, many of the features on the site require that you have an up-to-date and standards compliant browser. I am saying today: Internet Explorer is officially unsupported.
While the site is entirely functional on Internet Explorer, it suffers from a number of bugs which I have a fundamental objection to working around. Microsoft has distributed and proliferated a sub-standard (literally) browser for well over a decade and it’s enormous install base has hampered advances in the professional design community. Constantly having to worry about compatibility with Internet Explorer today is like worrying if the game you are developing will run on a Pentium II.
True, one could make the argument that accessibility is important when developing web pages - and I would agree with that statement. I would, however, reject the notion that browser compatibility and accessibility are one in the same. Reasonable steps can be taken so that anyone can experience your site and use all of it’s features. However, when it comes down to beauty or IE support then I choose beauty. There is absolutely no compelling reason to continue using Internet Explorer when Firefox does every single thing better.
