Apartment Therapy takes a look at an amazing example of a mid-century modern home in Los Angeles.
Paging through the slideshow, I’m struck by how the changes in depth and texture and the attention to detail show how an open-plan design, even a busier, more complicated one like this, can be warm and inviting.
Sure, some of the color choices don’t age well (although I think alot of that comes from the age of the fabrics), but those could easily be changed out for more modern selections without killing the vibe.
The architect and owner is Ray Kappe — I’ll have to look up some of his other work when I get the chance.
So after a long year’s wait, the iPhone finally came to Sweden, and thus to me.
Was I one of those crazies who waited in line the first night to get one?
Uh, yep.
Was that a wee bit of overkill?
Maybe, but much of the world is sold out of the 16 GB black ones, so that’s somewhat mitigating (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.)
But what does this mean for you, dear reader? Well hopefully, it might mean a few more blog posts from me, now that WordPress has come out with an iPhone app and I can do it on the go.
In fact, I wrote this post on my iPhone (albeit from a rather immobile supine position on my bed).
The help system on my Leopard installation has lost track of most of its help files. Even the Help help can’t help:
The ol’ Repair Permissions trick to fix this didn’t work, and a quick Goog came up empty, too. Anyone out there know what to do?
Today my good friend Todd pointed me to Swivel, apparently being touted as “YouTube for data”.
Seems promising, although most of the datasets are vanishingly small, and too “munged” — not raw enough for reanalysis. For instance, there seems to be a lot of stuff like this:
Billion Dollar Climate and Weather Diasasters, 1980-2006
which comes straight off a website and is already heavily processed. To their credit, you can download their technical paper on this analysis, but it’s scant on methodology and the source data is unavailable.
I guess there’s value in trying to centralize all of these bits of data, analyzed or not, and the already-analyzed stuff is of course far more interesting:
average trans fat in grams by fast food restaurant
But still: where’s the everyone-can-edit part, like Wikipedia? It’s one thing to be able to leave a comment, but the strength of this site could be the ability for those knowledgeable in data analysis, a subject area, or both to come in, review, and actually correct or reinterpret the data. Letting people simply throw up whatever crap they happen to believe could make the problem of data-and-statistics misuse even worse, because there will be no way to evaluate the findings.
I can’t wait to see what Edward Tufte has to say about this.
Update 13 nov 11:46a GMT+1:
I checked out the Swivel blog and (unsurprisingly) it gave me a better idea of the creators’ vision. And some cool links, too, to other data-related sites.
[image courtesy of twid]
That’s who I really look like (or used to, much to my eternal shame). Who the heck are these people?
These days I pretty much always use Subversion — I have come to rely on it to save me when I manage to mangle, delete, or otherwise befoul previously working code. I have also come to rely on FileMerge, Apple’s graphical diff tool. Mmmm, shiny. Unfortunately, FileMerge doesn’t conform to the interface of the long-standard diff and diff3, so even though svn can accept external diff tools, FileMerge couldn’t be used.
I figured there was a way to overcome this problem, but my initial pokes and prods weren’t fruitful and so I abandoned my attempt. This seems to have been a good idea, because in the meantime someone else has solved the problem for me. Bruno De Fraine has posted wrapper scripts which make FileMerge svn-compatible: fmdiff, fmdiff3, and fmresolve.
By the way, I found out about fmdiff because for some reason my installation of TextMate isn’t correctly picking up my PATH variable, so it can’t see that I have subversion installed. TextMate’s documentation says that it gets its environment from the Finder.
Do any of you know how to fix this?
Wow, has it really been over 2 months since I’ve posted? Shameful. As most of you know, I’ve moved to Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve been here for about a month now, and it’s been wonderful so far.
The biggest surprise has been how excellent the summer climate is. Typical is 72 and partly sunny during the day, dropping to about 60 in the evening. This is perfect weather. Los Angeles weather. Of course, that’s all over…it’s now decidedly autumn.
Overall, though, it hasn’t taken me too long to feel “at home” here. Or closer to it than I expected anyway. Occasionally I have to remind myself that I’m living in a foreign country. I thought I’d still feel like a tourist at this point, and yet it’s still kinda like I’m on vacation.
That seems silly to say, but really, nearly everyone speaks English here. While this has kept away the feeling of isolation, it has contributed to my greatest challenge: learning Swedish. Yeah, big surprise, right? I’m finding it rather difficult to learn. Sure, I can tell I’m getting better, albeit slowly. But dammit I’m impatient.
All right, well that’s enough blathering on about myself. I know this is a blog — self-absorbed by definition — but really…
Hey everyone (all 3 of you),
My apologies for being slow with moderating comments — for some reason I’m not getting emailed when a comment is submitted like I should be. Consequently, I’m opening up comments to be unmoderated. Unless comment spam becomes a problem, I’ll keep it that way.
So there, now you have no excuse for not saying your piece…
Update: my friend Alex pointed out (thanks, Alex) that, contrary to what I wrote originally, in fact 554 front pages from 54 countries are available from the Newseum. So hey, it’s even better!
Sure you can go to Google or Yahoo and read news from around the world. But did you know you can see the front pages of 386 newspapers from 39 countries? Well, you can, thanks to the Newseum.
By the way, I found this site from a journalist who made a virtual newspaper vending machine with a Mac Mini and an LCD screen. Check it here. (via Make)
photo courtesy of inju
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