I can’t resist cross-posting this video.
Steven Fry is someone I admire for his thought. I do admire him actually.
Find 30’ this weekend and see this man talking about technology, success and life. Explore the simplicity of his ideas and feel how these ideas can make this world a better place.
Enough said. Here comes the video.
For those whose mother language isn’t English, writing in English isn’t always easy.
I catch myself rewriting the same simple sentence again and again trying to avoid mistakes. In the end I make the clumsiest ones.
However I don’t give up. There’s a lack of confidence but not a lack of endeavour. That’s why I bought Revising Prose.
Oh man, this book is not easy. It requires some grammar and syntax knowledge. It also makes you feel stupid because of your poor vocabulary. And you have to give to it 100% of your concentration.
I am in page 13 and I think I already have climbed Himalayas. I carry on. There’s a lot to be learned.
At times your life becomes darker and carry less hope. It happens, right?
While curating High Quality Bookmarks I met the Library of Human Imagination. It is a real library which aims to get us closer to the human nature, the good and evil, the beauty and the ugliness of humanity. There are some ways to define “evolution”, but no matter what you’ll say about it, it will remain part of human nature. And I loved this project.
This library is a reason to get a grip and move on. Yes, I must visit it once.
Since there’s no website of the library, I embed a video from TED 2008, where the man behind it, Mr. Jay Walker, presents it to us for the first time.
(Yes, it’s an vulgar Flash embedment.)
Read also an interview of Jay Walker and the relevant article on WIRED.
The ingredients of a good wallpaper:
OK, here it is the best wallpaper ever.
Oh, you might have seen this wallpapers on Zeldman’s website, but I swear I saw it first! So it belongs to me!
Anyway, I never liked Veer’s wallpapers that much.
Long time, no see.
It’s almost a year since my latest post. Sometimes blogs live and conquer the world and some other times they fall apart. I would like to believe that this is the last time I apologise to myself and you, dear readers, for my long absence.
So I am going to take it easy. Welcome back.
OK, everybody is twitter-ified. Social media evangelists feel utterly happy. Big companies became Twitter addicts. Politicians feel they have to impact the Twitter environment. Even newspapers found a sphere to cover other than Facebook. Poor Twitter, be aware.
A few days ago I was asked why I stopped following a specific member of Twitter. I felt I needed to provide some explanation, but do I really need to do so?
Twitter-land is a free land people. I would never impose any specific use of Twitter. I couldn’t anyway. People go there to chat, to share links, to boost their job, to show off, you name it. I would never judge them. I just don’t care.
Thinking a lot might harm you. No, really. You are not obliged to do anything you don’t like. Do you want to share jokes? Do it. Do you feel you follow too many? Un-follow them. Do you hate re-tweeting? Go away. The world will keep turning around.
Since you asked (you didn’t actually, but it’s fine with me), I visit the Twitter-land to meet my ultra geeks companions, to follow their links and to smile. I don’t care who’s following whom and I don’t care who’s following me. I can’t be anyone but myself in there.
At the same time I love some clever wallpapers and some witty e-cards.
Did I provide you a decent answer dear Twitter fellow?
Of course your social Internet life impacts your Internet profile as well. If you un-follow a lot of people they might think you show off. If you tweet a lot you might gain more followers. And so on. So be prepared for the anonymous foggy feedback.
I always wanted to write something about Twitter but this post meant to be fun. Shit. Fine.
Do you still find me interesting? Here is my profile in Twitter. Wanna follow?
(Click for larger image)
This fall came too soon.
I used to see falls as a chance to start new things. Now I don’t. I don’t know why. Maybe because I couldn’t really start doing new things or because now things don’t have a real starting point.
Anyway, a fall is always a fall and this is enough to make us feel fresh and awaken.
See the image in full size (2935 x 724 px) in Flickr.
(I borrowed the technique from Heather Power Champ. Photos taken from my iPhone.)
So I am going to turn off my digital life for a while and disconnect from all the things that keep me busy.
Looking back I must confess I neglected this blog once or twice and I apologize for this dear readers. You see, working as a web designer or to be more specific running a tiny design studio sucked all my time. The fact that most of my clients are greek made my focus on the greek version of my website.
Quite unexpectedly business went great. The greek version of porcupine colors gained the attention of some amazing companies. One project lead to another. This pushed me keeping it updated all the time.
Before I turn off my engines I ‘d like to share with you some very interesting links I gathered all this time. So here they are:
Busy vs. Productive
Love it. Each statement is so true. Read it twice.
Fuck style
Designing for the Web is not styling things. It is more like architecture than decoration. The most influential article I have read this year.
iPhone meets Lego
Legos still amaze me. iPhone is… anyway, we all know what an iPhone is. Have a look at these photos where one world meets the other.
The animal noise page
Hilarious page where you can read how people generate words according to what comes from an animal’s mouth.
Type Classification e-book
If you like typography you ‘re gonna love this.
That’s the end. I hope you all have great time wherever you stay. See you in a couple of weeks.
A cousin of mine just finished her studies in the university. I congratulated her and I asked what she didn’t want to hear:
- And now what?
- It’s over. I studied enough. Now I want to do something else.
- Fine. But do what you want to do. Don’t forget this.
Then I stopped talking. I thought my voice resembled the voices of all people who like advising the others. I don’t believe in advising anyway. I prefer telling stories.
I don’t know what she ‘s going to do in the end. I think she doesn’t believe in herself enough. I wish I could show her why she must follow her heart and do what she wants to. For some people it’s impossible. I hope she’s not one of them.
We grow up with voices around us echoing we should make money and become successful. But how can this be done if we don’t love our profession? We don’t have the time and the resources to explore this life and realize what we really desire. We don’t have time to make mistakes and learn from them.
I have seen people turning into miserable creatures because they never followed their desires. They killed their dreams in order to satisfy the people around them, family, friends - you name it. While being a teacher I helped some of my students stop their studies and change their life. I believe it is one of the best things I have ever done.
When people love what they do, they do it well. They wake up each day with dozens of new ideas and dreams. They seize each day. The skies is their limit. And they are happy.
I realized what I want to do with my life when I was 28. Yes, for many people I was too old or immature and I should have decided earlier. Since then there hasn’t been a single day I resented my choice. And I would never exchange it with anything in this world.
I know you didn’t expect this letter, this email to be specific, from me. You see, you recently left your company, Microsoft, and this is a perfect opportunity to say to you what I ‘ve been thinking about you all these years.
The truth is we have told many bad things about you and your company. Bill, you ‘ve got to understand that he had our reasons. On the other hand, dear Bill, you never stopped being one of us, a geek, and geeks love intriguing each other. Now that you ‘re leaving the scene it seems so awkward to us. I know you have achieved a lot in your life and really I am happy about that because I think you deserve it.
Bill, I am going to say something that a lot of us keep holding it inside: without you many people would be somewhere else, would do something else, would be different. When you introduced us these white ugly noisy boxes you introduced us a whole new world of tiny miracles. These miracles used to become more and more charming day by day and fascinated us.
In this game it was you Bill that gave us a chance to be a part of it and I really need to say “thank you”. You gave me the chance to learn, play, be disappointed, laugh and finally it was you who helped me become what I am right now. I know well that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t put my very best effort on it. But, you know Bill, in this life giving a chance is a great thing. Some people never have this chance.
However, I can’t forget some of your clumsiest products you provided us. Do you remember Windows Me? It was a torture using them and I still recall the moments I was looking for my Windows 98 CD to roll back. Do you remember the infamous blue screens? Once upon a time 16MB RAM were enough to run your OS. Now 1GB RAM is hardly enough to work with your latest muddy child Vista.
I am sure you remember Internet Explorer 6. I can’t forgive you for IE6 Bill. Not because you made a mistake - everybody should make mistakes in order to evolve. I am mad with you Bill, because you left this thing alive for so long and now it makes my life difficult and my designs ugly.
Such things Bill made me become a blood brother with Steve, one of your worst enemies. But I really felt very happy of both of you when you shared the same stage last year. Of course he was slick and witty and he managed to steal the show. It’s OK. Without you, Steve would have been much worse. In a way Apple is better than Microsoft because of you.
Farewell my friend Bill. I hope your successors will be better than you - however I don’t think so. I am sure you ‘ll keep playing with your code and you ‘ll still dream of the very best products for us. Have fun.
