arkitrave :: log

I’m getting comment spammed. Just after taking over the “Australian wildlife and nude artist” Eric Shepherd for the top “Eric Shepherd” ranking in Google (no, I’m not going to link to him…), I have had more comment spams than actual comments. [UPDATE: that was short-lived. I’m back in second place.]

Now that I have (some) more time on my hands, I think it’s time to leave MovableType and move on to WordPress. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile (if I’m going to wrap my mind around scripting, I think I’ll have an easier time understanding PHP than Perl anyway).

I know in the end this won’t solve all comment spam problems, but it might be a step in the right direction. Soon I’ll have to implement a server-generated math problem (”What is 2+2?”) that has to be answered before a comment is accepted.

Meanwhile, if any of you need anything enlarged, I’ve got some people you can talk to…

I spend a lot of time money at Starbucks. Not because I particularly like their coffee or food, but because they are close and the other alternatives have incredibly slow service.

If you haven’t noticed, a white chocolate mocha costs considerably more than a regular mocha. Since I really like white chocolate mochas, I decided to investigate why I was paying so much more for them.

My first bit of sleuthing was asking the barista what was up with the price difference. He told me that white chocolate syrup costs more than regular chocolate, and that was the reason for the markup.

I ran some figures. If a latte costs price x, a mocha (a latte with chocolate syrup) costs $0.20 more, and a white chocolate mocha (a latte with white chocolate syrup) costs $0.65 more (for tall or grande sizes).

That squirt of white syrup costs three times the cost of the regular chocolate. Certainly it must be because it is so much pricier than the regular chocolate syrup.

Thanks to extensive research, I discovered a shocking fact: the 64-ounce plastic jars of Ghirardelli chocolate, white chocolate, and caramel syrup are sold for the same price at numerous online retailers. Around $15, including the pump. There is no indication that white chocolate syrup is the holy grail of confections. Rather than rare and precious, it is common and sold for a generic, standardized price to thousands of coffeehouses.

The greater than 300% markup for preferring white over brown? You tell me.

As I finish the school year and am either sleeping or thinking about design, I thought I’d post Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. He is best known (at least to architects) for being the graphic designer for Rem Koolhaas’ book S, M, L, XL. Many of these are great points; a few I am not so sure about.

Sorry to the non-hover people out there, you don’t get to see the spans. Sorry to everyone else for the schizo-jumping thing…I don’t have time to think about how to get the spans to display without the other list items moving. I think the jumping is the nature of the beast when using list items with spans; my understanding of CSS is that I couldn’t get these to display without jumping unless I did the markup differently and used, perhaps, absolutely positioned divs. The spans aren’t acting as children of the li items when I absolutely position them (i.e. they are positioning relative to the parent element). Anyone know what the correct behavior should be? OK, with position:relative on the li items it would work, but I decided I liked it better the way it is. Feel free to discuss the actual content now!

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites
   for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed
   by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on.
   Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that
   may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you???ë?¬?ll never
   have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process
   we will only ever go to where we???ë?¬?ve already been. If process drives outcome
   we may not know where we???ë?¬?re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of
   growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations,
   attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun
   of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of
   value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different
   question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as
   an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment.
   Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a
   common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge.
    Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous
    environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical
    rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce
    success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities
    may present themselves.
14. Don???ë?¬?t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself
    from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the
    answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate
    of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict,
    friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven???ë?¬?t
    had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you???ë?¬?ve gone too far, been up too
    long, worked too hard, and you???ë?¬?re separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something
    other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday
    and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don???ë?¬?t like it, do it
    again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things.
    Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration.
    Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big
    difference.
23. Stand on someone???ë?¬?s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments
    of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don???ë?¬?t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you
    can???ë?¬?t see tonight.
26. Don???ë?¬?t enter awards competitions. Just don???ë?¬?t. It???ë?¬?s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the
    amount of information, we leave room for what he called our ???ë??noodle.???ë??
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way
    of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates
    new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens
    in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise.
    Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio
    can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between ???ë??creatives???ë?? and ???ë??suits???ë??
    is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
31. Don???ë?¬?t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry???ë?¬?s advice. By maintaining financial
    control, we maintain creative control. It???ë?¬?s not exactly rocket science, but
    it???ë?¬?s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have
    failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him
    or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine.
    By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions,
    we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your
    TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically
    rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic???ë?¬®simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn???ë?¬?t my idea ???ë??Ü I borrowed it. I think it belongs
    to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don???ë?¬?t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You???ë?¬?ll never
    get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only
    to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp???ë?¬?s large glass
    to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else
    ???묨? but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run
    with the technological pack. We can???ë?¬?t find the leading edge because it???ë?¬?s trampled
    underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but
    still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside
    of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces ???ë??Ü what Dr. Seuss calls
    ???ë??the waiting place.???ë?? Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference
    with all of the infrastructure of a conference ???ë??Ü the parties, chats, lunches,
    airport arrivals ???ë??Ü but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful
    and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes
    are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable
    efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job
    is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since
    I???ë?¬?ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are
    expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory,
    innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory
    is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous
    moment or event. That???ë?¬?s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not
    a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different
    from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control
    over their lives. We can???ë?¬?t be free agents if we???ë?¬?re not free.

Comments?

Shaun, among others, tells me I should:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

In December Xenakis and his comrades began to see results they had been fighting for in social measures: ELAS published the ‘Code of Self-Government’ to implant democratic principles in the countryside; local government, law courts, education for peasants and public utilities were organized.

from Xenakis, a biography of Iannis Xenakis by Nouritza Matossian.

I’m doing a paper on the Philips Pavilion, a collaboration between Le Corbusier, Xenakis (as architect, not musician) and Edgard Varese. It was a sound pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, designed to be an ‘electronic poem’, as Corbu put it. Rather than exhibiting products from the Philips corporation, as is customary in exhibitions, the pavilion was designed to be an experience using the technology of the company. Varese composed an esoteric piece of modern music, there was a lightshow with projections everywhere inside the structure, and the building was a series of concrete hyperbolic paraboloids. The paper is due tomorrow morning.

I like spontaneity in relationships, but this is a little overboard. Ok, so I was opening one of the twelve Photoshop posters I’ve made today for my project due tomorrow, and my computer suddenly rebooted itself. No warning. Just a black screen and a RAM check. It seems all right now, but there’s something kind of frightening about machines doing things like this. I built this PC nearly two years ago, and it’s been very good to me, but it’s kind of like a friend or family member breaking trust once. Even with years of a good track record, one breach can put a rift in a relationship that takes time to heal.

And besides the philosophical angle, which is probably due to too little sleep, too little real food, and way too many cheap, syrupy beverages, there’s the simpler question of why…

Is it just a weird power supply, or is something fundamentally wrong with my hardware? It’s not like I can take it back to myself and get a replacement…

I have my eye on a 17″ Powerbook. They don’t do weird things like this, right?

Update:

I won’t spill all the beans, but I have just been hired as an interface designer for a progressive web/IT marketing firm in Buffalo. I will be working as a subcontractor for now, which works best for them and for my school schedule, but there is possibility for future full-time status. The job involves graphic design and logo/visual identity, and interface design using CSS. The work ranges from small business sites to full e-commerce sites built on their own application server. Thanks, CSS Zen Garden! They saw my entry, found my website, and evidently liked my approach to design and CSS. And my wife told me to wait till school was out to do my Zen Garden design…

I’m thrilled that the Garden is working; I think it’s great that an e-commerce company realizes the importance of good CSS for presentation and its advantages for easy maintenance, search engine optimization, etc. There aren’t many companies like that out there, and I’m looking forward to working with one of the few.

Peter Zumthor, one of the top architects in the world, was at school today and provided critiques in my studio. I didn’t get to present my project, as he talked a lot. Only three students presented. But out of those presentations came many interesting questions; his approach is very different from UB’s, and I thought that many of his questions could be asked of both design in the physical world and design in the digital world.

[Note: for the uninitiated, architecture studios deal with hypothetical building problems - this semester is a mixed-use apartment block on the Toronto waterfront.]

[Note: for a good, only slightly cynical overview of the architectural studio culture, read this.]

“What did you learn” [through exercize x]

“Why do I want to buy this apartment you’ve created? Why is it better than other apartments I could buy? Because it’s ‘more interesting’ isn’t enough.”

“You can do a crazy house for a friend. But apartments? No.”

“Why is this form being used here? Why is it being used at all?”

“What is my experience of this building? Where do I enter, where do I walk to get where I’m going?”

“Do you like it?”

“Do you like it as a designer or as a user of the building?”

“What do you like best about your project?”

“What are the problems you see?”

Of course, there were also a few statements like “I don’t like it at all - I’d never do it.” He’s Swiss - they tell it like it is (I know — my wife is Swiss…)

Some of these are provocative questions, of both web design and architecture. Some are simple, but don’t get asked enough.

Discuss.

So we were scheduled to have a lecture by Bernard Tschumi, a prominent American architect who has been extremely influential in the deconstructivist movement and the idea of pushing boundaries and transgressing accepted limits in architectural theory. He cancelled. This is the second time in five years he has been scheduled to lecture, and the second time in five years he has cancelled. He’s not a hero to me or anything, but he would be an extremely interesting architect to hear live, as I have read quite a bit of his theory, and I was looking forward to the lecture. It’s not everyday the UB School of Architecture and Planning brings in a world-famous lecturer.

He cancelled a 5:00 lecture at 12:45. I guess something more important came up.