b(eing) todd

what can I say? I like diet dr pepper!

funny. not as much the wine tasting as the scallops!

Still, as objects of the mayor’s ire can testify, Menino runs the city government as his own fiefdom, which can make interacting with City Hall like trying to accommodate the imperious ways of a monarch.

globe op-ed about #mayorforlife menino. not the guy to piss off.

Facebook statistics show that it has 250 million active users each with an average 120 friends. More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month by its users, over 70% of whom use applications like games and quizzes in Facebook. Unfortunately, most users don’t know the implications of entering personal information, making friends, and playing games on Facebook.

This guide will show what you can (and cannot) do to safeguard your Facebook privacy.

Ive written a few blog posts (http://btrandolph.com/2009/06/facebook-friend-lists-and-privacy-settings-redux/) on creating and using friend lsts in facebook to control what people see on your profile. as more people are opening the facebook lives to non-family and friends, it can make a big difference! this post offers some additional tips, esp on photo albums.

Yes, it’s fonts that we are talking about here, and as anyone who has seen the documentary “Helvetica” or fiddled with computer programs can tell you, there’s a big difference between Wingdings and Bauhaus. And there are many people who care deeply about the ways letters are given shape, how they descend below the line, where they get thicker or thinner and how elaborately they are ornamented.

So when Ikea casually abandoned its version of the famed 20th-century font Futura that had served it for 50 years and replaced it for 2010 with the computer-screen font Verdana, professional outrage was immense.

via nytimes.com

I always thought that the IKEA brand, especially in my mid-20's when it was THE furniture option for me, was more "inexpensive" than "cheap". This one change in typography can change that perception - making it a lowercase brand in more ways than typeface.

for me, ikea has always been about the store. the catalog is nice but it has never made me say "I must have this now" in the way the store does. lucky thing, I guess...

interesting visual, although I think it ignores the concept of synchronicity as a measure of interactivity. for example, in a real conversation, one person speaks and the other responds. with a letter, on the other hand, one person "speaks" but even aside from the delay in transmission, the other person has control over when he or she replies.

using this basis of comparison, the items can be categorized in three ways. conversation, video chat and telephone achieve the highest level of synchronous communication. messages - instant, text, facebook or twitter - have the potential to be synchronous but do not have to be. facebook status updates also fall into this category (although communication by status message seems rather impersonal!). email and snail mail correspondence, while arguably more private, cannot achieve the intimacy of synchronous communication.

I would also argue the categorization of twitter messages as broadcast (one to many) when those getting the greatest value from the service are using it as a conversational medium. those conversations may be public, but they can still be very personal...