CROWDCTRL

A ton of great quotes in this interview with Trent Reznor from the Herald Sun in Australia. Some candid honesty here from Reznor. One of many quotes: “I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music.” #

Interesting that usps.com/smallbusiness doesn’t work, but usps.com/smallbiz does.. I remembered seeing the URL on a commercial in passing, and went with the correct spelling first.. #

I blew out my rear car speaker this morning blaring My Violent Heart on the way to work. Cheapo Pioneer brand.. Oddly enough, the CD doesn’t sound that different with a blown speaker.. #

The best time to watch a nine inch nails live dvd is very late at night. Revisiting some old stuff is a perfect break from my non-stop year zero addiction. Highlights: “something i can never have”, “burn”, “the hand that feeds”, and pretty much everything else on here. Interesting note: every camera shot with the crowd shows a few dozen camera phones shooting little videos.. #

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Two BYU Football Players Arrested After Water Balloon Altercation Saturday. The only thing worse than KSL writing is the commentary on that site. #

New favorite feed: Tiny Gigantic, the blog of creative studio Language in Common. Via JSM. #

Leaked shots of the front and back covers of Year Zero. Note: “Consuming or spreading this material may be deemed subversive by the United States Bureau of Morality.” Update: a flickr set of a dozen more. #

I’ve been following the work of KNI for some time, and their work has inspired many a late night around these parts. Tonight I’ve rediscovered Yewknee, found d_box is back online, and found this cool little nugget in his flickr stream: a cool KNI book prototype. Rad idea and smooth design there. #

Hi all. Getting back. Currently listening to the NEW NINE INCH NAILS streaming on yearzero.nin.com, and am about to write this up as a nice return to article land. Go listen. Now. More updates soon. #

11 tips for fathers on raising a daughter, including #1: You’re not her mother #

A commercial bus from Tallinn, Estonia, to Riga, Latvia, is the first international bus to include wifi throughout the entire trip. I spent two years in the Baltics (mostly in Riga), and found the area to be very warm to new technology. I used to hit up a little internet cafe (above the Subway sandwich shop) and often had the local Latvian teenagers crowding up the place playing Halo. Cool story there, from Wired. #

Ryan Adams Plays Stonehenge?! #

Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes? #

Andy Rutledge takes a shot at the new AIGA website, designed by HappyCog, and backs his arg with a few #s: Fonts/Faces: 6, Link Colors: 6, Link Styles: 2. The site certainly goes in a new direction, but the jury’s still out for me on this one. The logo is freaking me out. I do know HappyCog’s own site is the best work I’ve seen that super crew (all of whom are out of this world) do collectively in the last few months. Methinks this redesign has a lot more to do with strategy and information design than blue plaid and typography. #

Mike Rundle: The Web’s Best Interface Design. From Wayfaring to Akamai. #

Bronwyn Jones writes websites for Apple, and she’s speaking with Greg Storey and crew at SXSW this year about writing. Her site is really very good, with well-written pieces, lists of things like best sandwiches, excellent suggested readings and music, and a Flickr photostream I’m enjoying. All pretty normal blogger fare, but somehow very refreshing. The newest addition to my feedreader. #

Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial #

Heading down to Austin for SXSW this year? Join me and the crew from Northtemple for our Northtemple Designer Meetup. Think about this: talk with some of the world’s best designers while you’re sober. Manage to give out business cards without getting beer spilled on you. Head over to nt for the details, and RSVP at Upcoming. See you there. #

This is a really cool way to promote yourself and your book at a major conference. SXSW really offers a unique self-promotion opportunity, and Colly and crew get it right. #

The new movie 300 is looking really good. Besides the obvious attraction to the NIN track in the trailers (both trailers are a must see), the CG and war scenery look awesome. Also, from Wired this week: 300 Brings History to Bloody Life and Gallery: Frank Miller’s 300. Opens in two weeks. #

Geoff over at Nuby on Rails posts a nice review of all the major Ruby on Rails hosting options. All my Rails sites are currently on Dreamhost, but the errors and spottiness have made me consider others. Nice writeup. #

Calling all Fantasy Baseball freaks: come join the league. I’ve set up a league over at ESPN called BALL CONTROL. Go over to the league directory and search for it and join up! #

Late nites are a little easier when the Submarines are around. Bonus find: I didn’t know they remixed Declare a New State.. Listen here. #

Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow. #

Was wondering why my Feedburner stats jumped so much Friday and Saturday.. Turns out it was Google Reader finally reporting subscriber numbers. Crowd went up by over 50, and Northtemple’s count went up 150 to almost 400 subscribers.. #

Among tons of other crazy Nine Inch Nails news this week (I’ll get to those soon), NIN has updated their myspace page with 2 new songs from their forthcoming Year Zero concept cd: “My Violent Heart” and “Survivalism”.. Analysis soon.. #

Scarlett Johansson was named this year’s Harvard Hasty Pudding woman of the year, for which she “led a parade through Harvard Square, sitting in the back of a silver Bentley convertible, flanked by Harvard students in drag.” Come again? #

NBC screws up another good show, taking Studio 60 off the air. Why do all the shows I love get canceled? #

Tired of cnn.com? Newsvine got you wishing web2.0 never happened? Check out Daylife, “a quick overview of the top stories of the hour, worldwide.” And get this: the content is chosen by a team of editors, not a few dozen introverts with too much time on their hands. Also don’t miss the Daylife Highlights, a visual Flash-powered collection of the day’s most interesting news. #

Is anyone out at the Schuyler Fisk / Josh Radin show tonight in Salt Lake City? Let me know how it was.. Her new tour site and a revamped homepage just launched. If you still haven’t heard her stuff, and you’re into acoustic Jewelish femrock, check her page out for some streaming samples. #

All hail baseball. MLB.com’s 2007 Fantasy Baseball Preview is out, and my man Jose Reyes is at #2 overall. Other noteables: ARod finally drops out of the top spot (#3), and Ryan Howard (#4) and Chase Utley (#5) enter the top ten. To say I’m a fantasy baseball freak would be an understatement. Anyone up for an ESPN league this year? #

Gilbert is so cute. #

Little problem with the comments. Seems to be fixed for the time being. Sorry for the trouble, if you’ve tried to comment, please return and let me know what you think.. #

Jesse of Soylent Foo fame posts a nice how-to on making screencasts with Mac OS X. He fails, however, to post a screencast of how to make a screencast. Disappointing lack of irony. #

Loving: Hard to Concentrate by the newer and unstoppable Red Hot Chili Peppers effort Stadium Arcadium #

New Nine Inch Nails? So soon? I’ve barely immersed myself in With Teeth.. Also, the new live CD is out 2/27, called Beside You in Time. #

That new Hivelogic logo is pretty sweet but I find myself really missing those little illustrations that used to occupy his masthead. Now the site seems a bit too canned and lifeless. And Mormon. #

For those in Salt Lake City, come over to the LDS Tech Talks downtown on Thursday, January 18th at 6:30p. A few of us from Northtemple will be there to meet and greet and answer questions about working at the Church. #

George Fulton is a photographer in Columbia, SC, who creates really snazzy pieces of work – each recalling some strong emotion in some way or form – using great situations with a smear of digital illustration. Look for him to steal the show at this year’s Addy’s in the photo category. #

The history of the Numa Numa video. “Brolsma’s video ‘singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams.’” I seriously once saw Randy and Aaron doing this dance in front of their Macbook iSights.. #

Mr. Dilworth, good friend, fellow Railshead and esteemed coworker (I dined with him today at Caputo’s in fact), relaunches his homepage and companion site, the Cosmic Knot. Touche, old chap. To say I love it would be an understatement. Delightfully dirty, with plenty of old world, almost Victorian flavor. Do go enjoy them. #

I just got a 500 Internal Server Error on a Dreamhost discussion board addressing 500 Internal Server Errors. Dreamhost has some major problems, and sites hosted in PHP, Rails, and Django are all experiencing this. Lame! Jesse, when’s our Amazon server ready? #

Ted Boren over at Northtemple summarizes the great lesson every interaction designer should learn: “Customers do not always know what they need, or even what they mean by what they say. It’s our job to take requirements, clarify them, push back to the simplest design that meets those requirements—not to play the Yes-Man to our client.” #

RJD2 Reveals Tracklist, Tour Dates, New Song – also check his myspace page to stream the first track off the record, Get it (hint – it’s still hiphop). #

The first band to tour the internet. #

50 front pages of today’s paper announcing Saddam’s death, from Newsdesigner. #

Nice breakdown of the Carmax website by Andy Rutledge: “CarMax would do well to remember the shopper’s mantra: get outta my way and let me shop.” #

What superhero / villain are you? I scored 100% on Superman (no surprise), and a 94% on Apocalypse. I’m betting Gilbert is Wonder Woman, Rob is Iron Man, and John is Green Lantern. #

Are you reading Bearskinrug yet? The site of alistapart’s resident sketch Kevin Cornell. His recent sketches on Peoplemals is awesome. I love his stuff over in Coudal’s sidebar as well. What’s great is those cool watercolors he has are done digitally. Love it. #

Remix the Submarines over at Jamglue, a new remix webapp. Sweetness. I love this kind of stuff. #

Zara Phillips is first Royal to appear in an ad, for it she wears an evening gown soiled with dirt splatter for a Land Rover ad. Cool ad. #

Kottke’s year in errors roundup had me rolling this morning.. #

Is it just me or does the new Mezzoblue fail to excite or inspire? Words that come to mind are homely, drab, and boring. Check out those comments for some typical comment worthlessness. Depressing. #

Recent Standford grad Ramit Sethi runs a site called I will teach you to be rich and recently featured a nice interview with Joyce Park, one of the founders of Renkoo and former Friendster engineer. #

Robot Johnny reviews movies in poem. #

I’m loving this image over at a NYTimes article about street art, Last Hurrah for Street Art, as Canvas Goes Condo. Very inspiring. #

John Dilworth, in Make Your Small Type a Little Bit Bigger over at Northtemple: “10px type has potentially 38% less resolution than 12px type. Sure you can still make out the words, but you’ve eliminated all the subtleties of hundreds of years of typographic design elements that were put there to make things easier to read.” #

Communication online. An analysis. #

Photoshop CS3 public beta later this month? #

Jesse spreads his foo with a screencast on Firebug. Thinking of using both the extension and screencasts at work.. This ‘cast of his is getting great response.. #

Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web, a PDF book by Mark Boulton. Christmas 2006. #

Ben Bleikamp’s 4 idiot-proof ways to make your blog look cool are also four good things to do to improve the design of anything you do. #

Rad portfolio design for Airside, an ad / design agency. Good work too. #

From I believe in adv, one of my daily inspiration points: Coca Cola Love (bold usage of color and typography), Messer Roedter Knives (medium as part of the message), and a great set of wordless ads for Milenio Diario, a Mexican newspaper. #

If I’m getting rich off anything, it’ll be with Jesse Newland. J launches his hot new design today over at SOYLENTFOO, and adds a freebie (foobie?) with a tumblefeed of all his internet feeders, combining last, twitter, delicious and his own blog in one opml-supported morsel. Grab it and consume. #

JSON is my all time favorite acronym. #

New this season from the Coudal superheros: Holidiscs, a nice little Jewelboxing kit for sending out dvds of your kids to the grandparents. Jewelboxes, dvd-r’s, liners, booklets, labels, shipping materials, photoshop templates, even tic-tacs. “A limited-time offer for Moms and Dads with design skills and cute kids.” Rad. #

Jeffery “The Godfather” Zeldman has assembled what can only be called the New York Yankees of the web industry. Now we need some baseball nicknames. The Big Unit? Moose? #

Cameron announces his move back to Utah and to the NorthTemple.com team at the LDS Church. Word! #

far from fearless is an elegantly worn – and GREEN – site from Chris Murphy. Love the color palette. #

How am I just now learning about Psapp? Cool, Scandinavian-style (tho from England) electro-pop, with sweet beats and syrupy vocals. Found via the Grey’s Anatomy theme song, “Cozy in the Rocket”. Reviews coming of their two albums. #

I am really enjoying Andy Rutledge’s new design. Huge type, an inspiring contrast with the black and bright yellow, and as always excellent content. I can’t stop looking at it. #

The best international logos of 2006. Favorites: the Elenov winery of Macedonia, where the typography resembles a bunch of grapes, the colors of the Romanian Radiocom, and the old-worldish and simple design of the Guild teashop chain of Russia. Good stuff. #

Microsoft has thousands of developers checking code into the Longhorn repository. Ouch. #