I’m a web designer/programmer by trade (Please don’t judge me based on this website. Please.), and so it’s odd that I don’t post about more innovative web design here. The truth is, I’m picky. I’m pretty loose about a lot of the other creative fields, but in my own I’ve got a very selective eye. I know good design when I see it, but I don’t celebrate it. I celebrate great design; the kind that boggles my mind in ways I didn’t know it could be boggled. Surprisingly it’s a new website for the New Zealand Book Council that shook me up this morning. The Read at Work website mimics a Windows XP desktop, but each of the folders on the desktop contain books to read set up as faux Powerpoint presentations. The desktop idea has been done a couple of times in the past, but the design behind the Powerpoint presentations is really genius. I just literally cannot explain how perfect that shit is. I also like the idea behind the site: to read at work without getting caught. It fosters a love of reading, while at the same time turning it into something mischievous, something to “get away with.” And on top of that the selection of books they’ve incorporated into the site are great. In a field where innovation is severely limited by technology, clients, time, and talent, it makes me a little misty to see that there are still great works to be done. Damn fine job.

Read at Work

Since Beijing is hosting the Olympics this year I keep seeing more and more protests calling for the freedom of Tibet from Chinese rule. I agree. What’s more surprising to me, however, is the abundance of Chinese nationals around the world holding counter-protests. Maybe surprise is the wrong word. Incredulity is probably better. How, China? How can you possibly imagine that Tibet is yours? It would be the same as Germany still claiming Poland. Just because the people that occupy the country can’t physically fight back doesn’t mean that you can take it. I know that these kinds of actions go on all over the world, and they have for thousands of years, but proliferation doesn’t make something right. Especially not in a world that is becoming an unbounded global economy (or should be at any rate). National Geographic, in an effort to not let China’s actions be forgotten, have reprinted the essay of Heinrich Harrer, a German living in the sacred city of Lhasa in the middle of last century. Harrer’s story, which you might know as Seven Years in Tibet, is probably one of the best accounts of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. He was an Olympian who later became the tutor of the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama. I can’t imagine a more fitting Olympic protest than the tale of an Olympic athlete who witnessed the horrific actions of this year’s Olympic host not so long ago.

My Life in Forbidden Lhasa

All of you Neil Gaiman fans out there, and those who haven’t yet tried him out, can no smile a little wider. His publishers have released a free, online copy of his best-selling novel American Gods for the entire planet to download. It’s sort of a test to see if free copies online will translate into more people buying physical copies. So, read it, and if you like it, go buy it. It’s that simple. I’ve already worn through two copies so I appreciate the online version as something I can’t drop in the bathtub; not without electrocuting myself anyway. I can think of worse ways to die.

American Gods - Online version

Neil Gaiman

With the anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s death having just recently passed (February 20th), a day that preceded a lunar eclipse, a day that was both storm-ridden and sunny, it’s a strange coincidence that I should stumble across a set of photos from a show at M+B Gallery from over a year ago. No single author has been so influential to my own style, and what’s more, my own life than Thompson. I have to wonder about a person that can create so many changes in so many people, but then be reduced to a series of images and words, fragments of memories floating through our collective subconscious. I’m staring out a window at the same California sky that Thompson walked under for a better part of his life, looking at pictures of the times and places that he thought important or just vivid enough to need a reminder of, and I’m not questioning my mortality or anything as trite as that. I’m just enjoying a sky that a friend of mine once enjoyed, a friend I never met.

Hunter S. Thompson at M+B Gallery.

Somewhere in my journeyings to day I came a across an F. Scott Fitzgerald story that I’ve never read before. I was actually pretty surprised at how much fantasy is involved since most of Fitzgerald’s stories aren’t really fantasy even though they’re fiction. The story is great, but then the end seems a little too quick and preachy. It almost seems like he had to hurry and sew everything up, but included a moral so it wouldn’t all be pointless. Regardless, it’s a good read.

The Diamond As Big As The Ritz