Oscar Wilde“The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.”
“Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.”
Back in August I wrote about an issue I had experienced with Safari 6’s ability to render text with the CSS declaration: {text-rendering: optimizelegibility;}. It appeared to be a bug, since I had no previous issue. The bug, from what I could tell, was only limited to Helvetica Neue; so the more time that passed the more I began to suspect the issue was on my side—not the browser.
This morning I confirmed that suspicion with a restore of standard fonts in Font Book. Somewhere along the way I must have added an old postscript version of Helvetica Neue to my system fonts and the new version of Safari didn’t like this.
The remedy was actually quite simple. Font Book gives you the ability to Restore Standard Fonts, which is accessible from the File menu.
Today, as Hurricane Sandy made it’s way towards the eastern seaboard, social media has been very busy with tweets of eye-witness reports, photos from space and weather maps. One map, made by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of HINT.FM I found particularly interesting.
Top Speed: 47.7 mph,
average: 9.8 mph
The map uses data from weather stations around the country to display windspeed and direction on an HTML5 map (the latest version of Chrome is recommended).
Hurricane Sandy
October 29, 2012, 7:59 pm EDT
HINT.FM receives, what must be an enormous amount of data, from National Digital Forecast Database.
Common Patterns is a website used to collect mark-up and style, built to expedite the design and web development process.
This definitely should be filed under “odds and ends.” I created this design in 2007 for a t-shirt. It was never made. It was influenced by Abstract Design and How to Create It by Armor Fenn, which I had just purchased.
The Olympics have been a bit of a let down this year. I love the Olympics, don’t get me wrong, but something has been missing. I was unable to put my finger on what that thing was until today. My complaint is not related to the athletes or the endless marketing and commercials. It’s not NBC’s tape delay or their mindless and often insulting coverage of the opening ceremonies. My disappointment has to do with the spirit of the games.
A few days ago the New York Times published a story claiming Lolo Jones is only concerned with image, and lacks any substance to back up her Olympic credentials. I don’t feel the need to write a counter story, many others have already done that; but the story (and several others) lead to exactly what has bothered me most about the Olympics. The attitude of win at all costs is not limited to a few badminton players, it’s the way the games themselves have been covered.
According to the Olympic Charter, there are 7 fundamental Priciples of Olympism, the philosophy that governs the IOC and the Olympic Games. The second principle reads:
2. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.
Every four years the world stops to cheer the athlete from their hometown compete against the world. I want to see my country win just like the next guy, but I also want to see what should be prized much higher—human dignity. It’s there. I’ve seen it, but it’s been so marginalized during the coverage. Every time a runner helps another off the track or congratulates another after a match, that spirit is there.
The Olympics should not be about the medal count, a beauty contest or some manufactured scandal. The Olympics should be about how the world comes together to celebrate those who rise to the top because of their own achievements, not because they’ve torn others down in the process. The media and those of us sitting at home should take note.
This started as a doodle and like most great doodles there is really no explanation, except for boredom.
My first reaction to the newest version of Safari.app is it seems pretty snappy—perhaps it’s just my imagination. Although there seems to be some nice enhancements, I’ve run into one bug I thought was worth noting.
The current version of Safari 6.0 appears to have an issue with {text-rendering: optimizelegibility;} used in combination with font-family:"Helvetica Neue";. The text results in a garbled mess typical of a special character not encoded properly. The CSS text-rendering property, which is a part of the W3C Working Draft had worked with Helvetica Neue in the previous version of Safari 5.1.7.
The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air.Excerpt from Chapter VI
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