QuirkeyBlog

This past weekend, Kat and I traveled to Philadelphia to visit two of our best friends, Tal Ben-Yaacov and Asuka Goto, both extremely talented sculptors. Tal has his first real post-college show of his sculpture at in West Philadelphia at The Saturn Club, and we were happily obligated to be there to help set up and attend the opening.

He is showing five large sculptures in total, three completed in the last couple of months. Tal’s work is a mix of found objects, mainly metal car parts and organic plaster and wooden shapes. The metal pieces are brightly painted while the plaster often remains its natural pale white color.

I am of course partial, but I love Tal’s work. The lines are so clean, yet even the most clearly engineered metal objects are given the quality of life within the context of his complete pieces. The bright colors of his metal work, at first estrange the objects from any natural or organic interpretation, but when combined with the seemingly fluid plaster objects are given life. They would walk - they would hum - if you gave them the right push.

In his plaster works especially there is a dialogue about process and creation. The works are initially cast in plastic bags or with wooden forms. Then after being formed with drills and chisels, are given up to nature, being organically disintegrated by water (a stream in fairmont park). The end effect is an evocation of the original shape, including the taught-ness of the form, however, eroded, recreated, and reformed in a way that could only be the work of the chaotic and random nature of a water.

In this way, Tal’s work speaks of its own genesis. It’s about the reformation, the refactoring, of disparate energies and objects.

I’m trying to help him put together a website, but in the meantime you can see more pictures of his show at my flickr stream. If you’re interested in purchasing or commissioning work from him, or just finding out more info - you can email him at tbenyaacov at gmail.

Remember in Third grade, Friday afternoon, waiting for the clock to tick tock to 3 (or 2:50)? Things haven’t changed much, after a stressful week, I think we all, whether we;re aware of it or not, count the ticks until the weekend.

I wanted to get tons of stuff done in the last couple hours ‘fore the clock strikes, including writing a nice meaty post (I have about 40 ideas started), but alas, its time to go.

This weekend I’m off to Philadelphia to attend an opening for one of my friends since forever, Tal Ben-Yaakov. He’s a sculptor and is putting on his first solo show.

Many pictures to come after the weekend.

Off to the Chinese bus!

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/4pizon/16571263/

So this is what it feels like to be the man. A real man. A DOOGIE man. Since I was a kid, I always wished I typed my journal into a computer just like I was a 14 year old prodigy doctor. Now thanks to HogBay Software’s WriteRoom (and a little editing of the preferences) I can.

WriteRoom is a great implementation of a good idea. A while ago Khoi Vinh professed the need for a distraction free writing environment. WriteRoom isn’t a direct implementation of Vinh’s idea, Blockwriter, but it’s based around the same leading principle, get everything out of the way and turn your $2,500 Mac into a typewriter. This seems kind of backwards, but it works. People (read: Aaron Quint) are easily distracted when sitting at a computer trying to write. As operating systems become more complicated and more icons are bouncing and more growl notifications are appearing everywhere, its way to easy to loose your train of thought. WriteRoom forces you to see nothing but the words.

I’ve been using it for blogging (the majority of the in-depth writing I do these days) and Its been working great. Almost two great. The other day I was late to meet a friend because I completely lost track of time while writing a post. Since WriteRoom hides the menubar and hence the clock, what seemed like 15 minutes was actually an hour. The one major component of Vinh’s Blockwriter that WriteRoom doesn’t implement, is the no-backspace functionality of a typewriter. To Vinh, one of the key aspects of the process of getting you writing is not letting you go back and delete. You can strike through, but by spending less time refining and more time actually typing there are less forces slowing your fingers down. I think that this would be a great option for a future version, I’d really like to try it out (perhaps something you can turn on in preferences).

I found out about WriteRoom from a 43Folders post. There are other alternatives which I’ve yet to put to good use, like MegaZoomer (and here) which adds a view option to many applications, allowing you to hide everything but the main window. (Combine this with TextMate for distraction free nerding.)

Actually, more like a lost week. My friend Sivan, gave Kat and I Lost: Season 1 DVD to borrow, and lets just say that outside of work and watch it, I didn’t do much this week. Yesterday, we killed the last two discs, and now all we want to do is watch more. The worst part is we cant talk to anybody about it until we watch all of season 2, lest they ruin everything for us. But their are so many questions!!

If you haven’t seen it, do it. However, prepare some rations of food, perhaps warn your friends, and just realize that you won’t do anything else for the next week.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawaii/146709529/

Speaking of User Interface . . .

I’ve been using Windows Vista Beta on my home media center now for over a month. Needless to say, it’s a step up from XP, but I still cant get over just how sloppy it is. The “glass” interface is much cleaner and nicer to look at, and some elements, like the start menu, have major design improvements, making for much easier navigation. Here comes the but.

BUT

It crashes all the time. I’d simply write this off as an affect of beta software, but something tells me the Release version is still going to have problems with freezing up.

Pertaining more to this conversation, it’s not cohesive. As a whole the design and interface improvements are great - but thats the problem - they’re not whole. Most menu’s fit into the new ‘glass’ paradigm, but every once in a while you’ll get a dialog or a menu that looks like Windows ‘95, and you’re completely thrown off. Again, Id throw it off to the beta - then I found this little diddy? (Via blackrimglasses). At some levels I just cant fathom this. Does Microsoft just not have the resources? Did someone overlook this? Do they just not care?

User interface and cohesiveness, if they are to exist in a computer workstation, must start at the operating system. Users want need to be given a clear set of idioms for how they operate and use a computer. At the most basic level, the icon to close an application should probably look the same throughout an operating system.

One of the reasons I switched and will argue for Apple, is Aqua, the cohesive interface standard that makes Mac OS X so pretty. The interface for the operating system, menus, icons, toolbars, and even the Apple applications are completely standardized. Most third party applications even try to conform to this standard, which makes using a combination of Apple and third party apps so easy and seamless.

I feel one of Windows biggest problems is that they haven’t grasped this yet. Many application use completely different interfaces to stand out. Basic interface elements, like menus, toolbars, and icons should be inherited from the OS. Is Microsoft ever going to grasp this? Even at the most basic level of a font menu?