"Warning: I am a designer by trade so I may get a little over excited about this bit. You do not have to slap an ugly QR Code on well designed media. QR Codes are just now going main stream so they tend to be the focus of the media they are included in. Big black and white squares positioned right in your face.  For now this makes sense since the marketers using them tend to need to educate their audience on what they are and how to use them. As they become more common they will become something people will look for, like a web address, allowing designers to integrate functional QR art seamlessly with their design. Just because they are traditionally black and white does not mean they should be. QR codes:

• Can be any color
• Can be any modular material
• Must have at least 55% contrast between the foreground and the background
• Should have a margin or “quiet space” of 4 units
• Need to have clear detection patterns in the corner
• Can have up to 30% of the code obscured if you use the highest error correction
• Can be read with any orientation
• Can put it in perspective
• Can be anamorphic (widescreen)
• Can have the cell shape distorted
• Can have the interior made of circle or other shapes
• can have the design reversed."

"Oddly, certain kinds of workers in Massachusetts cannot be shackled by noncompetes: doctors, social workers, and broadcasters among them. But why should a TV anchor be allowed to jump from one station to another, while we make an EMC engineer take a year of unpaid leave before he can form a new company? How does that benefit our economy? My biggest concern is that new legislation only requires noncompetes to be “reasonable,’’ rather than nixing them entirely. To ensure that we get there, individual employees will have to dive in to this debate - rather than leaving it to big companies who know how to lobby. And CEOs who are willing to think about the good of the state’s economy - beyond their own firm’s desire to avoid spawning potential rivals - should speak up."

"This being the case, it's entirely possible that cash-strapped advertisers will have exactly the same kind of "moment of clarity" that shopaholic consumers are reportedly having now that they've seen entire store inventories marked down 50 percent or more in pre-Christmas sales—that is, they may say to themselves, "We knew all along that this stuff was made in China for a tiny fraction of what it sells for here; we were nuts to pay so much in markup for it.""

"I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, assholes, to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.
...
If you tell people they can upload their content, you should have a clear and distinct way for them to retrieve their content. People do it ad-hoc as they can, but the abilities of most people, the people without an engineering degree or years of experience, to get back what they put up is minimal. It’s not that important. We should make it important."

"IMMEDIAST projects are against all forms of coercive communication, cultural monologue and media control. We acknowledge non-violent public insurgence as a legitimate response to sustained violations by media and state. We recognize the air as public property, and the signals that travel through it to be the domain of the public."

"What better reason, then, to sit back and savor the simple enjoyment of a get-together with friends at a hangout like the Chip-in, which Miller thinks is just a formal venue for the kind of casual gatherings that occur all over town."

"These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. ..."

"...Fifth, fulfilment of this last misgiving, in the shape of abrupt disappearance of the buying demand throughout the country, this particular phenomenon being prolonged through a period of months and sometimes years."

"Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here."

"The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector’s item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price."

"If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question."

"I have for all my mature life been impressed by people's tenacity, and in no specific more than discussion, whether in electronic forums or newspapers' letters to the editor..."

When the going gets tough, the suckers get easy.

I spent last week corresponding with Marinetti's New Man. He lives, now, amongst us. He cannot be bothered to read this essay, because he is, alas, damned to be himself.

lolDirt: "i made you a volcano, but i breaked it."

"We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don't sharpen the knife too much."

"Because many of us founders are so accomplishment driven, we tend to look at both activities and outcomes as accomplishments."

My hesitation is the underlying assumption that a "book" is equivalent to a "series of words". Nice redistribution system; hard to reassemble in the end, though.

So much for agalmia.

Homeless Dave interviews President Bill Clinton on the teeter totter.

Slow time allows one to reframe what one's encountered. There is no "information overload"; what's changed is our ability to parse what we're presented with by new tech and dynamic social networks.

The new "interlibrary loan" search /catalog aggregator system for Michigan libraries.

Ann Arbor's economy is headed for a downturn with the loss of Pfizer, but local policy-makers seem focused on the one-stop solution of finding a big replacement corp.

Using del.icio.us as a simple email/messaging service.