Flippity Flop 4: color, Q. Cassetti, 2011, pen and ink, digital colorationFirst day of Lent. Thinking about the things I am going to give up. I have a list. It’s all doable , the right thing to do. It’s nice to have a reason to give something up. The question is how many things to give up so that it feels like something. and I can do some preemptive mental spring cleaning on M. E.
Poor Mr. White. I took him to the wonderful vet clinic, ARC. They immediately scheduled him for surgery tomorrow and decided to keep him until then. I guess Mr. Cranky and Mr. White mixed it up again, and his eye was severely damaged such that they are going to remove the eye and sew up the lids. Lets just say it has me shaken. Robbie has been nice to suggest that Mr. White finally has earned a new name, Winky. Mr. Winky White… David suggests a tiger’s eye eye versus the sewn up thing. A patch would be dapper. He is so sweet but eggs Mr. Cranky on.. So he will become my studio cat during the unmanaged time of the day—so that they will not have unsupervised time. The kind vet basically outlined that these feline behaviors cannot be modified.
New news aggregator, Zite, recommended by Walt Mossberg just launced on iTunes today (free) . Just downloaded it. Love Flipboard and Pulse. I know this is going to be great! Katie Boehret at All things Digital explains:
“Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it’s used.”
“Zite isn’t just a mirror of your social-networking account. It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics.
It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.”
Another highlight of this morning’s news and article grazing was this gem to help lay people work with type (from Jim Dempsey at the Graphicmac.com). Dempsey simply outlines “tips that can make your next printed piece more professional”. I think I may ask Jim Dempsey if we can copy this as a document to add to our tools to help our big client’s employees work with type in a better way.
Speaking of Dropbox, we are going the next step with it. I am loving what it can do for me.