More for all those typography lovers! Pentagram recently invited friends and clients to visit their resident psychiatrist. You, too, can drop by his office to learn what typeface most suits your personality. This descendent of Freud will ask you four questions, take some notes, and then reveal your "type," complete with a history lesson on that font. I was diagnosed as Cooper Black Italic. Give it a try right here. The password is "character."

Here’s a shirt that’s bound to end up being worn by one of the characters from Big Bang Theory: the word Helvetica, set in Comic Sans.

I think that I might be a little too excited about the series premiere of V tonight. For those of you not in the know, V was originally a mini series in the early 80’s (83-84) about aliens – lizard-like creatures that disguise themselves in human form- that come to earth feigning friendship while slowing taking over control of the planet. Total cold-war, fascist undertones and shades of Nazism blended with alien lizard babies and eating guinea pigs. Awe.Some. I am hoping that this re-imagined version will live up to the original. We’ll see.

Wowza! Check out these amazing photos from the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. Super amazing!

I have been having some CPU issues lately with the good ol’ laptop and trying to decide what to do. I have a 15” MacBook Pro that is s few years old that is currently running on Mac OS X Version 10.4.11. Pretty old, since Mac will be rolling out Snow Leopard in September. I’m running on about 75 to 80% capacity on the hard drive, I can get an external hard drive to free up space, so not too worried about that aspect. A main problem is that I need a new battery. I have to keep it plugged in at all times in order to keep it charged, basically tethering me and negating the “mobility” a laptop is supposed to provide. REALLY annoying.

An other issue is that I am running on iLife ’06, this suite includes iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD, iMovie, and most importantly iWeb, which I use to publish this site. It’s gotten to the point where I have to reload my entire site every time I update it. Very annoying! It also has weird errors where it thinks that it doesn’t update the site, when in fact it does. I’ve done patches and fixes for the program, but it is just so outdated that it doesn’t help much. Plus, I don’t have the option to add widgets or publish remotely. Not to mention I am pretty bored with the style options. I also would like to get my hands on the new iPhoto which seems to be much easier to navigate and search for photos that the one I am currently running. Plus the editing and effects options seem to have a little more muscle.

Problem is that in order to upgrade to iLife ’09, I need to be running Mac OS x v10.5.6 or later. So, I’d have to upgrade my OS as well as iLife. The current price for Leopard is $129 (which will be replaced in a few months with Snow Leopard) and iLife ’09 is $99. Plus the new battery is an additional $129. Not to mention an external hard drive that would be another $150 or so. See how it is adding up? I don’t really know if it is worth it to spend $500 on a this one or replace it with a new one for about $500 more? Or, I could just get the new battery and suck it up with the current OS and iPhoto and possibly move my website to Typepad, SquareSpace, or some other external publishing site, but then I’d have to pay a monthly fee for it, why would I do that when I already pay $100 a year for MobileMe? (Which I really love, even though I can’t use it to its full advantage with my current OS.) Ugh. Not sure what to do, any suggestions?

I am hoping that some of you caught the ABC News Special ‘Earth 2100’. Part worst case scenario environmental report, part dystopian sci-fi choose your own adventure, it was truly an amazing piece of journalism. A two-hour, prime-time special, hosted by Bob Woodruff, speculated on what the world may look like if humans take no action on addressing present environmental concerns. The program invited historians, economists and scientists to make projections on the state of various locations in the world in the years, 2030, 2050 and as far ahead as 2100. (I highly recommend that you check out ABC’s site, you will be amazed.)

Most of the scientists seemed to agree that the world was indeed heading for a kind of collapse, unless something was done right away to address existing concerns.
Experts pointed out that it will take only a hundred years before the dramatic man-induced climate change, shrinking natural resources, famine and war make for a world that may be uninhabitable. It was a pretty dark view, but one that I think is fairly realistic and pragmatic. What I found most interesting was how they showed the ramifications of how global politics will effect things.

The interviews, statistics, and reports were intertwined with a fictional narrative following a woman that was born in 2009 that lives through the earth’s eventual collapse. It used a graphic novel style that was a brilliant choice to portray the possible outcome on at a intimately human lever, much more so than if it would have been a live-action film.

Even though the vast majority of the special focuses on the gloom and doom scenario, the last ten minutes focus on the fact that this future is not set in stone and that we have the ability to make the changes needed to change our, and the Earth’s, future. I just hope that we choose to follow the correct path.

I joined Facebook about six months ago. It is an interesting social networking site that can sometimes be a bit addicting. It has been great to reconnect with old friends from high school, as well as keeping in touch and up to date with friends and family. I find the status updates the most intriguing part of the site. They range from poetic, cryptic, silly, to boring, annoying, and puzzling. It can be more revealing that one realizes. Which is why it has me thinking about Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates or “tweets” which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). This is a riff off of the status updates on Facebook: think only text updates and that you can follow people that are not your “friends” you can also be only a receiver or a follower. Twitter has been in the news quite often lately, especially in the arena of journalism.

I am considering opening a Twitter account to see what all the fuss is about. I am really intrigued from a social networking and communications stand point. I love the idea of new forms of communication and how it affects you. This is a strange conflict between becoming closer knit as a community while at the same time desensitizing yourself through constant barrages of information. I’ll let you know if I decide to take the plunge.

Shawn got a Blu-Ray DVD player for Christmas this year from his mom (Thanks, Cathy!) and we just got it hooked up this weekend. Very awesome picture quality to be sure. But the thing that I found most amazing was that we could hook up the player to the internet and link to our Netflix queue. Now we can play all of the “instant” movies that are available on our TV! And it is free!!! It downloads the movie in about 30 seconds and off we go! This is so totally cool. I know that it sounds a bit lazy – can’t wait for a DVD to come in the mail – but I think that its brilliant. I am especially excited because we can use it to watch TV shows that are on DVD. Something that I always want to do, but hate having to get the six discs in the mail. I am also glad because this means that I can watch some movies that Shawn might not be interested in without having to bump other movies in line. My only question is am I aloud to count the movies on my 101 Things list if I watch them instantly?