I’m going to be on vacation for the next two weeks, driving and camping all around the Pacific Northwest. I’ll be visiting Portland and Seattle, as well as Olympic, Mt. Ranier, Redwood, and Crater Lake National Parks.
I’ll be trying to document my travels fairly well via Twitter. (I’m yeah_its_me, if anyone wants to follow.) When I get back, I want to make an experiment of combining photos from Flickr and Twitter tweets (and possibly Google maps as well) to make some kind of online vacation album thing.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
1. This video is beautiful.
2. This woman is awesome. (And so is her company.)
3. This Flash tutorial was written by me.
(See how I snuck that in there? But seriously, I’m very excited about it.)
1) The Arcade Fire’s interactive music video
SO. FREAKIN’. AWESOME.
2) Jonathan Yuen’s portfolio site.
This has to be one of the most beautiful sites I’ve ever seen. The whole interaction is just so calm and serene.
3) A LOLcats Bible? Really???
If you live in or near Philadelphia, you should go visit the new Perelman Building at the Museum of Art. When you go, you should especially check out the modern design exhibit, because there’s some neat stuff in there. (The sculpture room and some of Stieglitz’s photography were also quite nice.)
And you should do it before Dec. 31 of this year, because admission is free until then.
And after you visit the museum you should stop in at Brigid’s, which was my favorite neighborhood bar when I lived in the area.
And that’s what you should do.
1) reCAPTCHA
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
[…]
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
This is such a neat idea. It really is a great example of that most clever type of design that draws on people’s self-interest to contribute to a greater good.
2. The Brick Testament
Someone has a) a good knowledge of the Bible, b) a weird sense of humor, and c) waaaay too much time on his hands.
3. My newest favorite XKCD comic
Is it weird that I’ve actually wanted to rappel down the outside of my office building for the longest time?
(Yes, I admit it: This post is a cop-out because I don’t have any original content right now.)