Designer Emulation Kits, and Exec Toys

So it's the season of little useless holiday gifts for the person who has everyting. So I thought I'd add a suggestion to the pack. At Emulate :: Designer Emulation Kit you can find little pcboard homages to a few classic designers lamps. Each one of these snap assembly kits sits on top of a standard 9v battery (think smoke detector) and makes a nice addition to any executive desk.

However, if you want one of the classic 1980's interactive desk toys , I recommend one of the following(I left out a lot of the classic kinetic magnetic, pendulum, spinning wheel, and liquid movement toys because I feel the ones are better)

• Newton's Cradle
  
• Pinhead- readily available( called Pin Art these days), also look for the clock
  
• crdl- really tough to find these days(only found em on ebay)
  
• tangle- go for the original chrome or a primary color
• Euler's disk
  

Mucking with the lexicon

Okay so sms and IM speak is starting to invade regular conversations among the younger set. I have actually heard someone use OMG, and jk in conversation ( tommy sh'oaks little sister). I shit you not, she actually uses "Oh-em-gee" and "jay-kay" in regular conversation. Rather than let this bother me I thought we should just try and add to the slurry. To muck with things a little more I want to try and introduce some new ones, based on the internet language of "love" (german), and see if they spread. My current personal favorite is MGIH or "mein gott in himmel!" as an OMG replacement if this catches on we can force a sort of AOLspeak++ (or maybe just end up with a bunch of sms messages we could trade at a kraftwerk concert).

Man am I pissed

Kansas education board downplays evolution - Science - MSNBC.com Yes gentle reader the kansas school board has gone and done it. Every once in a while people wonder why fewer and fewer americans are becoming scientists. Well it's gonna get worse. Kansas will now e teaching intelligent design. I don't even know what to say about this, but if this can happen I think it's fair to say there's a huge population of this country that I will never be able to understand, and don't really want to.

Nice Cans!!!

Products- mTUNE-N - Cordless Stereo Headset for iPod® nano So there were a lot of homebrew projects like this that I saw for the shuffle, and I'm glad someone finally figured this out. As soon as these are available, I'm totally sporting a set

n+1 article on what's wrong with the hipsters

So I like the music, I like the fashion, I like a lot of the lifestyle ( indie club shows, exhibit receptions, cheap beer, etc.), but I'm not really ever gonna' fit in with it. I think one of the things that always bugged me about the last few mainstream sub-cultures (esp. our current hipsters) is the lack of a cause, and the fact that achievement in traditional areas isn't valued. It's much cooler to be a waiter/struggling something, than to be any type of wageslave. This n+1 article: captain neato nicely sums up a lot of what I mean. It's not that I'm against the silverlake, williamsburg neo-bohemian lifestyle, I like a lot of it. I just don't really fit into the community completely. It's not that I'm a little too A-type and corporate, I'm sure there are plenty of pseudo-bohemians with "real" jobs (and not just trustfunds), but the difference is I like a lot about corp life, and am not embarassed about trying to excel in it.

My sweet ipod case

For the holiday weekend I decided to put together an LA hipster outfit as my costume. It was a huge success but the crowning piece was the ipod case I made. The case is basically a really narrow ugly tie with a vinyl window tied to a carabiner. The fabrication was really easy, I cut a square in the tie and glued in the vinyl window which I had cannibalized from a smartmedia card sleeve. I added a hole in the back for the headphone cable, a safety pin to make sure the nano didn't slide down past the window, tied the thing to the carabiner with a sloppy knot and voila hipster ipod case ready for any belt. I like it so much I think I'm gonna' start using it regularly