Clay Newton's quick bio: Clay Newton is an artist and designer, raised in the wine country's illustrious Napa proper. After spending three years as an apprentice of sorts at Richard Carter Studio, working at the French Laundry (pre- & post- Thomas Keller) and Trefethen Vineyards, he jumped the hills for Davis to attend the University, majoring in Art Studio with a minor in Sociology. His first kid, ZZ Anne Newton, was born in November 2005. Clay's technology career started in the bowels of the UC Davis IDEA Lab, where he studied under Randal Packer, Lynn Hershman, and Jon Winet. Jon later became one of Clay's close friends and collegues. In 1998, Clay started working for Eve.com which was really his indoctrination into the fast and furious dotcom mentality. When crumbled under the weight of idealab!, Clay was lucky enough to be able to cash into a house in yet another less-than-illustrious locale: Richmond (as of this writing in 2005, Richmond is the 11th most dangerous city in the US -- oooo scarey!) From Eve, Clay moved on to iEngineer which morphed into Assentive Solutions. When Assentive died a fiery death, Clay bounced over to Virage (2 hr commute hell.) After the third round of layoffs in 9 months, he shifted gears to Navis which tried to devour his soul but only took away a portion of his liver. In 2005, he joined Bank of America as a VP of Interaction Design. In the summer of 2006, Clay moved back to Napa and now telecommutes all the time.
Like, outta NOWHERE Ok, maybe I am slow and behind the times or something. I am just minding my own bidness, digging through my huge directory of Sage subscriptions, and I hit a kottke post about BLDGBLOG. I'd been there before; I recall thinking it was fairly interesting.
Patternerific!!This is a great photoset that examines the security patterns of envelopes. I wonder who designs these things?
Are they specialists? What tools do they use? Do the scribble a lot?
I have a hard time imagining that there are people out there that spend 40 hour weeks contemplating the best way to destroy light in this fashion. Maybe there are. I am sure that it is an evolving field. Although, paper mail must be a comparatively insecure way to send things, given encryption and secure connections.
Oh, Snap! Not like this is the most amazing, rare conceptually mind-altering thing I have seen in a while, but I do think it prods out a good question: Is this really a good idea?
I like the idea of providing additional context. Frankly, I must admit that I don't know exactly how Snap works. I am curious as to whether it grabs a preview of the exact page to which you are linking, or if it just pulls the homepage, and if you can control what it pulls. From reading their FAQ, it looks like it uses a CSS class to bind the methods to, which is the right way to do stuff such as this, IMO.
Anyway, here is my bet: this type of popup is going to become extremely prevalent in the next 6 months. We are already deploying something of this nature at The Bank. There have been plugins for Firefox that added this functionality to Google for a while now. Yahoo uses similar kinds of functionality both in YM and on their news pages.
FINALLY. new Blogger.
Last I logged in, I was trying like hell to switch over to the new Blogger. I guess I am not enough on my game to get an early invite, so I had to wait with the hordes.
Now I am in, and looking forward to investigating the new features.
Very interesting interview with Ian Pearson, FuturologistAt the moment we're relying on encryption and firewalls and other security measures to stop people stealing your passwords. In the future, all I have to do is let some bacteria into your building; they float through the air conditioning system, land on your keyboard, you can't see them, you don't know they are there. They record every single keystroke and report it back to me. As if that's not enough, they could also be listening to what you're talking about, and even directly interface with your brain if necessary, and they can certainly float in through the vents on your PC and access the chips.