A Zulu man wearing adaptive glasses. Photograph: Michael Lewis

As a very nearsighted designer who depends on vision for my livelihood (I have 20/500 vision – if I were any more nearsighted, I’d be crosseyed) this article from the Guardian really made an impact on me. Josh Silver, professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a brilliantly simple solution to bring affordable vision to the more than 50% of the world’s population in need of corrected vision.

The premise is based on the fact that the thicker the lens, the stronger the magnification. Inside the tough outer lens is a water-filled sac which can be filled by the wearer to the optimal magnification level. There is no need for an optician; the wearer can adjust the fluid level, then seal it off by twisting a small screw.

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It’s now been 3 weeks since I was forced to buy a laptop to replace my Sony Vaio.  I ended up going with a Mac because of the superior hardware specs and the option to run OSX while still keeping XP on the same machine. Was it a good decision? I am still trying to decide.

It took me at least 2 weeks of INTENSE frustration to get used to some of the things that are different/worse. My fingers had a hard time getting used to all the new keystrokes, and I spent forever just trying to find stuff or match the functionality of my old Sony. When I used XP on it, the keyboard and trackpad was so  incredibly annoying that I resorted to a bluetooth keyboard just to be able to get anything done. And the multi-touch trackpad works like ass in Bootcamp (there are, as yet, no drivers that Apple has put out for XP. You can’t double-tap, and when you click, the cursor jumps.)

Plus, I have hundreds of dollars worth of Type 1 fonts that won’t work on the Mac. Although Adobe will crossgrade software from Windows to Mac at no charge, they won’t upgrade your Type 1 fonts to cross-platform Opentype. So I’m stuck with some of my best fonts that will only work in XP.

So here’s my partial list of pros and cons, in no particular order:

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I wonder why nobody ever thought of this before. HP recently won the WalMart Design Challenge to reduce environmental impact by selling their HP Pavilion dv6929wm Entertainment Notebook PC in its own messenger bag rather than in a box, thereby reducing packaging waste by 97%. The bag guards the laptop during shipping and are placed directly on the shelves that way. It’s a win for customers, for HP, and for the environment! The only downside is that you have to shop at WalMart to get one!

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I am an anomaly: a long-time graphic designer who has worked exclusively on the Windows platform since the early 90s. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, especially at the beginning when design software was slow to come out for Windows, if it came out at all. Back in the 90s, if you were a print designer, you were generally considered a masochist and/or an idiot to work in Windows. But I was a pragmatist, not willing to dish out loads of extra cash when I knew how to get Windows to work just fine for design– albeit with some jumping through hoops. I churned out thousands of design jobs in Windows, sometimes getting compliments from prepress departments for how well my files were constructed compared to what typical Mac-based designers normally gave them. Occasionally a Mac-centric shop would tell me they refused to take PC files, despite my argument that file formats were identical, and that it makes no sense to discriminate on the basis of an .EPS file’s birthplace. (In those cases I’d compress those same PC-generated files with Stuffit to make it look like they came from a Mac, and… well, whaddaya know… not a peep of protest from the shops.)

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Our son is getting married in a few weeks to a wonderful young woman in D.C., and we spent this past weekend working on wedding gifts and favors for the guests that incorporate both their Irish and Hindu heritage. Our daughter thought of the idea of screenprinting an Irish and Hindu blessing on a piece of Irish linen. I thought it would be cool to create their own custom image of interlocking Irish love knots and the Ohm, the sacred Hindu symbol. Here’s what I came up with:

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Reason no. 21,325 why little girls are the cutest things ever: Check out the note my 8-year-old friend Libby left for her father on the garage door, after having heard he had a really hard day at work: 

Transcription:
Welcome to Heven!!!! Where their is no work and only musages* and piece and quiet not to menchen hugs and kisses. So slip on those Ira socks** and fuzzy bear slippers and favorite P.J.’s but relax!!!!!

*I have a Free Musage Ticket that Libby once made for me as a gift for babysitting her guinea pigs. She will hole punch it to validate it after each massage. Unlike regular coupons, however, this one never expires. “If I run out of places to punch holes,” she told me, “I will just make you another!”

**Libby is referring to her dad’s black dress socks, which he has been known to wear with shorts, like their neighbor Ira does.

This past weekend, 6 babies– 4 little nieces, 1 baby cousin, and our little granddaughter—all younger than one and a half—gathered in Dallas for a mass baby christening. My mother, ever the optimist, invited over 50 friends and relatives, hired a caterer, outfitted all the babies in tiny christening gowns and bonnets, booked 2 photographers, and called the first presbyterian church to tell them we were descending on them.

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Last week we, bought an 8gb iPod Touch ($229 from Fry’s) for my Irish father-in-law’s upcoming 80th birthday. We loaded it with a bunch of his favorite old music, family photos and videos from the trips we’ve been on together. And we’re bringing it to our son’s wedding next month to add wedding photos, and a special video of everyone singing happy birthday and giving him birthday wishes.

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Download this free font from Bittbox, which I contributed the lower-case “a” to! It was a collaborative font project where designers from around the world were encouraged to hand-draw a letter, which Bittbox then assembled into a quirky, mish-mash font. Check out the list of contributors.

I’m not sure if or how I’d ever used this font in an actual job, but it does make for a pretty cool little hand-drawn alphabet to print out and put on a wall.

If you’re interested in submitting a letter for the next Conglomerfont project, check out www.bittbox.com.

Now this is a really interesting idea. A company called txteagle has developed a business that pays users in third world countries small amounts of money to do quick, small tasks via their cell phone—things like translating a phrase from their native language into English, recording words in their own language for the purposes of speech recognition software, or completing a short survey (1 or 2 questions) about their living habits for the purposes of heathcare research. For marketing research, companies can text users to respond about how they feel about the wording of a product or brand, in order to gauge public sentiment.

On the txteagle home page, they sum up their business model this way:

There are over 1.5 billion illiterate, mobile phone subscribers in developing In the developing world, many living on less than $3 a day. Corporations pay people to accomplish millions of simple text-based tasks. Txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe.

I’m baffled by a couple of things, though:

• If they’re illiterate, how do they read the text message?
• How do these poor folks, most of whom live on less than $5 a day and can hardly afford to buy food, afford a phone and phone service?

Txteagle seems to have good intentions, though. They have found a way for users to turn their idle minutes into profit. They also offer a way for users to transfer money earned to bank accounts, encouraging them to save. Or, they can take their earnings in the form of more minutes on their mobile phones.

Amazon has launched a program called Mechanical Turk that allows computer users in third world countries to do the same thing, but there are far fewer people with computers. Txteagle’s model of using text messages, making use of the larger infrastructure already there, sounds like a better idea.

What do you think? Is this a business model that will fly?