Nights like this are necessary to remind me that, yes, I really do suck at working with hardware.

This is where you should insert a picture of me staring balefully at a Fonera 2100 that is happily bricked despite, or more truthfully because of, my best efforts.

On the plus side, this version 1.0 XBox looks absolutely smashing running various bits of software, if only it could talk to the outside world.

Bubbling is preeminent.

I started seriously paying attention to fonts when I was in college. I switched majors sometime in my junior year and began art/design classes. In one of my first design classes, I cut four Copperplate letter “T’s” out of Styrofoam so that I could lock them together, ink them and use them to make pattern prints.

Since then I’ve been in love with letters, or more specifically, letter forms of different fonts. When Stephen and I lived in Durham, we’d go out to dinner and Stephen would make me look at the menu and name the typefaces. Nerd party tricks! I often make decisions on competing products based on the fonts used. It’s actually something that we all do naturally; most people just don’t realize that they are making decisions based on readability or their personal comfort level with a particular font.

Yesterday I jumped into a new logo design project. I started making my list of possible font candidates. While I was browsing through the fonts I realized that I have history with these fonts. I remember past projects based on the fonts I used, which in turn makes me remember different events that happened while I was working on those projects.

Seeing some type faces are like seeing, well, faces of friends. There’s a few old workhorses that I’ve used so often that the projects blur together. These guys are dependable, classic and get the job done. There’s a few trendy, fun fonts that I don’t use often, but when I do they pack a punch and I remember them fondly. And then there’s my personal favorites that I have to be careful not to overuse. I love them dearly and have to remind myself that they don’t and can’t solve every design dilemma that I have. Then there are the dated fonts. Faces that scream “Disco 70’s” or “See? I’m a computer!” These fonts are so dated I wonder if there will ever be another use for them outside of kitschy party invites.

Every time I browse, I find fonts that I want to use for other projects. Sometimes, and this is my favorite, I’ll see a font and it’ll spark something for me and I’ll create a whole new project based on that idea.

When I spend the afternoon looking at fonts, I get excited all over again about the work I do. The launch of a new project is always exciting and picking out fonts is always my first stop on the journey to making something useful for someone.

So next time you are at your favorite restaurant, check out the font on the menu. You might or might not know the font’s name, but know that some designer somewhere loved it enough to put it in front of you.

I can tell I’m reaching the end of a long week: all I’m doing is posting short things. And perhaps you, like me, don’t have much time either. In that case, here’s the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention boiled down to 1 minute each.

Courtesy of Abovenyquist, the NY Times weighs in on parents writing blog posts in their baby’s voice on sites like “Totspot”.

Really, now. Who would do something like that?

Hello Kitty wants you to be pretty.

When I was young, I read a lot of comics. The Hulk, Spiderman, Batman — I read them as they came out. These days any comics I do read I read as trade paperbacks. I’ve never thought about why that is, but Andrew‘s comment made me realize one reason why I stopped, at least for DC and Marvel comics.

Then, just to prove what a Fraction junkie I am, I would recommend the two TPB of The Immortal Iron Fist as another genre comic done right – at least until Fraction and Brubaker left the comic.

DC and Marvel shuttle writers and artists on and off titles. The reasons are varied and wide-ranging, and I can understand many of them, but in the end it’s enough change that I lose interest. Couple that with both the way continuity is folded and stapled back onto comics and the annoyance of having to swing by my city’s far-away comic shop, and in the end I just order TPBs from Amazon.

You’ve probably seen http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com. But refreshing the page can get old after a while. So why not subscribe to the page’s feed?

(As I confessed to several friends last night, yes, I looked at the page’s HTML source. I am a geek.)

ETA: This is not to be confused with http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com, which doesn’t have a feed but does have more scientific information hidden in its HTML.

“If the world was to end, and I could plan it because I was God, it would have to be something stupid, like the Chinese have built the Transformers to bomb us back ’cause they were pissed about the Hiroshima bomb.”

—Top Design contestant Natalie, from Montgomery, AL

Yes, that would indeed be something stupid.

Fruits has power.