I stopped by the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade earlier this evening and caught these amazing pumpkin-headed puppets before the crowds got so thick that I couldn’t see anything. At school, the Halloween celebration came early with a costume contest sponsored by the Communication Design department. A pair of students with wheeled hands and feet, representing “The Spirit of the G Train” (the notoriously-late subway that runs near campus), won the grand prize.
The design department’s sponsorship of this event got me thinking about just how much a well-conceived costume can communicate. While many are archetypes of the season (zombies, witches, etc) or distinct fictional characters, I find costumes that are based on more abstract concepts or on unexpected physical objects to be the most interesting.
Outside of the holiday, a living representation of an idea can sometimes be the most effective way to communicate, yet designers are often hesitant to move away from the ‘flat’ world in which they work. Only rarely, in select advertising campaigns and theme parks do we see companies taking their brands off the page and into the real world. While I’m not saying that costumes are necessarily the best way to solve most problems, they are often overlooked.
For more conceptual (and incredibly witty) costume ideas, I’d recommend taking a look at Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress (especially the later pages).
Inspired by, and based on, Harvey Ramer’s Autolink Attachment Plugin, this plugin lists attachments to a WordPress 2.x post in a list following the text. Only attachments that are not already linked to or displayed in the post text will be shown (this is mainly to prevent inline images from being listed).
Attachments are shown with an icon mapped to their file extension from Mark James’ excellent Silk icon set. The attachment’s title will be used for the link name and, if the attachment has a description, it will be shown below.
Update Feb 7, 2007: I’ve put together a new version that fixes the CSS typo (oops!), the post id issue Pete mentioned, and is now compatible with WP 2.1. There’s also a version available that just fixes bugs for WP 2.0 users.
This widget displays your WordPress archive as a dropdown menu. It supports dates, categories, and tags (if UTW is installed). Dates can either be shown in the default WP format, or in a hierarchy. The widget title may be left blank to display the menu without a title. To see what this looks like in action (showing dates in a hierarchy and categories) take a look at the bottom of this page.
To install, just toss dropdown-archive.php into your wp-content/plugins directory, activate the plugin, and add the widget to your sidebar.
As part of the redesign of this site I decided to implement my site search to support the ’search’ input type supported by Safari. It renders as the native OS X search field and can keep track of a user’s search history.
This widget is meant to be a drop-in replacement for the default WordPress search widget. To make sure other browsers aren’t confused, it checks the user-agent of the requesting browser and only serves the search element to Safari. Other browsers will get a standard text element. Optionally, this text element can be filled with placeholder text that is cleared on focus by javascript. If the widget title is left blank, no title will be displayed (which is ideal if using placeholder text).
To install, just toss safarisearchfield.php into your wp-content/plugins directory, activate the plugin, and add the widget to your sidebar.
Yesterday I got the chance to head out to the New York Hall of Science hoping to gain inspiration from their signage for a museum project I’m working on. Their wayfinding system was effective, but didn’t provide too much enlightenment. The museum offered a nice assortment of hand-on exhibits, many that I had seen elswhere (I think I was spoiled by OMSI and the Exploratorium as a child).
By far the thing that stood out most to me was an exhibition called ‘Connections: The Nature of Networks‘. It deals with many kinds of networks that exist in the world, from rivers to the internet, and the theories behind them. A bit of research shows that it was designed by Jeff Kennedy Associates who has a fascinating (and probably internal) site on the early development of the project.
I was quite impressed with the variety of networks that the exhibit managed to cover. You could see what happened when a break occurred in a power grid, scrub through video showing social interaction of various creatures, and visualize node interaction in a network of ropes and pulleys. Among the other geeky wonders showcased were a giant version of Conway’s Game of Life, Internet Arm Wrestling, and a touchscreen GIS viewer turned exhibit showing the paths of subway, telephone, major roads and cable TV throughout Queens.
My personal favorite installation was a video processor that tracked the paths of visitors through the exhibition space (shown above). It wasn’t the most accurate, but it did a pretty good job and definitely had that “wow, this is cool” factor. You could scrub through about 5 minutes of path history with a trackball and switch between the path-only view and a live video feed from the cameras above the space.
The first thing that came to mind after seeing this exhibition was a session at barcamp that I didn’t get to go to but wish I had entitled “Spreading the Meme: How people get into hacking. How can we get get more to start?“. Connections: The Nature of Networks seemed that it could be quite effective as a step towards this goal of getting kids interested in technology and networking.
More photos
While walking to school this afternoon, I noticed that the top of the Broken Angel art structure, had some smoke coming out of it. Further inspection showed that the smoke wasn’t coming out of any chimney but that a small portion of the upper tower was on fire. Out came the cell phone. After talking to a couple of dispatchers (first general 911, then fire) I was told that the fire department was on the way.
The FD turnout was impressive. I think there were seven engines on surrounding streets within five minutes. By the time they arrived, the flames had grown to engulf the entirety of the upper tower. Soon, a bucket truck was up and they hosed down the tower continuously for several minutes, mostly extinguishing the fire.
There was still a small bit of the tower burning after the initial spray was shut off, but it remained tiny and didn’t spread. Some firefighters entered the structure and, after they emerged, a second round of spraying took care of the last bits of smoldering.
The Broken Angel seems to have survived this day and will continue to provide an interesting feature to the neighborhood. All the same, I have to wonder what toll the water took on the already decaying structure. How much longer will it continue to survive the elements? The fire remained contained to one tower and the surrounding buildings remained untouched (except for a bit of water fallout from the spraying), which is incredibly lucky considering the amount of dry wood I imagine is used in the construction of the building.
