I happen to work right next to Mas­sArt and often find myself wait­ing for the bus in front of the col­lege. A week or two ago, I noticed a sign sport­ing the new Mas­sArt logo:

I lit­er­ally, with watery eyes, gazed at the way the ‘A’ crops the ‘S’, and thought to myself: “It’s beautiful.” I then imme­di­ately chas­tised myself for having such an emo­tional reac­tion to a piece of typog­ra­phy and resumed con­tin­ued read­ing my Howard Zinn book.

Brand New has an excel­lent review of new brand­ing and logo in MassTer­ful Iden­tity. The arti­cle also fea­tures a lot of excel­lent pho­tographs of sig­nage and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial. Also, it appears as though a com­plete over­haul of the Mas­sArt web­site is in the works (thank God). I can’t wait to see what they do with the new one.

Score one for KJ’s alma mater!

Imag­ine my sur­prise when I opened up Con­sole yes­ter­day and found this error mes­sage from Mail in the console.log:

I wonder what caused the error why the devel­oper thought “this should never happen.”

I wrote a short Apple­Script yes­ter­day to allow you to auto­mat­i­cally add the cur­rent tab in Safari to your book­marks in Del.​icio.us with a spec­i­fied tag or tags. The default tag is “toPost.” Add the script into Quick­sil­ver as a trig­ger and you’ve got an über con­ve­nient post later (or never) script.

Here is the script (or down­load it here):

-- To change the tags, edit text inside quotes below
-- Use spaces to seperate multiple tags (ex: "tagOne tagTwo")
set tags to "toPost"

-- build delicious URL for current tab in frontmost window of Safari
tell application "Safari"
    set u to (name of current tab of front window) & ¬
        "&url=" & (URL of current tab of front window) & ¬
        "&tags=" & tags
end tell

-- Add URL to Delicious
tell application "Safari"
    do JavaScript "javascript:void(open('https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?description=" & u & "','delicious','toolbar=no,width=150,height=100'));" in document 1
    delay 0.5
    close current tab of front window

end tell

This is basi­cally a simple mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the script writ­ten by Andrew Faden which does pretty much the same except from Net­NewsWire instead of Safari. Be sure to check out his orig­i­nal script and also the much improved ver­sion sub­mit­ted by Larry from http://​script​ing​for​lawyers.com/.

eFi­nance Direc­tory has an inter­est­ing arti­cle about the myths of rent­ing a house versus buying a house. One that caught my atten­tion was Myth #4: Buyers have assets, renters do not. The last para­graph sums it up (empha­sis mine):

Renters may not co-​own a home with a lender, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have assets. Many renters have a large and pros­per­ous port­fo­lio, Star Wars col­lectibles (just an exam­ple) and other assets that can be sold IMME­DI­ATELY for cash. The reason they own these things is because they haven’t been paying a lender to ‘rent’ money so that they could pre­tend like they own an asset.

Wow, that last sen­tence is rather blunt and unfor­tu­nately, accurate.

Via Kottke.

I am by nature a rather intro­verted and shy person. Given a small gath­er­ing, I can be quite talk­a­tive, but in gen­eral in larger social cir­cum­stances, I tend to be more of an observer. There are of course some occa­sions where observ­ing is not an option and active par­tic­i­pa­tion is required. Some­times public speak­ing might even be required.

Con­trary to what might be expected, I am actu­ally per­fectly fine with this. A long time ago I devel­oped the idea of a “social helmet.” This is very much like the saying “put on your think­ing cap.” Basi­cally, when going into social engage­ment, I (metaphor­i­cally speak­ing) put on my social helmet and com­mu­ni­cate like a normal, out­go­ing person.

The funny part about this is that I have always had a very dis­tinct mental image of what my social helmet would look like. First of all, notice that it’s a helmet and not a cap. Appar­ently social engage­ments require some­thing more robust than the stan­dard cap. My social helmet is essen­tially an old-​school leather foot­ball helmet with antennas.

A while ago, I was trying to describe it to some­one, and decided that it was easier to just create it in Pho­to­shop. With­out fur­ther ado, my social helmet:

What does your social helmet look like?