Merry Christmas.

With that out of the way I would like to tell the world about a fine use of Flash. I’m not as hugely into design as some of the readers around here, so try to think of me as an average Internut participant who found something that pleased him.

I am planning on a little trip up to Moncton tomorrow, and was curious as to what kind of weather I could expect. I checked a fine national weather site and to my delight they have a nice little Flash map of Canada with adorable (I’ll put my reputation on the line with that word) icons showing me the weather.

It was pretty and it worked. Cheers!

Who else is browsing the web on Christmas morning? Show yourselves!

Don’t pity me though. I just spent the last three hours opening gifts with my family.

The animal computer book cover series by O’Reilly is consistent, unique, memorable, and beautiful. The brainchild of Edie Freedman, now O’Reilly’s creative director, the books have become as recognizable as the Dummies series, at least to their own more self confident audience.

I’ve long admired the covers for the beautiful illustrations and the strong and well balanced white space and solid color block design program that houses them. The animals started as 19th century wood engravings, but most are now drawn by one of O’Reilly’s own editors who is also a part-time illustrator.

For more information and background on the O’Reilly animal book covers, see Animal Magnetism: Making O’Reilly Animals and Edie Freedman’s own Origin of Species: A History of O’Reilly Animals.

Discovered at the last minute: Design Your Own O’Reilly Book Cover. Here’s mine.

We are honoured to be included with our inclusion on the Kottke.org links b-list. Those chumps on the c-list can suck it.

Struggling with the thought that there could be others better than ourselves, I checked out kottke.org a-list of links.
Most I was familiar with (Harrumph, Evhead, a.whole, etc.) but some were strange and new.

The best of the pack is Stewart Butterfield’s Sylloge.com. Stewart (along with Eric Costello of the very cool glish.com) runs the infamous but wonderful 5k Contest. His personal blog is absolutely beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful weblogs, see fellow kottke b-lister Dollar Short.

I found a great link at Coudal Partners (home of the photoshop tennis circuit). Shockwave slot-car racing. You actually build your own track! It’s fantastic.

Just drag the track pieces from the top of the page to build your track (make sure it plugs into the power piece at the bottom. When your track is done, click the flag, and race.

It’s harder to make a good track than you’d think. I have much more respect for those Coleco engineers now. So far the best in-office track design award goes to iZak for this beauty. If you design a better one, send it to me and I’ll post it.

I’ve just come from the theatre. It’s nice to work at an office that shuts down for such important occasions.

My expectations for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring were high and I was not disappointed.

Today the good mailman arrived. He demanded $8.32 but had no change to offer (is that even legal?).

However, he also brought with him a big bag of goodness containing Sam Brown’s (of explodingdog.com) new book “Wish for Something Better”.

I suspect that you do not own a copy and that I am cooler than you. Buy one, they are beautiful. It’s a small square book (about 6″ x 6″) and the printing looks great. It will make your coffee table way cooler than it was yesterday.

I stole this from the Guardian’s editorials. I’m not trying to be Mr. I-am-politically-active, but I found this to be very silly. I’ll bold the part that made me laugh. And reference the good lines with numbers incase people want to discuss this afterwards. I don’t know if this counts as a flame or nut. I feel nutty picking at each sentance, so I wont post my actual feelings about each number up here, except for 5 & 6. I laughed loudly at those. And #7 made cough and say ‘bullshit’ at the same time (like in Men in Tights).

Don’t let pie tossers roam our streets

   I am sitting here sipping upon my morning tea, and what do I see? Evan Brown – the man who, may I remind you, could have very well blinded Prime Minister Chretien by thrusting that whipped topping in the man’s face¹ -will be roaming around our streets again.

   What message does this send to our children? Suppose little Patrick² doesn’t like what his teacher put on his report card, or young Jonathan³ doesn’t want to wear the new sweater his father just bought him for Christmas. So what do they do, I ask? Why not lash out at their authority figures and cream them with a pie⁴? That is the message we have sent. Is this what we really want⁵? A generation of young, rebellious pie slingers?⁶

   
No, I am not saying that we should have thrown the book at him, or a pie at him (no pun intended⁷) but, hey, people, this is not civil. Pie tossing is wrong⁸ and Mr. Brown should have been ordered to issue a public apology to those he offended.⁹ Seriously, people, are you with me or against me? Who else wants an apology?

      That’s my two-cents worth.
      (name)

I’m all about doing whatever it may be that’s the latest “thing to do”. Where I am these days, using XML-RPC to ping Weblogs.com is the thing to do (odd, I know).

So, I’m doing it. Actsofvolition.com now pings weblogs.com whenever it’s updated.

Props to the good people at Userland Software on their work with the XML-RPC protocol. For an Adbusters subscriber, I’ve always been quite sympathetic to Microsoft (I even like Clippy – seriously), the work being done on the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols by Dave Winer and the other folks at Userland may well save us (and Microsoft) from the Microsoft world.

What the hell does this mean? Well, in of itself, not a whole lot. It means that every time one of the geniuses around here makes a post, Weblogs.com will be notified and show our site on their list. Then, other sites can sort-of syndicate that list – for example, they could have a ’10 recently updated sites’ list that would grab its content from the master list at weblogs.com.

This is not a big deal, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. The more important thing is that I called a procedure on another web server and passed information in an understandable format – a simple, but powerful concept. Hopefully this simple experiment will be the begining of some more interesting and useful applications of this technology (more to come as I experiment further with this).

I often complain about the use of acronyms, so I appologize for this post. XML-RPC stands for Extensible Markup Language – Remote Procedure Calling. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.