People who don't use twitter always have the same complaint, which boils down to "you can't say anything meaningful in 140 characters." Twitter isn't everyone's cup of tea, but complaining that you can't say anything with 140 characters is a terrible excuse.

Came across this in the "The Elements of Typographic Style" on the subway ride this morning:

A reasonable working minimum for justified text in English is the 40-character line. Shorter lines may compose perfectly well with sufficient luck and practice, but in the long run, justified lines averaging less than 38 or 40 characters will lead to white acne or pig bristles: a rash of erratic and splotch word spaces or an epidemic of hyphenation. When the line is short, the text should be set ragged right. In large doses, even ragged-right composition may look anorexic if the line falls below 30 characters but in small and isolated patches - ragged marginal notes, for example- the minimum line (if the language is English) can be as little as 12 or 15 characters.

 A few paragraphs later:

On a conventional book page, the measure, or length of line, is usually around 30 times the size of the type, but the lines as little as 20 or as much as 40 times the type size fall withing the expectable range. If, for example, the type size is 10 pt, the measure might be around 30 x 10 = 300 pt, which is 300/12 = 25 picas. A typical lowercase alphabet length for a 10 pt text font is 128 pt, and the copyfitting table tells us that such a font set to a 25-pica measure will yield roughly 65 characters per line.

65 characters per line? Filling two full lines would leave someone with 10 characters in change! I started counting characters on several lines throughout the book and they all yielded less than 60 characters, but each line said a lot. 140 chars might sound confining, but it's really not. Think about it as one line (or two depending on the font size) in a larger paragraph, which is part of a larger chapter, which is part of a larger book.

@kottke linked this  [article] this past week, and it got me craving to undertake a hundred day repetitive project. Michael Bierut, senior critic in graphic design at Yale D-School, gives his graduate students this basic assignment:

Beginning Thursday, October 21, 2010, do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day between today and up to and including Friday, January 28, 2011, the last day of the project, by which time you will have done the operation one hundred times. That afternoon, each student will have up to 15 minutes to present his or her one-hundred part project to the class.

The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation. The medium is open, as is the final form of the presentation on the 100th day.

What a fantastic project! It teaches you to keep pushing and just produce. There will be days when you just can't for the life of you do one more thing, but if you know that the next day you'll be doing something new, though in the same vein, there is a kind of succinctness to the current project and an opportunity to reinvent the next day.

I'm toying with a few ideas:

• 100 different book covers from 100 different stores/apts/libraries/etc
• 100 daily lego sculpture
• meet 100 new people and take a picture with them
• 100 photographs of street art: graffiti, stickers, various awesomeness
• resurrect my "how many __________ does it take to change a lightbulb" jokes

Or I might just steal the wildly enjoyable idea of Ely Kim: 100 days, 100 songs, 100 locations, 100 dances.

I'm making a decision tomorrow and starting on Monday. Let me know if you want to do something too and we can set final dates together!

Wish I could take credit for this, alas I only took a picture of it.

"Take a good look at the people you will be working with because you will become more like them than they will become like you." -- looking for job advice.

Not sure what The HuffPo is trying to say by suggesting that the reader also check out articles titled "After a Split", "Sex with The Ex", "I Failed a Divorce Mediation" above an article announcing Aol's acquistion of The Huffington Post.

And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for."

--Roughing It,  Mark Twain