A housekeeping post: My fall semester starts Monday, and since I’ve been dragging a little lately, I took two days off work last week to dust out my head- and living-spaces. The extra-long weekend was EXACTLY what I needed. In the past four days I did lots of laundry, watched pictures moving on screens, went out to three brunches, drew many little illustrations, made salon & dentist appointments, walked almost everywhere, enjoyed unseasonably gorgeous weather (weather that isn’t physically painful is always unseasonable in New England, regardless of what the season happens to be), scrubbed and washed things, organized a junk drawer, and otherwise managed to be productive and lazy in ideal proportions. Some highlights:

On Thursday, I did nearly nothing.

On Friday, I painted a chair.

On Saturday, I made bagels with my boyfriend.

On Sunday, I dressed up to watch Mad Men at a retro cocktail bar.

This is going to be a really exceptional week, and I’m so ready for it.

Nomad Drizzle rain shoes. Waterproof rubber flats. &cute! $40 each. I’ll take them all.

Last week’s episode of Mad Men—like the premiere—didn’t really merit a Design Geek Review. It wasn’t terribly fabulous, visually or otherwise. (I’m bored of the suburbs.)

However, yesterday’s was wow! So here are some things that set this Design Geek’s heart racing last night:

1.&2.

3.

4.&5.

6.

1. The Campbell apartment. Where to begin? The orange accent wall/built-in bookcase? the incredible wooden room dividers? When can I move in?
2. More Campbell apartment.
3. Clara’s dress!
4. Peeping Peggy!
5. And again.
6. A woman wearing pants in the workplace. We haven’t seen this before or since last season’s Joanie-ex-machina finale.

Orange zebra bracelet and green elephant bracelet from Furbish Design Studio.

Three things that made me happy this Sunday:

1. Helvetica poster!
2. Artist’s maquette in Peggy’s office!
3. Underwood typewriter ad framed above Allison’s desk!

This month is all about production.

Collaborative art with my boyfriend, making things happen in our apartment, and completing my master’s thesis proposal. This last is the biggest news.

I found out several weeks ago that Harvard redeveloped my computer science degree program, changing the focus from Digital Media Arts and Sciences to Digital Media and Instructional Design. This is HUGE for three reasons: (1) the degree and its requirements now align much better with my career goals and proposed thesis project, (2) the new instructional design classes are far more exciting than object-oriented programming, and (3) I can definitely graduate in May 2011 under the new guidelines—provided I turn in my thesis proposal by the end of this month.

So if updates here are scarce over the next three weeks, that’s what I’ll be up to.

While this “pink turd” (to borrow and slightly tweak Gruber’s lovely turn of phrase) is truly, truly hideous, it actually is pretty much on par with the kind of clueless-about-half-the-species sort of whiz kids who named the iPad.

Just my two thoughts on an item at digitaldaily.com

I should really start a tumblog for this sort of thing.

via a bit late.

I think I need to own this shoe.

This is brilliant:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito.

Very busy with classes, so here’s one of my programming projects to tide you over.

I call it pinbOut; it’s a small video game somewhere between pinball and breakout (aka brickbreaker, but more properly arkanoid).

http://positdesign.com/media/pinbout/

Player one (white) is controlled with the z and x keys; player two (black) is o and p. Depending on your screen resolution, you may need to scroll down quickly. Requires up-to-date Java in your browser.

In the last three weeks, my programming class has kept me too busy playing my hand at being Ada to put together a coherent piece on the order of last year’s ALD post. But I’m already planning something all-out for next year. So this one’s a quickie.

Much of tech right now is dominated by social media. And one of the big rumors floating around is that because women are more “social” than men, we dominate social media. And that’s not quite the case.

So, for Ada Lovelace Day, you should check out the following brilliant geek girls, web designers, software developers, and connectors on Twitter and elsewhere.

@randomdeanna is Deanna Zandt. I was beyond lucky to have the opportunity to attend her talk at last year’s Women Action & The Media conference in Cambridge. She wrote the BEST guide to twitter anywhere; it’s where I send absolutely everyone who’s new to the network. She’s also the author of the forthcoming Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking—yes, she literally wrote the book on social networking. And used social networking to crowdfund the writing process.

@mollydotcom is Molly E. Holzschlag. She is the face and brain of web standards. If you hate spacer.gif, if writing jerky workarounds for IE6 grinds your gears, if you value your web browsing experience—well then you owe Molly a beer. She’s intensely involved in the development of CSS, HTML5, and of the Opera browser. When I wanted to be a professional writer, I wanted to be Margaret Atwood; when I studied philosophy, I looked up to Sam Power and Catherine Elgin; Molly Holzschlag was the first role-model I had when I became involved in computer science and began to think that I could do this as a career. I wrote about her last year for ALD; I want to hug her.

@Skud is a genius. Kirrily “Skud” Robert came across my radar via twitter, when her OSCON keynote talk on women in open source was making the retweet rounds. Her feed is brilliant and relevant and she’s hands-down one of the most important women in any part of the tech community today.

@thisisstar is Star St. Germain. I’ve raved about her amazingness here.

@teruterukama is Kama Lord. A former coworker of mine, in many ways Kama—more or less unintentionally, simply by being herself—taught me how to be female in tech without sacrificing my identity or personality. She’s a fresh gust of smarts, brutal honesty, and one of the snazziest dressers I know: think bright pink hair and a veiled pillbox hat.

Also, special love to a current coworker: the brilliant poet/programmer Dawn Gabriel. She’s a software engineer and mom to 8-year old Henry as well as a pair of amazing twin girls named for programming languages: Ada and Alice, who will be a year old on May 3.

We will be revisting these ideas in near-future posts:

“Inspiration is that unexpected moment of discovery when the mind leaps to a new place triggered by something interesting. That something interesting can be a thing you’ve read, or seen on the street, or in a book or gallery, or a piece of music, or something really great or something really awful. For me it is often unrelated to my work and is completely unpredictable.

Influence is when you see something you like, usually work that is related to the work you do, and you absorb whatever it is you like about it and either consciously or subconsciously emulate it or somehow incorporate something of it into your own work.

Reference material is when you look at something specific and try to make something like that.”

—Marian Bantjes, via

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her wearing a dress before. Love her.

“I have neither the discipline nor the desire to turn into someone else.”

via NYTimes.

via pcrm.

I wish Boston was hosting a funeral today. Via ie6funeral.com.

So, I’ve had this fascination with Pantone ever since I saw my first swatch book.

I was completely blown away by this very concise set of colors that could universally be identically reproduced by any printer, anywhere in the world, and how infinite the selection felt. This was during my first job out of college, and oh! I wanted to take the samples with me when I left! Then I found out that Pantone commissions or licenses companies to make messenger bags, mugs, and notebooks branded with specific color codes, and I kind of wanted those too.

This is preface to the fact that I needed a USB thumbdrive/memory stick. My class last semester required a massive-gig firewire drive, and I did at one point have this very ugly dun-colored thumbdrive, but it’s definitely vanished. probably in large part because it was this purely utilitarian thing that I never really loved. Anyway, I need a new one for my class this semester, and I wanted to play by the rules I set for myself as part of my new year’s resolution: to not own anything that I do not know is beautiful.

My first stop was the british girl gadget guide, shinyshiny.tv, and I dug through their posts tagged thumbdrive. The first to pique my interest was called “four eyes“; awkwardly sized, but totally geektastic, and likely hard to lose.

Adorable, right? But unfortunately, not available for purchase. And I looked around.

Then, I learned from shinyshiny that Pantone makes branded thumbdrives. Research told me the price was good (I grabbed the 4G). AND—here’s the kicker—they’ll engrave it with two lines for free! I like that upping of the odds that if it were misplaced, it would have a good chance of returning to me. I had my name and website inscribed on it; I’m not hard to get in touch with via this site. It just arrived today. Wanna see?

Look! It comes in an adorable silver case!!

And hello Helvetica!!

Of course I got it in 716C—one of my signature colors. I’m a super-happy girl tonight.

A “playful paint program” that you can play with, at http://positdesign.com/media/paintplay/

I utterly love Werner Herzog. There’s really just no two ways around it.

I’m also pretty certain that this is the first book I ever read the whole text of out loud to my mother, which she claims happened when I was 2.

via coilhouse magazine.

It’s Fashion Week! So, inspired by galadarling, I wanted to highlight some of my own fictional style icons.

5.   The Hitchcock Blonde; Vertigo, Marnie, The Birds, etc.