Emily Chang – Designer

Honored to find out that ADD has been chosen as a finalist in the weblog category for SXSW 2004! Can’t wait to go to the event in March.

I’m a nut for anything illuminated (eg. my sculptures circa 1999) so this is definitely something I can relate to…

“Illuminated Handbags. Ladies, suppose that your handbag featured a “cool, gentle light” inside, so you could see where everything was—wouldn’t that be great? Of course it would, and the good news, reports Thaddeus Herrick in The Wall Street Journal, is that a recent innovation involving an old technology called “electroluminescence” is about to make it a reality.  Electroluminescence, or EL, “uses electricity to light up specially treated plastic,” but does so in a way that “generates so little heat that it remains cool to the touch.” EL actually “has been around for decades, but for years researchers puzzled over applications because of its low light intensity and the fact that originally it only worked on flat, rigid spaces.”

Read the rest of this article »

“Smarter Bookmarks. How do you find your favorite websites? Some people, reports Lisa Guernsey in The New York Times, “try to keep track of websites by sending themselves an e-mail message with the link and a note of why it might be useful. Others,” she writes,” print pages or use sticky notes.

Increasingly fewer people, however, bother to bookmark pages anymore. That’s according to William Jones and Harry Bruce, a pair of associate professors at the University of Washington, who dismiss bookmarks as “‘information closets’ that hold a jumble of sites people never return to.” That’s a problem that William and Harry hope to solve, and they’ve got a three-year, $378,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to do so. Their project, called “Keeping Found Things Found,” involves research into “how people returned to sites they had visited before.”

Finally, the sand of Venice Beach under my feet!  When I left Ithaca, NY two days ago, there was snow on the ground and a storm on the way.  Meanwhile, in Southern California people are surfing and basking in the sun.

View out of my hotel room in Marina Del Ray, CA.

Traveling to LA for a new client meeting at LMU.  Looking forward to warmer weather and seeing the Pacific again.  Hopefully, I’ll have time to head to Venice beach and Santa Monica for some photos with the new Nikon.

On the flight to LA today at 11:14 EST.

Remember “push” technology? It was all the rage back in 1997 when Pointcast launched its software that turned a PC screensaver into a headline ticker for all sorts of real-time information. The problem was, users quickly tired of the constant onslaught and network administrators complained the massive data downloads overwhelmed their systems. By 1999, the whole thing had been largely forgotten, until the recent surge in blogging (Web logging) resurrected the concept. Using RSS (really simple syndication) software, any Internet user can automatically receive the latest updates from thousands of Web sites, and this time the “feeds” are so bandwidth-efficient, network managers aren’t even likely to take notice. The technology caters to ruminators who churn out a running commentary on their favorite topics, but many news organizations—including CNN, the New York Times and the BBC—have also quietly added RSS feeds that provide constant updates to their subscribers. To read RSS feeds, you need a program called an aggregator. There are a number to choose from, many of them free, but one adaptable that works with Windows, Macintosh and Linux can be found at www.amphetadesk.com

(Boston Globe 5 Jan 2004)