matthewgruman.com

• A $7.50 cab receipt that I paid for with my credit card. He refused to bring me to my door and left me at the corner.
• A off-market Playstation One Memory Card (“1 Mega”, Island Blue). I do not now, nor have I ever, owned a PS1.
• About two years worth of Greenpeace stuff: calendars, newsletters, folders, etc.
• A 2007 organizer. I wrote down a couple of doctor’s appointments, and my then-girlfriend wrote down some dates so I wouldn’t forget in January and February; the rest is empty.
• Draft One of my “Irish Song Cheat Sheet”. I didn’t have enough time to learn them before the show, so I printed out the chords and taped them on my guitar. I ended up making two pages, and then making a little latch and lever out of tape so I could access page two during the show without trouble. I was talking to a guy after the show who thought I’d torn off my only cheat sheet because I didn’t need it. He was wrong.
• Thank you note from a couple of years ago: “Thank you for your contribution to this production. Few people notice the bass when it is present, but we all feel it in our souls when it is absent.” I think that’s a knock at missing practice.
• Receipt from a restaurant on campus I try not to eat at because they serve bagged salad. I can’t think of any valid reason for a restaurant to serve bagged salad.
• Certificado Di Autenticità / Certificate of Authenticity from my Versace glasses. I’m pretty sure it’s the only one I have.
• Handwritten notes — spastic arrows and boxes everywhere — on how to switch from a 12-hour insulin to a 24-hour one.
• Directions for a sleep-deprived electroencephalography. The part that says YOU SHOULD NOT DRIVE has been scratched out by a nurse.

Gizmodo

My friend Dany is looking for graphic design work in Toronto and sent me this Craigslist posting:

* Don’t bother applying if you can’t read the following paragraphs and send me exactly what I ask for below *

I’m looking for an * outstanding * web graphic artist that has recently completed their post-secondary degree (MUST be within the last two years).
This is a requirement; don’t apply if you haven’t completed your degree / diploma within the last two years.

Although this candidate is a new graduate they need to have substantial experience in WEB DESIGN. You need to specialise in web design, I’m not interested in you if you only do print, or logos, or annual reports, etc…. you have to do web design and do it WELL.

Your professionalism needs to be high, not the typical “web design” that often comes from these post-secondary programs; you need to have high quality and I would expect you then would be at the top of your class.

You must be interested in a career starting with working FULL-TIME on-site in downtown Toronto. I’m not interested in you if you are just a contractor looking for a gig.

Please send:
1) Your resume
2) Web Examples of your work (I’m not asking for print examples)
3) Your salary expectations
4) Your design school and your ranking in your class

You’d expect the company posting that would have to be pretty fantastic, eh? I checked the website attached to their email address and got this:

A mess of Coldfusion errors on a really outdated, table-layout website.

I really hope that no one is bullied into applying for that job. No graphic designer, especially a recent graduate, should think that this is an appropriate way to look for employees. If you’re a company who is looking for a student, you should be very prepared to lead them through the employment process. The students who are already “amazing” won’t be interested in these kinds of job listings because they’ve already made their contacts during school.

I find it quite disgusting that a company who has so many Education clients would act this way.

Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.

The Guardian.

The Holiday Sweater Song from justin on Vimeo.

Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military’s computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

Forbes.

He’s rocked, too, by Jules, an eerily familiar Robert Longo piece. “Is that the picture they used in American Psycho?! Damn!”

Kanye West in Spin Magazine.

Girls are not Chicks is a feminist colouring book. Not only do they offer a way for girls to be immersed in positive female role models, but they’ve priced the book on a sliding scale based on what you can afford.

Amazingly enough, I found out about them from a spam email at work. There’s no way an academic lit journal’s audience is interested in colouring books, but I tend to check links if they come in a well-written email that isn’t porn. I’m glad I did, because I’d much rather have my nieces colouring this than another ridiculous role model:

Link.

Link.

Link.

Espresso machines have VERY sexy designs…

Minor changes in repeated actions could be part of an unconscious effort to improve performance, said U.S. researchers who studied subtle variations in the pitch of a bird’s song.

Researchers Evren Turner and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, suggest their findings, which appear online Wednesday in the British scientific journal Nature, shed new light into why everyone from high-performance athletes to musicians vary in even the most highly practised skills.

CBC.

Bird songs are some of the most intricately fascinating things I’ve ever studied. The same song survives generation to generation as a way to improve kin selection. But, if you separate a group — even just by placing them on either sides of a river — the song starts changing significantly until it’s unrecognizable. It’s all about the details.