I want to work with Thomas Heatherwick

I have worked with architects, engineers and contractors for nearly 20 years, managing the design and construction of all manner of facilities. As more than 18 of those years were in the public sector (15+ federal - military, 3+ municipal), function over form was unfortunately a primary design consideration. Where form did come into play, it was usually a more decorative stone face instead of some brick. Too often, I was working with budgets set down four to five or more years earlier, and in some cases with unchangeable scopes of work - the military construction (MILCON) program is rather rigid in that respect to ensure what is authorized is built (getting permission and funding for one thing but building another is verbotten). You can imagine that the crystal ball gets a little foggy out that far. And, by the time you get the funding to design and build, the budgets are usually too little to do what is needed, requiring creative scope cutting to get the most product for the buck. And that is why almost no federal, and very few municipal buildings are anything other than sterile designs that serve a functional and nearly never a visual need. So you can probably see why architect Thomas Heatherwick, and his firm Heatherwick Studio are such a treat for me. His designs are visually stunning, incredibly creative and are slap-the-forehead wake-ups to what we should be able to do at no more cost than traditional design. I was amazed at the very innovative solution to a common construction requirement (no spoiler...it's at the 4 minute point in the video), and even more amazed at the focus of his talk: the British contribution to the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the Seed Cathedral. Imagine deliberately designing a building with 60,000 penetrations...and then making it work.

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Cheap and easy to build websites for those who don’t know html

I've started to play the guitar and sing around town. It's loads of fun. Friends and acquaintances are were starting to ask me how to tell where and when I would next be performing. The obvious solution was that I needed a website, but I barely know any html, yet I wanted to create a pleasant looking site. And I didn't want to pay much. Google's free website design software looked too rudimentary, and it didn't allow me to use my own domain. I read some complaints about Go Daddy's website building service, and thus shied away, though it might be fine for a static site like the one I wanted. [Note: I do much of the website admin work at DI, which uses a Wordpress platform, which is terrific, but doesn't really fit my needs for my personal site]. There are various other companies out there offering free or cheap websites. I looked at some of these, but not many, so don't take this as any sort of deeply knowledgeable survey. I ended up choosing Intuit's Homestead program, and I'm happy with it. Homestead offers various packages, but I only needed the basic level. I will be paying less than $150 for two years, which gets me a access to Homestead's easy-to-use website-building program, up to five pages, 25 MB of storage and 5 GB/month of bandwidth. This price (which ends up being about $6/month) also provides me with a domain (I picked erichvieth.net -- I already owned erichvieth.com ) and the option of a blog. They have other packages too. As you might expect, they will urge you to buy their more expensive packages, which have more bells and whistles. Homestead's base price includes unlimited live and knowledgeable phone assistance. For instance, they walked me through the process of linking the domain I already owned with my new website. I took advantage of Homestead's live help several times while building my site; pleasant people tutored me on how to do some of a few other things that were not quite obvious (until I did them once). You can train up on this software in an hour. The design-making software is so well considered that it is hard to get things wrong while making your new site. Once you put together one site, you'll be tempted to help family and friends slap together their new sites. Within a few hours, I had put together my own personal website, which gets the job done quite well (though I'm still tweaking it). I used two of the pages to provide information about my music. Since I had the right to create five pages, I used the other three to provide information about my photography, writing (I'm an avid blogger . . . ) and a general bio. I'm posting on the way I built my new site in case anyone reading this is in the same position as I was, looking for a good combination of low cost website, relatively low-volume bandwidth, and easy to design. If anyone else is happy with any comparable service, feel free to mention it in the comments. Remember the parameters: low cost and design-it-yourself website building for people who don't know any html.

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Humans are so well designed!

I saw this snippet on my New Scientist RSS feed. Some researchers, investigating methods to improve IVF success rates, have discovered that contrary to popular belief, chromosomal abnormalities, and hence miscarriages, are not abnormal occurrences, but are in fact the norm.

As women age, their eggs are more likely to have the wrong number of chromosomes, which can lead to miscarriages. But when Joris Vermeersch from the Centre for Human Genetics in Leuven, Belgium, and colleagues examined 23 embryos from nine young, fertile couples who were undergoing IVF for screening purposes, they found that 21 had chromosomal abnormalities, suggesting these are in fact the norm (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.1924).
I can only presume god was just being mean when he said 'go forth and multiply' - since he must have known that our ability to multiply was broken.

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You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).

I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas. These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million. Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope. Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN's Spaces or Google's Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn't ever load any software or maintain the "backend" of your blog. In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That's why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools. Here's an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren't exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you'll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it's free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.

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