Mike Davidson has updated a post from 2004 to help you out of work designers get a job. It's kind of gratifying to see how he hires because, although I'm not looking for a job, and although I'm not a designer, the things I've done represent me much better than the things on my resume.

-Is the stuff in your portfolio well designed and in keeping with the creative style I’m looking for?
-Are you a cool person to work with?
-Do I know anyone personally or professionally who can vouch for you being a cool person to work with?
Everything else? Doesn’t matter.

What can you do, and who do you know?

Recently, Tom Brady was in a car accident and all of New England held their breath. It turned out he was fine, but his car was pretty badly banged up. It turns out the $97K Audi S8, was a loaner vehicle registered to a non-profit, Best Buddies, on whose board Tom Brady sits. Is this an issue? Joanna Weiss in the Globe thinks it might be.

Audi is supporting Best Buddies by giving them loaner cars. Presumably, Audi wouldn't be replacing these cars with a check. Presumably, Best Buddies can't really use 12 $100K cars at once and lets their board members drive the left overs...

I just can't get fired up about this. Audi wanted to support an org by giving them cars. The org wants the support of the corporation and takes the cars. The board member drives one of these cars. Maybe it's not pure, but neither is it especially unethical. What do you think?

We live in a world of so, so, so many ants. Did you read that ants post I put on Kottke? There's just gazillions of ants ALL OVER THE PLACE.

“The vortex of ants… is a circular mill where a group of ants (sometimes hundreds to millions of ants) get separated from the main swarm and ended up following each other’s scent in a circle. It’s called the death spiral because they continue to go in circles until they’re exhausted and die.”

Whatevs.net

And this week a bonus.


Each week, Chris Piascik draws something from the episode to go with this recap.

Last week's episode would have been difficult to top, so they went introspective this week. They just went through the spring, the traditional time of rebirth, but now it's about to be the beginning of summer and things are changing.
-Don's writing a journal. Getting introspective, swimming, and cutting down on the drinking. The dark downtrodden Don of the beginning of the season is apparently gone, last week was the rock bottom it seemed, and Don is on the path to digging his way out. "I should have finished High School. Everything could have been different." Well, if you say so.
-"I'm kidding around here." There's really no reason Ida Blankenship is on the show. As far as I can tell, she doesn't serve any purpose. I imagine something will happen with her at some point, but then again, maybe it won't.
-Did you notice? No racial or ethnic slurs this week. 2 in the first 2 minutes last week and none this week? Just rampant sexism is all... Er...
-Joey and Joanie... Joey's mother issues wouldn't let him be bullied by Joan, but mostly it was a way to show that Joan is of the Dr. Faye Miller School of Catching More Flies With Honey. Peggy thinks she was doing Joan a favor for firing Joey, and she was, but Joan just thinks it'll reinforce their respective stereotypes. Not really a situation Peggy could win, or would want to. Nice reference by Joey to Joan being raped and then in the next scene she goes home to her rapist husband. She bursts into tears when he suggests she talk to her work friends.
-Seriously? A Budweiser product placement in one of the journal writing scene?
-Don's list of things he'd like to do is surprisingly short and to the point. Climb a mountain, or travel anywhere, and get control of his feelings. I guess he feels one Clio is enough, but I definitely expected that list to be a little bit longer.
-"Every date feels like a first date with you." "Don't you want to be close with anyone?" Get used to it, sister, this is Don the Drape we're talking about. Bethany wants Don desperately, or rather she wants what he can give her. He's the right kind of guy for her, she thinks, but this new Don probably isn't going to end up with her. In fact, going down on Don in the cab might be the last we see of her.
-"I bet she was thinking of that line all night" was actually a line cut out of Casablanca. Maybe not, but didn't Don's voice-over dialogue sound straight out of a noir movie? Actually, this was a pretty neat trick, aging the voice in Don's head, making it sound almost sepia. Wonder if they'll keep using it.
-"I'm working, all the time." When you're not drinking or sleeping on your couch.
-I liked the scene with Henry and Betty in the car. I've written a couple times in the past about whether was a great actor playing wooden, or just an awful actor. This was one of the first scenes I thought she was really great in. At the end of the scene when when she was pouting against the door, she really looked like a little girl.
-"People tell you who they are but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be." Don has said stuff like this before. More than once.
-"You need 3 ingredients for a cocktail. Vodka and Mountain Dew is an emergency." Peggy Olson's Bartender's Bible will be out next week at booksellers all over.
-Don looked at alcohol different all episode. In the first meeting, he was going in and out, probably in some kind of withdrawal, on the date with Faye, before the date with Faye. There was a cool scene where he looked at his liquor tray, looked at his watch, and then called Ida for some coffee. You go, Don. Make a change today.
-"You want some respect, go out there and get it for yourself." "Don doesn't even know who you are." "It's just a job Joey, you'll get another one." Peggy really sounded like Don when firing Joey. It's a move away from "the guys", a group she had been moving to, up towards Don. This is a really interesting dynamic to watch this season.
-"Don has nothing to lose and you have everything." Remember when Francine wanted to shower with Don? While she's right that Don has nothing, Betty and Henry don't really have a whole lot. It was hard to tell if Don was invited to the birthday, or if he just came, but Betty was trying to make it work. We'll see how this plays out.
-"A man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him." I don't really know what this means at all.
-"I've been a little out of sorts lately." Ya think?
-"He's a handsome 2-bit gangster like you." Faye pretty clearly sees Don for what he is, but still wanted to use him for sex. Wonder where this is going to go.
-There wasn't any music at the end. Last week the open door shot played out with Bleecker Street by Simon & Garfunkle (a sort of foreboding song to play over the idea of an open door). This week, Don playing with Gene. More uplifting, and no music at all.

Data Collected by Alan McConchie about what people call soda around the country was put into a chart by Matthew Campbell and Prof. Greg Plumb of East Central University in Oklahoma and the result is below. The word is soda, everyone.



Via Kerry and LAist.

Tyler Cowen writes in the NYTimes

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.

Just wanted to see what these looked like next to each other. So that's what they look like next to each other.

This is an awesome video.



Via MattonlyMoore

I was in a hotel in Philadelphia this weekend in a relatively new hotel, and it had one of those doors connecting it to the room next door. It got me curious about them. The guy next door had the same ring tone as my wife, so every time his phone rang, we looked for her phone. And at night he snored. So I'm curious, how many people actually buy multiple hotel rooms when they travel these days? Back in the day of family vacations, I could see getting multiple rooms in the roadside motel and putting kids in one room, parents in the other. But that's not happening at the swanky Kimpton downtown. What gives? The number of people inconvenienced by these doors has got to outnumber those convenienced by them by, what, 4 times? 10 times?

Hotels, give it a rest. We don't need every room connected anymore.

This bothers me less than the unaged hamburger thing from last week, but I have no idea when this turned into a gripes blog. My bad.

I know nothing about this video, except that it's awesome.



(Via Unfogged.)