Sticks and Stones

Prefab housing should never be sneered at. At time of great necessity, cheap materials easily combined to form a decent standard of housing, were paramount. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA built many - albeit not nearly enough - trailer parks; using prefab techniques to build easily and quickly assembled residences for those who need it most.

As with most mundane and necessary things, someone comes along and decides the idea should be spiced up. From there, a new artform is born. Houses as art is not a new concept: we’ve been decorating our homes and building brand new ones specifically to show off our fine taste. Classical forms used on gated mansions, glass-fronted modernist homes, even Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of the otherwise unassuming brick to great effect are all demonstrations of this desire to turn the home into something more than four walls and a roof.

MoMA commissioned five architects: KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia; Lawrence Sass of Cambridge, MA; Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of Manhattan; Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria; and Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London to form an exhibition of prefab houses.

Their gorgeous designs use the same materials that go into very cheap homes, but by adding their flourish these architects have turned ordinary boxes into beautiful and environmentally friendly dwellings. The exhibition is open from July 20 to October 20.

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Before getting this MacBook I was used to a 20 inch screen which allowed me a lot more screen real estate. Downsizing was painful because it allowed me much less space in which to do all that I do, which is why Rafe Needleman’s piece at Webware.com last week was so useful.

Even though you may not be able to decorate your desk with two 30 inch Apple Cinema displays as Al Gore does, it is likely that from a hodgepodge of assorted CRTs and LCDs you could create a truly impressive screen worthy of a nuclear power plant.

While impressive to look at and possibly quite pleasing to own, there are actual usability benefits to this indulgent proposal: you’ll get more done. It’s incredibly easy to add a second display: all modern operating systems and computers have support for this. It takes the click of a few buttons and the tightening of a few screws (possibly just the sliding in of a plug to a socket i.e. MacBook, Cinema display and the wonder of mini-DVI).

But what if you need your RSS reader, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, World of Warcraft, and Sticks and Stones open? You would need two, maybe three monitors at the very least. Products like DisplayLink and DisplayFusion would be best suited for this sort of rigourous usage. As soon as I dive behind my computer and unhook the necessary cables to link up the 13 year old Gateway 17 inch monitor, I’ll be hitting feeds twice as hard, and hammering out posts twice as quickly. Or, procrastinating twice as much.

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Jeff Buckley was a musician who even after his death enjoys resounding acclaim, not only by myself and Udayan, but music critics and musicians alike. The son of Tim Buckley, a popular folk singer, Jeff released only a single album in his lifetime, Grace (1994) before tragically drowning in 1997 at the age of just 30.

I do not claim to be a music mogul, nor do I claim to be in a position to understand the intricate components which comprise a song. I could certainly never write one despite my (distinctly-amateur) guitarring. However, Buckley’s music was just beautiful. His voice had such an impressive vocal range and sublime sound. His lyrics are pervading, meaningful and timeless. His music is modest and understated. He is quite simply, my only true musical hero.

And it is a shame when you realise that your favourite artist of all time only lived long enough to release one album in his lifetime, and for some sketches and unreleased recordings to be released after his passing. Although I only found his music 8 years after his death, I miss him and wrote this post to share my passion for his work.

If any of you do enjoy Coldplay, Radiohead or Muse perhaps it is worth listening to an individual who influenced all of them yet who is so unknown in comparison. A tragic story indeed; the most talented of musicians who would have had so many great records to offer lovers of great music, whose life cut short when he drowned in the Mississippi on May 29th, 1997. Ten years on, barely thirty songs, and yet his ethereal voice draws legions of new fans every day.

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When I went to the US for an extraordinary month-long holiday last August, I constantly found myself surprised at paying the same numerical value for goods as I would in England. Then, just as now, the dollar was worth 50p which meant the US had a figurative ‘Half off!’ sign across every port. The federal government is atypical in its stance on tourism: most other countries have dedicated agencies for courting well-heeled foreigners to spend their currency in your nation. The US left this to state governments and following California’s splashy $4.5 million ad campaign this week, I reflected on what it is like to be a visitor to America.

On the one hand there are the expensive campaigns. In 2004, the memorable ‘You’ve seen the movies, now visit the set’ ads played on a variety of TV channels. Following the Californian ad, designed by MeringCarson, that ad began playing again. By all accounts these campaigns are working; the Commerce Department reported a 7% increase in number of visitors to 23.3 million, but closer inspection reveals this is still lower than the pre-9/11 figure of 26 million per year.

The BBC ran a series of interviews with Brits in New York over the holiday week asking why they were there. Invariably, the response was along the lines of ‘half off Christmas presents!’ This apparent success and the 7% rise suggests things are on the way up, however anyone who has visited a US Embassy to try to secure a visa recently will know that the new anti-terroism measures makes any possible visit to the US from countries whose citizens are required to have a visa extremely cumbersome.

If the US wants to streamline immigration policy, which does mean losing the somewhat absurd security policies, it would likely see a massive increase in tourism. Which would mean more cash into the economy. As anyone keeping an eye on the current state of the US economy can tell you, more cash is desperately needed. Keep that machine oiled, and let me visit the Statue of Liberty without leaving my dignity at the metal detector.

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I suppose it was inevitable. They used Myriad Pro but thinned it. They showed only half the Apple icon - the notebook is half the weight of the Sony TZ. They even used the word air. To be honest, I was hoping for an impressive WiMAX implementation but perhaps that is too WWDC for Macworld.

With a 13.3″ screen, a full-size backlit keyboard, 0.76 inches thick at the thickest point down to 0.16 at the thinnest… this is a truly cutting edge device; something we’ve not really seen from Apple since the titanium PowerBook. The MacBook Pro was always impressively fast but it was a heavy, full-featured device. This MacBook Air is fast, thin, and features a 1.8″ (iPod classic derived) 80GB hard drive with the option for a 64GB solid state drive (better: shocks and drops won’t affect SSDs as much and in general they are more reliable - particularly being less susceptible to data loss).

Expectedly, but no less disappointingly, there won’t be an optical drive there. While I am all for the death of physical media, we’re not there yet! We still need drives for Blu-ray videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs (for the same price, far superior sound to DRM laden AACs or Amazon’s MP3s) because WiMAX isn’t worldwide, which means we rely on 4Mb connections and wired broadband. Despite whatever pipe-dreams Steve & Co. have, over-the-air content distribution is not yet a reality. For $99, an external drive. Shows we really aren’t ready to move away from physical media yet.

The MacBook Air comes with a 60% smaller Core 2 Duo running at 1.6 to 1.8 GHz (see, when Steve snaps his fingers, even the mighty Intel rebuilds their flagship processor). 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, a phenomenal 5 hours battery life, and the industry standard 2GB RAM round out the specifications list I can glean from Tom Krazit at CNET’s liveblogging of the keynote. One final note, it is a relief to see that the device will have the usual array of ports (albeit likely the paltry set featured on the MacBook) and a MagSafe connector.

It will be available for pre-order today, delivering in 2 weeks. And when you finally decide to throw away your svelte little 3lbs notebook, it is fully recyclable: their first mercury and aresenic free display. All of the circuit boards are bromide and PVC free. But for $1799 and up, I doubt you’ll be throwing it away any time soon.

A couple of additions: 1. Highly disappointing: the battery is not user-replaceable! While of course a compromise to ensure minimum size and weight, it is very unimpressive. 2. That external drive is a really smart move. Why? Because in a few months, don’t be surprised to see an external Blu-ray drive, in the way the Xbox 360 has an external HD-DVD drive.

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