This seriously could not have come at a better time. I'm in LA and just started getting into the community. There are some hack labs around the city as well, but nothing specifically like this that I'm aware of. Massive props to steveeq1 for the link.
Just a stab in the dark, but there could be several reasons to try a font like Verdana:
1) Cheap licensing fees. The best typefaces cost plenty of money to use. There is a recession going on but.. c'mon.. you know?
2) It is a challenge to set and make professional use of a shitty typeface. Perhaps this was a ballsy exercise in flaunting an anti-elitist sort of position by using a "proletarian" font. Who knows?
I used to get into friendly, though heated, debates with a friend who would accuse me of being an academic typographer. As a defense, I challenged him to make good use of a junky font like Times New Roman to determine who actually had skill and who was a stylistic fashion whore.
Maybe this is some such attempt by the designers, I don't know? I kinda have a hard time believing that the print designer(s) for Ikea of all places simply made a bonehead error by using a screen font for print.
Just my 3 million bajillion cents. Side note: if anyone has a magical potion that helps to make a succinct point, I'd like to have a teaspoon or so :D
Five years in muay thai (MTA in North Hollywood) and blue belt in brasilian jiu jitsu. Lots of concussions, broken hands, messed up hips and tendons ;)
Seems like hackers are more into martial arts rather than MMA or muay thai or boxing, BUT I've met some guys that are engineers and programmers.
Fighting takes a couple years to get good at and keeps you goal oriented and focused under extreme stress and failure.
The first round is all hype, but when the third bell rings you feel like shit getting ready to go out there. That's when doubt creeps in. Killing that doubt in your mind or staying attacking even when you're losing is what makes a fighter a special breed of person. Lessons are learned the hard way, but they stick with you.
I listen to metal (Mastodon, Neurosis, Isis, Misery Speaks, Cult of Luna) in the day if I'm wired on coffee. Otherwise, I listen to a lot of ambient/IDM (Marconi Union, Signer,Arovane, etc).
Generally if I'm drawing, daydreaming, designing, or what have you I listen to a lot of indie, downtempo, sexy/chill house.
Don't forget that the legal system started updating itself and now has laws on the books more akin to being charged with terrorism. Another thing to consider is people getting threatened with bogus associations to organized crime.
People keep a low profile and things are more implicitly communicated when out in the open. A good hacker is creative, so a creative individual can just as easily imagine the "alternate" possibilities of a particular technology.
If you go back and learn Algebra, Trig, Geometry, then I fully recommend the Cliffs Study Solver series of textbooks because they are very cheap and very thorough plus each day you do a chapter, you'll make cumulative progress.
You are introduced to a concept, given a set of practice problems to see the concept in action, then given a problem set to solve on your own.
When you say they aren't saviours, what are the drawbacks you experience? I'm curious to try them since I'm pretty athletic but they seem kind of Skymall-ish, you know? :D I have yet to meet anyone who's actually worn them and had informed criticism. Do you use them all the time now or just here and there?
What's up fellow Angelino! I've been thinking about these things for surfing since there are so many damn rocks everywhere. I don't recall a time whenever I've gone into the ankle snapping, toe jamming continental shelf and felt anything incredible about it (other than on the pain scale) :D, so the more I read, the more interesting these look. How do they hold up against sweat / moisture?
I've tried to get into emacs and vi but neither of them "feel right". Generally it seems like these editors take a particularly geeky sort of personality to get into in the first place, which is awesome. The nature of emacs isn't exactly user-friendly, so someone moving towards it would already be adventurous enough to parse the help files (and has probably read a fair share of man pages as well... blegh).
As for the images and title of the article: what could have been (very often times these sorts of pieces ARE) a very drone-like, dry sack of shit for a paper that only someone with a robotic policeman's mentality could enjoy, I found to be humorous and filled with life.
Will I be using emacs anytime soon? Probably not but it's encouraging to see that there are cool, funny, HUMAN community members out there who want to help get people excited and productive with something they enjoy.
Drawing. I draw them and try to make them beautiful, not just throwaway squiggles. My thoughts come fast and translating them into words is like having to edit a paper at the same time as the idea is taking influence over my mind.
One day, a ladybug went to a caterpillar and said to him, "You have so many legs! How do you decide which leg goes in front of the other when you walk?"
He thought about it for a moment and told her, "Well it's easy, you just put this one in front of this one in front of this one in front of this one......." and while proudly demonstrating his abilities to her, he toppled over like a dumb ass!
Another alternative is I'll use my BlackBerry's voice notes to rattle something off and save it to make sense of later. :)
This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.
After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work.
In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly frowned upon to pitchforks-and-torches style anger.
No!Spec (http://www.no-spec.com) is the industry's main sounding board against these types of "competitions", so I won't rehash those points here.
The article's implied "gee-whiz these are wonderkids!" approach to the entrants didn't sit too well with me. The fact that entrants were largely between 18 and 24 years old seems more to do with a lack of professional experience (evidenced by partaking in spec work), than some magic ability of younger people to be able to do compelling work in technology.
I think it's more probable that those grizzled old guys with beards are too busy getting paid for their labor to partake in a lottery, hence the skewed demographics. Also, it would be natural to see more entrants win in countries where the US dollar exchange rate benefits taking a risk of getting no money. It isn't indicative of a lack of talent inside the US.
Haha that's a bit of a stretch! If it's their own internal data and they want to monetize it in this way, the market will decide whether the price they set is worthy of the product being sold.
While I might disagree with the usefulness/pricing of their data considering widely available alternative sources it isn't exactly on par with maligning someone's civil rights :D
Very cool idea. It's the mental equivalent of cross training for an MMA match! I'd like to give this a go tomorrow, but we have to come up with something a bit more memorable than "The ljolel Method". Any suggestions? ;)
If I don't eat and have coffee I'm like a monster.