Media

On Fashion Blogs

A Video that was presented at PREMIUM Exhibitions panel on Fashionblogs, asking Suzy Menkes, Yvan Rodic (Facehunter), Jennie Tamm (The Coveted) and Julia Knolle and Jessie Weiss (LesMads) to share their opinion.

Via Designnotes.

Slowness, writing and comprehension

Something I have been thinking about lately.

Through-out grade school I was repeatedly taught to write notes on whatever I was reading and to rewrite any other notes as a means to comprehend the material I was studying. I think I read somewhere since, that writing involves higher level cognitive processes that aid in memory (I don't have time to find the source). Even my Mandarin teacher forced me to write ad nauseam pinyin, and later characters, on the white board as a means to remember and to help keep me warm in winter.

Up until the past five years or so most of my learning and research activities were slow - the act of writing, high-lighting, reading books, and bookmarking passages took time. Time which allowed for greater absorption of the data at hand. Generally, you had to read through allot more material to help support your arguments.

My undergrad essays took seemingly forever to construct and my masters thesis encompassed a couple years of reading and experience.

Contrast that with the methods I, and many others, use now for the light research activities I am involved in in an almost daily basis. It's all at the meta level - delicious for reference material, textedit for in-use snip-its of text, Google docs for draft sharing and collaboration, Flickr and iView for images, weblogs and micro-blogs for sharing, Yojimbo for data stores, and Google and host of other sources for research. It's all fast and shallow with an emphasis on cut 'n' paste.

In effect we've become curators and convenors of other peoples material. We don't absorb, we regurgitate. We don't take the time to allow for that transformation of data to knowledge.

Online reading is part of this as are newer formats like RSS. We try to 'see' as much data as possible. Notice how much of the productivity software developed lately is about 'tasks' and concerns small snippets of text?

What effects does this have on the ability to concentrate? When I told a doctor I was having trouble focusing he advised to read real books slowly.

I wonder if there is anyway to actually slow down the process and still use digital tools? I'm not convinced I ever truly read anything onscreen as well as in a book. It's more scanning and collecting.

More:
The Effects of the Shared Writing Process on Reading Comprehension of Second and Third Grade Students.
Improving Reading Comprehension Through Higher Order Thinking Skills (pdf).
An insight on designers’ sketching activities in traditional versus digital media

Netflix for magazines

Maghound is an interesting service that lets you choose from a modest catalogue of magazines that get delivered to your door every month for one flat fee. The kicker is that you can change your magazines or try new ones whenever you like. The downside is that they only deal with US customers. A fact that is mentioned nowhere on their site. So if you are an American expat. in Singapore this isn't for you but if you live in the US and love Netflix this is worth a try.

Maghound. Via Uncrate.

Thinking for a Living

Thinking for a Living is a collection of recommended readings and online links put together by Duane Kin. It's expansive and could keep you busy reading for ages. While the design of the site is quite lovely it suffers from that old fashioned problem of tiny type. Enjoy but be prepared to bump up the font size a couple of times.

Thinking for a Living

Creative Critics

88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day

Being mobile and leading a truly portable lifestyle requires that you at least try to cut out some of the inefficiencies in your life. Increased productivity gives you the time to focus on the things that truly matter - would rather be working in your hotel room staring at the beach or relaxing on the beach after completing your days tasks in record time? This book presents 88 of the best life hacks from the Lifehacker.com web site archive. A website indispensible to finding new ways to refine personal productivity by tweaking, modding, mashing up, and repurposing web apps, desktop software, and common everyday objects. Order Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day from Amazon ($16.49US).

Landmark Mandarin Oriental Hotel Photos

I have considered the Landmark Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong for a weekend city getaway on a number of occaisions. Though it is possible to find some reasonably priced package deals, at an often quoted price of ~$500.00US a night this hotel is not for the budget traveller. Like many people whenever I am choosing a hotel, especially when I am paying for it myself, I want to see as many photos of the room as I can. It can help me make a choice between a few hotels. Most hotels it seems either share too little or share a view that exists only in the photographers mind so it's great when people share there photos like user Beeze has on Flickr.

See her photos here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Free WiFi in Bangkok

It's pretty hard these days to not stay in touch when you are traveling. Even the most remote places in Asia will have some kind of Internet café where you can send off an email or write an entry in your journal. Taking your own laptop and expecting city wide connectivity is another matter all together. Most upscale hotels will have some kind of broadband but who the heck wants to experience Asia from the sterility of a Hilton? Get out to a café and meet people.

When I was spending allot of time in Bangkok I relied on the Siam Center's wifi outside the Apple Center and a open wifi hotspot close to the Starbucks near Soi Nana. Stickman, a long time expat in Thailand, has created a list of wifi hotspots that will help you keep connected when visiting the sin city. There are many more complete sources but I always like to rely on those "on the ground" vs. some anonymous database. More to come later.

Free Wi-Fi hot spots In Thailand

Bangkok Hotels