Style over Substance

13 alternatives to Helvetica

For some odd reason, last week I decided to install Windows Vista. Stupid move.

I’ve never been on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon before, even when I was an electrical engineering and computer science student, since Windows was doing just fine what it was meant to do from Windows 2000 on. I was entirely satisfied with XP. I find Linux to be far too mess-with-to-keep-it-running and MacOSX was hardware-dependent so I couldn’t test it. I was convinced that upgrading to Vista would not be the terrible nightmare that the media made it out to be. I mean, it’s still based on XP code in there so it couldn’t be too bad.

I was wrong.

So far, and I’ve been at my internship most days so I haven’t even really been able to give it a proper stress-test, these are the things I hate:

Urgh. I might just upgrade to XP if I have a few days left over.

Breaking my arm wasn’t too good for my weight loss plans. If you can’t actually do anything, sitting on the couch and eating suddenly looks fairly attractive. I’m fairly sure I’m not making March 1st for my 60kg goal. I’m shifting it to April 1st now. Still, looking at the charts, it looks like my weight’s going back in the right direction and I should have undone the damage to my trendline in a week or so.

Very cool Lego inspired salon table (via):

Dorky lightsaber-look umbrellas (via):

Why the scale lies

Interesting blog widget for LinkedIn users

Manuale Typographicum by Herman Zapf

A bizarre plagiarism story: Joyce Hatto, a popular classical pianist diagnosed with cancer in the 70s, used the private studio of her husband to record performances throughout the 90s when she was too sick to perform in public. A while ago an editor at Gramophone magazine popped a Hatto CD into his computer. The computer misidentified the CD, tagging it as a CD by László Simon. Except it wasn’t misidentified; while trying to find the problem the writer discovered that Hatto had been stealing the tracks from other pianists and selling them as her own for a while. Apparently all of her 90s work consists of recordings by other pianists. Sometimes the tracks have been time-stretched to hide their true origins, sometimes they’re renditions by obscure artists. But most of them are simply 1 to 1 copies of other peoples works. (via)

Cute video about web 2.0 and people

So you like the big grandfather clocks, but you don’t have room for one? Easy solution:

(via)