The House of Representatives (in a bill called the Housing Retention Act) and the Senate (in a bill called the Foreclosure Prevention Act) are attempting to deal with this problem. These bills have many positive attributes, but they fail the key test. For a family now facing foreclosure, neither of these bills contains strong enough incentives to get people to work things out with their lenders. So lots of families are giving up and moving. As a result, by the time either of these bills is enacted, hundreds of thousands of families already will have sent in their keys and turned off the heat.

My father's latest opinion piece.

Give homeowners incentive to stay | Inman News

I'm dreadfully sick today and I think I've caught the GTA Flu.
It typically effects males between the ages of 18-35 and requires one if not two days off from work.

Digital Collage - I'm dreadfully sick today and I think I've caught the GTA Flu.

We've all heard of the elevator pitch: the brief overview of a product, service, or project that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator, usually around 30 seconds or so. Now here comes a new idea: the Twitpitch, and yes, it's just what you think - the same pitch narrowed down to 140 characters or less.

Twitpitch: The Elevator Pitch Hits Twitter - ReadWriteWeb

The reaction from the Facebook community was positive, so the folks at Animoto decided to step it up a notch. They noticed that a significant portion of users who installed the app never made their first Animoto video — yet the application (as they themselves admit) relies heavily on the 'wow' factor of seeing your first Animoto video and wanting to share it with your friends. On Monday the team made a subtle but important change to their application: they auto-created a user's first Animoto video.

That did the trick!

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning.nullnull

Amazon Web Services Blog: Animoto - Scaling Through Viral Growth

Back in the late 1990s, my friend Beatrice had a tradition of hosting dumpling parties. She'd make a few fillings ahead of time and then a bunch of us would spend the afternoon sitting around stuffing, folding, sealing, pinching, steaming, chatting and eventually eating. If you've never tried making your own dumplings you might consider the whole process a bit fussy, but the next time you have a bit of extra time on your hands, and/or a few nimble-fingered helpers, consider giving it a try.

Plump Pea Dumplings Recipe - 101 Cookbooks

The revolution coincided with a period of many radically different art forms in western culture, dada, futurism, constructivism, surrealism and so on. Especially in its early years, propaganda posters produced in Soviet Russia were influenced by such movements.

Though the more experimental looks eventually gave way to designs more akin to what could be seen in other western countries, Soviet propaganda still retained a look of its own, beyond the presence of cyrillic lettering.

Propaganda Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters | Crestock.com Blog

Q: The other campaigns are less typographically successful. Is maintaining a strong design program really so difficult?

A: I think the real story here is less about typography than it is about discipline. Political campaigns are the Brigadoon of branding. There’s a compressed amount of time to tell a candidate’s story before the race is over and the campaign vanishes. During that window, the campaign must make sure that everything it produces — everything it touches — delivers the candidate’s message in a meaningful way. No opportunity to amplify that story should be missed. The Obama people have used design to take that discipline to a whole new level.

Barack Obama is running the first real transmedia campaign of the 21st century.

To the Letter Born - Campaign Stops - 2008 Elections - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate?

What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?

Consider typography to be the window into the soul of the candidate’s campaign. The depth, the breadth, the good, the bad and the ugly is all there for us to witness and assess in one clear and telegraphic manner. And in this campaign, what you see is definitely what you will get.

...

It is a rather bland face being used in a rather bland way.

It seems a bit elitist and upscale for John McCain.

It sort of reeks of old thrift-shop, Danish furniture, and not in a good way.

It’s a typeface used to trick people into thinking they are involving themselves in something more important and more desirable than it actually is.

It is a typeface I associate with the 1970s: moving past the hygienic purity of, say, a humanist sans-serif and migrating ever so slightly toward fern bars and big hair.

Have you seen Helvetica?

McCain's Optimum Look

Slog tipper Daniel wrote us yesterday to tell us that Seattle’s Municipal Code prohibits parking vehicles that are more than 80 inches wide on city streets overnight. (Here’s the relevant text, if you’re interested). Since Hummers are bigger than that (81 and a half inches, according to the specs on Hummer’s web site), Daniel figured it must be illegal to park them overnight here, too.

I checked in with the Seattle Department of Transportation, and it turns out Daniel’s right. Although SDOT spokesman Rick Sheridan says “the intent of this code is more for commercial vehicles like an 18-wheeler rather than an automobile,” it would apply to the largest SUVs as well.

H1: 81.5"
H2: 80.2"

Whoops, H2. Still too big.

Hummers: Illegal on City Streets | Slog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper

Barack Obama comes off as the most intelligent, reasonable candidate left. But I think a lot of this comes via a lack of track record. His stint at the Harvard review, he didn't pen one article, nor while on the faculty at U Chicago. He didn't propose any big legislation as a state senator in Illinois, or in the US senate. At least McCain has McCain-Feingold, and Hillary has health care, and their failures in these areas are learning experiences that will make them better.

Falkenblog: Barack Obama as the Ultimate Corporate Climber