Category: Personal
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One Year of Blogging
I just realized that I have been blogging for over year now (one year and 24 days, actually). I still can’t believe I waited so long to get started. It’s been such a rewarding experience for me that I now think everyone should have a personal or a professional blog. I really do. If you…
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Back to the Future: New Poor, New Slums
A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the…
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Dreamgirls and the Self-Referential Musical
I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great! I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding…
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Other People’s ‘Puters
Christmas tree photo by Peggy During the holidays, as many Americans visit and spend time with their extended families, those of us in the web design industry get a chance to do a little user research — with our own loved ones as test subjects. Sure, most of us have watched other people use computers…
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One Month
I haven’t posted in a little over a month. I’ve been telling myself that my first new post wouldn’t be a narcissistic navel-gazer about why I haven’t posted — that I would instead just get back to the business of writing posts about real things, starting where I left off as if there were no…
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Bring Your Camera to your Polling Place
On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism. I can’t even begin to…