Month: June 2008

>I logged onto blogger intending to write something about a particular oddity of this technology: templates. The one I am using is Minima–it’s the first template in their list of templates, which makes it one reason to choose. But another is its relatively spare look–it’s not cluttered, it has a neutral color scheme. And I really like the headline font and layout. I chose a pleasant rust orange for the frame, rather than the default grey, which feels satisfyingly like I’ve personalized the site to suit my tastes. (See Virginia Heffernan’s recent piece in the New York Times Magazine on Google’s new “artist themes” and the web’s encouragement to personalize this.) But it has problems, too. Unless you’re more adept at html code than I am (I managed to write my own code back in the early days, but that was long ago), you cannot easily shape it to your…

>This morning on the way to the metro, I was listening to NPR’s Morning Edition and a story about the mayor of Karachi, who was asked whether or not Dubai and its spectacular growth was a model for the development and growth of Karachi. The mayor’s response was that he preferred Karachi to be the model. But then he went on to say something that caught my attention: Karachi should be the model for such growth, but of course they were “cutting and pasting” ideas from many different places in figuring out their development. I was struck by that metaphor of cutting and pasting and by how it has become much more prevalent in the last decade than it was when I was in school. When I was in high school–in the mid 1980s, not that long ago–I was on the school newspaper staff and we used to lay out…