• Ask Edward.Tufte.: How to make presentations: techniques, handouts, display technologies a very informative discussion on effective presentations
  tags: design powerpoint presentation +

Two years of war had ravaged the land and split the country. The unpopular Republican president, whose unlikely reelection one newspaper would refer to as “undoubtedly the greatest evil that has ever befallen this county,” now left Washington D.C. to visit the site of a battle and speak to the country. The Chicago Times would later call his speech, “silly” and “flat.”

One hundred forty-two years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln gave a short speech at Gettysburg, helping to dedicate a new national cemetery. Four months earlier, during three bloody days in July of 1863, seven thousand of 150,000 soldiers were killed there, 45,000 were wounded.

On this day, Lincoln defined the United States and the Civil War. He said this nation had been “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” born of an ideal and dedicated to an idea. Of the Civil War itself, he said it was testing whether this nation, “or any nation so conceived can long endure.”

Most people know the first few words of the Gettysburg Address, though they’ve unfortunately become a disconnected cliché. These past few years I’ve been drawn back to this speech repeatedly and have come to see the middle of the last paragraph as especially meaningful.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us… that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

Gettysburg Address at the Library of Congress
Gettysburg Address MP3 from Ken Burns’ The Civil War, Sam Watterson reading, background music is Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar and other musicians that use the best studio monitors to produce music.

Several weeks ago I had to take down the FXScript Reference site due to a runaway script resulting from a bad database query and excessive spamming. I had actually left myself a note in the PHP comments that read “this might cause a slowdown in the future…” It did. I got a chuckle from that.

In addition to bringing the site back online, I also added something I’ve been wanting for a long time; an RSS feed of recent comments. This will help me keep track of site activity (soon to be a recurring theme), and might be of interest to some of the site’s other users as well.

The foiled Millenium bomb plot from 1999-2000 had three known targets:

1. Several sites in Jordan, including the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman.
2. USS The Sullivans in port in Yemen.
3. LAX, Los Angeles International Airport

The attack on the USS The Sulivans was attempted on January 3, 2000 but failed because the bomb-delivery dinghy couldn’t handle the explosives’ weight. Ten months later on October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked in the same port, using the same tactic. This past August, two missiles missed a US Navy ship while in the Jordanian port of Aqaba.

On April 20, 2004, Jordanian security forces seized 20 tons of chemicals which were to said to be intended for a chemical weapons attack against Amman. Two months ago, Jordanian security forces arrested 17 suspected of plotting attacks. Yesterday three suicide bombers killed nearly 60 people at three hotels in Amman Jordan. One of the hotels was the previously targeted Raddison. One of the bombers murdered guests at a wedding.

The initial millennium attack against LAX was averted on December 14, 1999 by US Border control officers who were probably searching for drugs but instead found explosives and timers. On July 4, 2002, a Egyptian-born gunman killed two people at El Al’s ticket counter in LAX. This was finally determined to be a terrorist act in April of 2003, though he was most likely targeting Israel rather than the US. The specific LAX targets of the millennium plot are apparently unknown.

Not counting the sole gunman at LAX, two of the three known targets from the Millennium plot have now been successfully attacked.

• Neubau Welt – by Stefan Gandl Some beautiful vector drawings
  tags: design illustration illustrator vector +

I got an email today asking if I knew anything about slowdowns in iPhoto due to bloating of the Library.iPhoto index file. I hadn’t heard of it before, but Eric Lindsay, J Kevin Wolfe and the MacInTouch iLife reports have a lot of good background information.

My iPhoto is slow, but not too bad compared to some of these reports. However it does make using it not particularly enjoyable. My Library.iPhoto file is only 35mb (264,395 lines for 10,000 images), iPhoto takes about 15-20 seconds to show photos after launching. Most of my photos came from Sony cameras.

Maybe some of this will be addressed by the new 10.4.3 update.

I remember spending many wonderful hours talking with Phil outside of classes at Art Center. Cigarettes were his cadence, coughing his punctuation. He used to stress that no one should ever leave their apartment without a pen and change for several calls on a pay-phone. He loved to tell stories about parties, rock stars, The Life. Phil made it all seem so glamorous, he’d lived his dream and he seemed to want the same for all of us too. His stories about New York City contributed to the myth and wonder that helped lead me here.

But those stories are only part of made Phil special for me. Phil was one of the most consistently encouraging and giving people at Art Center. Too often teachers try to mold students into copies of themselves, but Phil taught his students to recognize and better use their own innate strengths. He pushed us to outdo ourselves, as ourselves. His own life was an example of succeeding on one’s own unique merits, more than anything else, this was the greatest lesson he could offer.

Phil Hays died last week at the age of 74, he’ll be fondly remembered.

In the mid-1950’s Mr. Hays was one of a young band of expressive and interpretative illustrators, including Robert Weaver, Jack Potter, Tom Allen and Robert Andrew Parker, who, rather than paint or draw literal scenes based entirely on an author’s prose, interpreted texts with an eye toward expressive license. Mr. Hays said that representational illustration was an art of nuance, and his work routinely dug below the surface, drawing on Impressionist, Expressionist and Surrealist influences. In 1957, Mr. Hays was hired by Silas H. Rhodes, a founder of the School of Visual Arts in New York, to teach his first illustration class, and later he became chairman of the illustration department.

As a teacher he introduced novels, plays and films to students as a way to increase their visual and verbal literacy. “Phil’s favorite expression is ‘Why not?,’ ” wrote the poster artist Paul Davis, a former student of his, on the occasion of Mr. Hays’s being awarded the Society of Illustrators 2000 Distinguished Educators in the Arts award. “He welcomes experimentation and innovation.” […]

In 1979 Mr. Hays moved back to California to become chairman of the illustration department at the Art Center College of Design. He retired in 2002.