Apr 7 | Design
One World Campaign Posters
So, a couple of years ago - when this was still Cassler.org - we started up a little thing called the One World Campaign. The idea was simple: using creative-commons licensing, we would band together digital artists from all over the world to make artful-PSA posters with ecological messages on them. The organizational structures were not in place at the time but we did punch up this one poster you see to the right.
Darin | tags: One World Campaign, photos, psa | link
Apr 7 | Design
Appalachian Trail Flip 2009
Here’s a link to our one-and-only episode of ATFlip09. It’s a podcast of sorts, except that - by definition - a podcast is a kind of continuous thing, like a blog. In that case: this is just an audio recording. Anyhow: enjoy.
Darin | | link
Apr 7 | Technology
Good Bad Ugly
Ok, so here’s another assignment which - more or less - has no purpose at all except to vandalize the front page of The Courriel: ‘find two blogs and talk about blah, blah blah…” One of those super vague, non-constructive assignments which is designed to expose college-aged adults to this weird new thing called the interwebs. Apparently it’s a series of tubes that make it so we can talk over long distances and shit. It’s like a phone, but less personal.
Anyhow, exhibit A: Subtraction from Khoi Vinh - he’s the director of NYTimes.com and an authority on usability and information design a la Jakob Nielsen. It’s a simple black & white template - very mid-80’s downtown cocaine sceneish - but it is built on a 960-grid. The Grid System is pretty much a way of laying out content using ratios and regulated widths. Subtraction is built on a 16/960 grid with standardized padding and margins along with column widths. Each element of design conforms to these standards and, as such, has a sense of structural harmony. The writing isn’t anything particularly special, but the design is grade-A, text-book stuff.
On the flip side of the design coin is WebDesignerWall which - despite it’s shortcomings with usability - is deeply and astonishingly beautiful to look at. In fact, Nick La and N.Design Studios have gained so much notariaty from their designs that their annual ‘Best CSS of 200X‘ series is one of the most viewed CSS galleries in the world.
Darin | tags: blogs, css | link
Mar 24 | Media
Is Creative Commons Really the Answer?
So there we were - in Media Applications & Tools class, where we investigate an amalgam of Twitter and podcasting and social-networking and so forth: the whole post-web2.0 deal. It wasn’t long before Creative Commons licensing e.g. Lawrence Lessig and company took center stage in the discussion. The assignment here, as you may have guessed, is to write about our thoughts on CC - but we were prompted: why is CC beneficial to content creators. The bottom line: it isn’t all that beneficial really. So, with my contrarian nature in full-swing, here’s how things look for non-commercial licensing.
The most obvious benefit (if you can objectively call it that) is that free exchange of ideas and culture. Fantastic! I’m certainly not one to argue that art - which is by its very nature outside the scope of commercial interests - should be the exclusive domain of corporate middle-men. Creative Commons cuts all that out; connecting creators and consumers in ways that are more direct than commercial licensing would allow. There’s no record company or distributors or record shops putting their hand in your wallet all the way along the chain of supply: it’s just you and the internet.
Ok, great. But let’s stop for a second and consider a likely scenario for anyone talented enough to want to monetize their artwork in the future. Rob Myers points out the dilemma:
Creators who reserve a right of creative fiat may see that same right exercised against them, and they will appreciate it much less in those circumstances. This is a permission culture, not a free culture.
Creators who release their work at no cost under an NC license will have to compete with their own work available gratis if they ever try to monetize the same work. This makes NC at least as effective at destroying earning ability as other CC licenses allegedly are while giving less freedom and returning less value as well.
So the artist is caught in a kind of weird double-jeopardy where their desire to self promote at the beginning of their career by licensing their work for free distribution (with such criteria as ShareAlike and NoDerivitives) is literally competing against themselves if they ever want to sell-out and make some money out of their work.
Now, I’m as close to a socialist as you can be: what with the way financial institution have (in the words of Jon Stewart) burned the fuckin’ house down with our money and walked away richer than hell. The bottom line is this though: we’re stuck in a monetary system and we all need to make money to get by. If you’re a musician or a photographer you lose any ability to monetize your work in the future by submitting to a Creative Commons license for short-term interests.
Now, if we were to escape the monetary economy in favor of a resource-based economy such as that prescribed by the Venus Project then the meaning of art and the monetary value of creation will become moot. The essential reality that Lessig and Co. must confront with their licensing schema is reconciling monetary interests with social progress.
Darin | | link
Feb 21 | fffruit
Wouldn’t It Be Nice
The New design has brought with it a tremendous amount of traffic - we’re talking a 400% increase on hourly hits and and a huge number of visitors who are completely new to the site. I am humbled by the attention that it has recieved and have been working on ways to add more unique information design principles to the platform. So, for the next few weeks posts will trickle out as I continue to add functionality and restore deprecated features.
QuickBits have been temporarily removed from the site as I move toward a new model for integrating them into the site. The QuickBits of old will be replaced by In-line mobile posts (courtesy of WordPress for iPhone) which will be styled in a way which distinguishes them from long-form entries.
Again, thanks for the support and patience while I work to complete the site’s feature set. There is plenty more planned, stay tuned.
Darin | tags: courriel, iphone, moblog | link
Feb 19 | Design
A New Design : Execution & Philosophy
For those of you who frequent The Courriel, you may have noticed that things look radically different all of a sudden. Gone is our old design featuring a single column sans any kind of comment system or sidebar information; replaced by the wonderful (if I do say so myself) split-column design. In fact, there are a whole slew of features that make reading The Courriel more informative and interactive [1]. 1. New Features This is the first version of the site to have all of these features in over three years.Now you can search, you can separate posts by kind, there are archives, full comment system integrated with Facebook Connect, a full blogroll, Twitter API, Last.fm mosaic, writer bios and more. The single biggest feature, however, is the inclusion of inline footnotes.
The footnotes are an homage to David Foster Wallace, perhaps my favorite author and a writer from whom I draw a tremendous amount of inspiration (both in subject and in syntax) [2]2. Infinite Jest Inspiration
In fact, the color scheme for our header is similar to that from the cover of Infinite Jest, Wallace’s seminole work. The center column of the site is reserved for these footnotes which are split into three categories: links, factoids and people. They are color coded as yellow, purple and red respectively. Mostly this is a different take on information design for blogs which, in almost every case, are presented linearly. Wallace said of his footnotes:
The notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, “but then no one would read it.”
Really, the internet is the least linear form of communication - literally a web of ideas and concepts. As such, it would be silly to presume that the nature of all this information lends itself to a linear narrative. There is always more to investigate. So, where most sites would simply provide a link to a definition or biography, we will include short blurbs with multiple links on subjects which - for one reason or another - deserve further investigation which does not fit inside the narrative.
At the moment, the new design is still in the works and should be finished within the next few days. In the meantime, beta.thecourriel.com is temporarily open for business alongside our live site. This beta page is pretty much an aesthetic prototype as none of the internal links or applications are currently fuctional. Moving from the design phase to the backend development phase, you will literally be able to watch as th
Darin | tags: courriel, css, information design | link
Feb 9 | Technology
The Long Tail
Chances are that if you are reading The Courriel you are – like me - a milennial, the co-called Generation-Y consisting of persons born after 1980. As a demographic, we are the first to have grown up entirely in the age of personal computing and – many of us - came of age when things like AOL and e-mail were banal details of everyday life, taken for granted.
The digital culture, so to speak, that we have grown into lends itself for an entirely new economic model. A model which eliminates the laws of thermodynamics as a barrier to business by delivering our content not on trucks but with digital signals. An economy with jargon and business models all their own: Netflix, content rights management, DMCA, iTunes, podcast, Amazon Unbox, blog, citizen publishing, Rhapsody, creative commons, net neutrality. It’s been a long way coming, but few saw how the everything-all-the-time-immediately-digitally economy would affect the entertainment industry. Chris Anderson pretty much called it back in October of 2004 in a piece he wrote for Wired titled ‘The Long Tail’
This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.
Though the details are abundant, the heart of the digital effect which Anderson describes can be summarized quite easily by comparing your local record store and something like the iTunes music store. Let’s do some math. Let’s say that the ‘average’ record store can display 5,000 albums at any given time with some room in back to store more obscure titles if needed. For each of the thousands of titles on display, each is stocked several copies deep and in alphabetical order – by hand. Now the sheet amount of energy in transportation fuel, human wages and storage space that is expended not only gives an measurable overhead for each and every plastic case in the store, but it limits – by sheer force of thermodynamics – the number of titles that they can make available to their customers. The end result is that the sales curve drops off to zero beyond the catalog in stock.
The whatever-whenever-you-want-it delivery paradigm eliminates the problem of limited catalog. Services like iTunes can make available every title they have the rights to sell with equal ease. The problem inherit with this is users will be prone to get lost in the massive amount of information and variety available to them. Apple and others have sought to ease this existential consumerist angst by including a home page which, in no uncertain terms, mimics the marketing feel of any physical record store. Big sellers are prominently displayed, the catalog is meticulously organized and tabled and relevant music is listed organically. The end result is that browsing the iTunes Music Store is every bit as easy – or even easier – than navigating a building filled with records.
Darin | tags: economics, music, the long trail | link
Jan 10 | Fiction
So This is The New Year
Marley and Dakota sat quietly for a moment on New Year’s morning, each attempting (in vane) to reflect on an entire year before the silence became uncomfortable. By any measure, it had been a shit year.
There were deaths: hundreds of people were killed in the Siege of Mumbai, thousands died from a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe - each paling in comparison to the 70,000 who died in the earthquakes in China. There was financial trouble: nearly twenty American banks were dissolved or absorbed by the competition, the Dow fell from 13,990 in May to 7,552 in November, the big three auto makers struggled for solvency and decided to shut down a number of plants while begging Congress for a bailout. And while the elections left some hope at the end of the year with Barack Obama winning the presidency, the victory was tarnished by the reversal of certain civil rights in California.
"It’s about that time," Dakota said as he stood and walked to the old stove, "for 2008 to fuck off and for me to make some tea." Dakota struck a match, started the wood furnace and placed a weathered teapot atop.
It would take about ten minutes to brind the water to a boil - just long enough for Dakota to select a variety of tea from his vast collection. The kitchen, it seemed, was bursting at the seems with tea stashed away in every corner and cabinet. There were exotic teabags from Central Africa, jars full of loose leaf tea from Eastern Europe and drawers full of tea leaves from Nepal. Of course the varieties each had a name which Dakota had neatly labelled on each container - names like Dae’ling and Memories of Prague.
Darin | tags: Fiction, treewalker | link
Dec 17 | Fiction
Serial Fiction: Daniel & The Treewalker
It 
Daniel & The Treewalker is a novel written by our very own Darin. New portions will be posted here every Sunday for your fiction consumption needs.was a particularly chilly morning in Vermont. As the clock had struck midnight a tremendous snow storm descended upon the valley as if summoned by a force beyond nature. Under the cover of night, the storm had swept through countryside and disappeared before sunrise - the only evidence left behind was a thick blanket of fresh, shimmering snow that covered the Green Mountains from base to peak. Not an inch of blue sky was to be seen as dark, heavy clouds stretched to the horizon in every direction. There was, however, one small hole in the cloud cover which created a natural, heavenly spotlight on a single home in the country. This was the home of one Daniel Melanson.
Daniel awoke that morning unaware that a storm had blown through.
Daniel’s first impression of the day was how warm it was in his bedroom. His home was nearly a hundred years old and poorly insulated from the harsh Vermont winter. The only heat came from a small wood furnace downstairs that Daniel would always put out at night. The cold would typically drive Daniel to hit the snooze button on his alarm four or five times before finally working up the will to leave his warm bed. Today, however, the room was of a comfortable temperature – warm enough for Daniel to spring out of bed at the first ring of the alarm with youthful vigor. Daniel was not typically a morning person; he would be the first to admit it but when he glimpsed the mounds of fresh snow out his window he found himself, understandably, in rare form.
Darin | | link
Dec 8 | Humor
Assassination of Sarajevo The Comedy!
World War I 
The Black Hand was a terrorist organization operating out of pre-war Austria.couldn’t have had a more hilarious opening than the slapstick comedy that is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was traveling through Sarajevo by motorcade unaware that not one, but three assassins with bombs were along the route planning to kill him. The motorcade passed the first would-be assassin but he had been distracted by a really loud bird or something, the same thing happened with assassin number two who was actually confused as to how that bomb thingy worked. By the time the third assassin had his shot someone had figured out that in order to kill someone you need to actually pay attention. He tossed his bomb - which was literally a round, black cherry bomb you might see in an old Looney Toons episode - right at the duke’s car but it bounced off the roof and flew into the crowd. The assassination had failed.
One of the Black Hand operatives who had been involved was having some self-esteem issues and had made his way to a deli nearby for a sandwich. While tucking in to some comfort food, no doubt with mustard and breadcrumbs on his face, the guy noticed the Archduke outside and figured that “if first you don’t succeed to kill a monarch, just shoot, shoot, again.” And he did. The guy fired two shots and finally got that bitch in the face. Then the whole World War thing happened.
All this makes me wonder - wouldn’t all these screw ups make for a great comedy? Heck, even a musical. For Christ’s sake, a World War could have been averted if some Turkish dude with a predilection for violence didn’t want a pastrami sandwich. I’m currently working on a screenplay. If you think it would work as a libretto, work on some lyrics and we’ll talk.
Darin | tags: assassination, comedy, musical, sarajevo, world war i | link
Dec 4 | Society
Costa Rica Got Drunk and Now There Aren’t Any Roads
The entire world collapsed from underneath the country. In case you didn’t notice the giant fucking canyon where the road should be, there are signs telling travelers to find another country to live in.
The Costa Rican government didn’t seem to notice, but a Swiss church group knows what’s going on: “There’s too much god damn water on the roads so everything is pretty much fucked”. My moms, writing from Central American clusterfuck Costa Rica says:
“the luxury of a sound infrastructure is something you take for granted…here, we are grateful when all of our utilities are working at the same time. We had planned to drive to the Caribbean last weekend and, being wise to the uncertainty of anything, checked the papers to see if the roads were still roads…they weren’t. The one of only two roads connecting the Central Valley to the eastern portion had suffered 4 landslides, Puerto Viejo was accessible only by a few planks dangling across the river where a bridge had been only days before. The storms in the Caribbean left 35 roads unpassable in Limon Province alone”
Word is that only Swiss missionaries can spot flooding in Costa Rica because of their proprietary GodLens technology that has been deployed in the region.
Darin | tags: costa rica, flooding, infrastructure, Switzerland | link
Sep 29 | Society
Consider A Dozen
In his First Folio, published in 1623, Shakespeare wrote a comedy titled “Twlefe Night, or what you will” [sic], a veiled reference to the sweeping and nearly universal importance of the number twelve throughout history. Twelve is a number that appears over and over in our lives and in our faiths: twelve is the number of months in a year, inches in a foot, hours in a European day, Jesus’ disciples, sons of Odin, the imams, the Olympians, the Tribes of Israel, and the years in the Earthly Branches of the Chinese Zodiac among countless other examples. All of them, described simply as a dozen.
For practical purposes, everyone knows what the number twelve is. As usual though, there is much more to know than most of us care to observe - it’s all a matter of what your interests are. A number is mundane and unchanging and mathematical – far from being a subject for serious literary thought. To this, your assigned correspondent must admit that a discussion of arithmetic significance is hardly worth further inquiry – it is the human element that interests us; to wit the dozen has been perhaps one of the most ubiquitous numerical groupings in history of the human cultural lexicon. This shall be the focus of this work. However, while placing brevity at risk, a cursory encyclopedic introduction to the number is required before we can address the complex and prevailing relevance in sociological terms.
Darin | tags: etymology, religionCon | link
Sep 22 | QuickBits
Comment on the Financial Crisis
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy comments on the financial crisis: “Back in March, in New York, he gave a thoughtful speech, tracing the sub-prime crisis to lax oversight, and calling for a major overhaul of regulatory policy. The serious newspapers reported the event, and that was that. By Labor Day, the McCain campaign had managed to reframe the economic debate—in as much as there was one—around gas prices, offshore drilling, and Obama’s purported plan to raise taxes on ordinary Americans.”
Darin | tags: bankingcrisis08, election08, mccain, obama | link
Sep 21 | Society
Bye, Bye to The Big Ballpark in the Bronx
On April 18, 1923, Babe Ruth hit a three-run shot to lift the Yankees to a 4-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox. It was just like any other game winning home run that the legend hit in his career except for a single defining characteristic which echoes in the history of baseball. It was, you see, the first home run ever hit at the newly opened Yankee Stadium.
Joe Mignogna couldn’t sleep the night before Yankee Stadium opened its doors for the first time. The 5-year-old was thrilled that his grandfather - a construction worker who helped build the park - got two passes to see the Bombers face the rival Red Sox in the inaugural game. “There was just so much excitement,”
Now, 85 years, five months and four days later, the doors at The House that Ruth Built will be closing forever. Yankee Stadium has a lore bound to it that is palpable in the atmosphere. Paul Simon, in recalling his first visit to the stadium said:
“I was standing in a subway car, holding my dad’s hand when the train emerged from the tunnel, climbed the elevated tracks, and I saw Yankee Stadium for the first time. How beautiful! The emerald green grass, the old-fashioned white facade and the dots of color that were the fans in their seats. We were in the left-field bleachers and the colors seemed even more intense, the grass a bluer green, the pinstripes dazzling and the ball a white rocket that shot from the hands of the outfielders playing long toss.”
It seem fitting that the last game played in the stadium, tonight at 7pm, will be against the Baltimore Orioles - a team that shares a heritage with the Yankees. Until 1913, the Yankees were known as the New York Highlanders and prior to 1903 were located in Baltimore calling themselves the Orioles.
To be sure, there have been countless historical moments at Yankee Stadium - among the 26 world championships brought back to the Bronx. On July 4, 1939 Lou Gehrig, suffering from ALS, offered his tearful and poignant retirement speech to a sold out crowd saying: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth,” as we all have heard. He continued to say, showing good humor “…and I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.”
Darin | tags: baseball, New York, sports, yankee stadium, yankees | link
Sep 17 | Science
Duets from the Rufuous-and-white Wren
Down in 
Costa Rica you will find the Rufous-and-white wren a small songbird that defies common behavioral patterns. Their song, which sometimes sounds like Beethoven, serves much more of a purpose than sounding pretty.
Dr. Dan Mennill, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Windsor, has been trying to figure out exactly why Rufous-and-white Wrens do this. But the problem with trying to study these highly elusive birds, he says, is that they hide in the dense underbrush, which makes observing them close to impossible. So, Dr. Mennill has been using a sophisticated network of microphones that allowed him to track the birds by song alone. Doing so, he discovered that the wrens’ warblings allow them to keep track of one another in the dense undergrowth, and also act as a warning to couples competing for territory.
Quirks & Quarks interviewed Mennill last week, you can listen to the show here. Of course, you get to hear the birds sing themselves.