Chris is doing some TA stuff, she lectures with 5 sections from the Intro to Communications class. She’s liking it, which is handy because she’d like to be a full time academic one day… hating class would be a bit of a drag on that. 

Anyway, as if to provide an example of their current subject matter Lucas asked a question the other day. 

A bit of context: Twang Town is a really good guitar (base/uke/etc) store here in Dunedin and Hyam who owns it is a really interesting character. He has a illuminated sign in his window to tell you if he’s open or not.

So we were walking by and Lucas asked “Why is the ‘Open’ sign red and the ‘Closed’ green? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Our boy. Already criticizing other’s designs.

So for a few months now the headphones on my iPhone have not been working properly… music comes out of them but I can’t use the line mic that was included with them. I imagined all sorts of problems, faults with the wireing, faults with the button etc etc… what I didn’t do was look it up online or drop by Vodafone (or mention it to my buddy Dean or his lovely wife Veronica,  when I was up in Wellington. You know, the couple who worked at a premium Mac retailer). 

So it finally bugged me enough to drop by the Vodafone store.. the nice man there (HI AARON!) said “oh, it’s probably lint and proceeded to pick out a huge piece from the headphone jack. He gave it to me and said “there you can go home and make a jersey”. Works like new. 

Which brings me to two questions:

1. Why is vodafone’s instore and email help so good when their telephone support is such utter complete crap? 
2. Why don’t cases for the iPhone ship with a little flap to cover the headphone jack?

This collection of electoral maps is just so fricking cool.

Sometimes you see design so stupifyingly bad that you wonder if it was done on purpose… to that end I present you with this.

I would suggest you wear goggles, but they will probably do nothing.

Ok, I’m not an architect, though I have an amateurs love and understanding of some of what’s involved (which is to say I obsess over my Frank Lloyd Wright books, Gerry books and Chris’ Dwell magazines). I also figure that as the ultimate user of architecture (even if it’s as a passing pedestrian) I’m entitled to an opinion on it.

So here’s the thing, any building that needs an area around it roped of with yellow safety tape due to falling ice and snow has failed completely, in the most important way possible: user safety.

If you’re designing for Montreal, a city that at least 5 months of winter a year and you can’t figure out a way to make sure that you don’t build a ramp for snow and ice that feeds nicely onto the heads of passersby, you’re not really thinking about where your work is going. Worse still, if you’re a architect who builds public buildings and you still manage to build them with ice and snow chutes that drop said frozen precipitation in the area of the front door… well let’s just say that the entrance of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal is not Moshe Safdie at his very best.