Join us at Pridefest this year in the West Village:
Hudson St. between Abingdon Sq. & West 14th St
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Come check out our handmade, organic, super fresh t-shirt collections, hang out, take pictures and buy plenty of shirts for you, your peeps, lovers, family…
Sign-up for our newsletter on our site to receive any Pridefest updates and possibly discover many other amazing and interesting things.
To learn more about this super gay weekend visit NYC Pride.
A little late since it is from March… Cara and I went to France. I took her to Praz de Lys, that alpine city I would visit every February growing up. One of my favorite place on earth.
This is a fun video of Cara sledding while I was filming.
A while back, Cara wrote about 10×10 in her blog. Interesting concept but always thought its design and fluidity could see some improvements. Last week I was reminded of the existence of the Webby Awards. This weekend, I had one of these moment where creativity was just not there and I was looking everywhere for anything that could inspire me on the HTML relaunch of Ubenice.com.
I went to the Webby Awards website in search for inspiration First, I was really disappointed to see (1) a lot of not so good work of art and (2) too many corporations represented.
Among those ugly websites, I bookmarked one: the Whale Hunt. This site is the amazing whale hunting journey in Alaska of some guy, an excellent photographer I thought. Not only are the photos pretty but the site itself is also good. When display and content rock together, that’s perfection.
Today I am back on the Webby just looking around to see if I have missed anything. I go to the year 2007 and find an amazing site: We Feel Fine. For some reasons, I feel… Here is a quick summary on what this is, from the site itself:
“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.”
Snapshot of I Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
Simply amazing. The thing I like the most about it, is that these people whose feelings we can read did not write these feelings thinking it would be read, by itself as a single piece. What I mean is when you update a facebook or linkedin status, you are perfectly conscious of what you are writing. But when you write a blog post, you can’t think of each phrase as a single piece; you see them as a whole within the content. This makes these pieces of feeling much more powerful to me. I was also playing with the search and looking at feelings from 70 to 79 years old people. I love it and of course, I love the different ways you can have the information displayed.
So what is the common denominator for these 3 projects? Jonathan Harris. All this just make me want to work hard(er) to become one day a programmer & designer that can publish powerful projects like his.
Update: Cara told me I actually knew about this project from Pangea Day, a year ago… :] Oups!
Just wanted to talk about CloudMade, a small start up company based in London. They have a great APIs for your map projects.
They use OpenStreetMap‘s data, which you can help map the world: get your own GPS system and you’re on the go. [You can also use OpenStreetMap's APIs but it is not as user friendly to deal with their API and the look and feel is not so great, no matter what style you apply.]
You can use CloudMade’s API to build your own maps. That’s how I discovered them. Their API is really easy to use and if you have questions on the integration, they’ll help you right away.
UI wise I love the look of their maps. It looks way better than some others’…
Here is their mission statement:
CloudMade help you make the most of map data. We source our maps from OpenStreetMap, the community mapping project which is making a free map of the world. Our aims are to continue the democratization of geo data and to expand access to open geo data through a range of simple yet powerful tools and APIs.
We sell organic cotton t-shirts with super fresh designs on it. We print the designs using eco-friendly water-based inks (from Matsui). We also use eco-friendly cleaners.
We offer shirts for women and men although more shirts are available for women. For now there are only 6 designs but as we grow we will be able to offer more.
You can purchase the shirts online with your credit card or through your paypal account. We ship anywhere in the world. Shipping is free of charges in the United States. We are also going to start appearing in places, mostly in the New York area.
I built the website. I might add games in a near future. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would.
My girlfriend and I have 2 cats. A couple of month ago, I had built 2 cat houses for them from cardboard boxes and newspapers. The hutand the castle, called after their form. They did not look clean and professional enough to be displayed longer in our living room, per Cara. She started moving them around, hiding them and asking me to enhance them or she would through them away. I was working on bigger projects at the time and did not have the time for that. The houses ended up in the trash after a couple of soft fights.
The cats were super sad without their fun houses. We went to Ikea and got a $6 hut. Looks like a devil and matches our apartment’s color scheme. But only one house was not enough for the 2 cats so I had to do something about it and decided to add a “Kicking Cat House” to my list of projects.
A week ago, I started writing specifications for the new cat house and making some designs. I started with crazy ideas, not easily doable and ended up with a simple design using cardboard boxes. Cara manages a farmer’s market in the city and last Saturday we asked for Tierra Farm‘s boxes. They gave me 2 big boxes, a smaller cubic one and some flat pieces of cardboard. Then the produce people from Migliorelli Farm had some empty plastic paper rolls, made of tough cardboard. I took 6 from them.
I had a design which would have made the house pretty vertical. But while pre-setting up and puzzling the boxes together, I turned it around to create something more horizontal and stable.
Me puzzling the boxes
Once the design was definitive, I started working on the rolls which would have 2 benefits: 1) Add weight to the house. 2) Allow Jefferson and Zohara to do their nails. I cut them all into pieces and then tingled heavy natural rope (bought at Home Depot) around them. Cutting them into 2 pieces each was a tough one. It was so strong I had to use the hand saw.
Rolls with and without the rope and the design goal
The rope is attached to the rolls thank to Cara’s staple gun. That was fun to use. But dangerous!
The next step was to prepare some papier mache to decorate the rolls that did not have any rope around as well as the base of what these rolls would be attached to.
To make papier mache, do the following (it is not the fastest recipe but it probably is the best; it also only requires natural ingredients):
1. Mix one cup of cold water with one cup of flour until it looks homogeneous
2. Boil 5 cups of water
3. Add salt (this will allow the papier mache mixture not to get moldy)
4. Verse the mixture into the boiling water
5. Cook for 3 minutes
6. Let cool down
Below how the small box look. I sliced waves in the cardboard and behind added one transparent plastic layer and a blue transparent layer so light could come through. The same concept would be used for the other boxes, each representing different nature elements.
The small box finished with papier mache, rolls, rope and waves
Using the same tools and principles, I built the rest of the house. You can see the evolution below.
Now you can see the trees and clouds are showing in transparency with the light
In order to add more comfort to the house, I built 2 pillows with a zipper for easy cleaning. The inside is filled with polyester.
A solar bag I wanted to finish on Feb 13th for Cara’s birthday. I finally finished it about a month ago, based on the following how-to, found on her blog. The how-to was for the electronic part so it was fun to build a bag to support this solar system. This bag is not quite appropriate to summer temperatures because of its warm materials but it works and charges her mp3.
80% sewed by hands. 20% thanks to my magic sewing machine.
My father had told me about him now only playing with biodegradable tees. Having stopped golfing for a couple of years, I really was far away in regards to new technology or the eco world and golf.
I bought him a box for Christmas, and bought one for myself recently. I have always been a big fan of the wooden tees, white. But I was ready to change my old habits and enter the world of biodegradable tees!
So I tried the Zero Friction performance tees (Me trying the tees in the video above!), 2 3/4 inches, white. And let me tell you all about it. Except for the fact that they are biodegradable and allow nearly no friction with the ball, I only have negative comments about them:
- too flexible, very hard to keep in shape and to insert in the ground
- the top where you put your ball in is not soft at all and I was almost cutting my finger every time I was trying to tee my ball
- did not see any improved distance
Overall, it was taking me too long to tee my balls, once done, my fingers were hurting and I could see my ball was not stable at all.
So let’s look for smaller, stronger and softer biodegradable tees. It must exist! As soon as I get to try them, I will update this post.
“The worlds first biodegradable and organic golf tee made from fertilizer.” It’s good for the golf courses, good for the earth and great to play, as it is super light according to their website. And it’s cheap too and can be bought in bulk. I absolutely cannot wait to try this one. Per their website, they also say that this tee will disintegrate within way less time than other biodegradable tees (for which it usually take about 9 months).
“Fibers run vertically from head to toe making bamboo tees much more robust and tougher when whacked, offering the player greater consistency and reliability.” They will last longer than wooden tees and they are made of bamboos which as you know grow so fast and so easily, not a problem. And of course they are also biodegradable.
UPDATE: I tried them on this Monday, May 19th and I must say I was a little disappointed. Every two holes they would break, while I was playing with a driver, not even an iron. And it had rained a lot the day before so the ground was not dry at all. If I have to change my tees every two holes, this to me is a waste of money and most importantly an environmental waste. Nevertheless I would like to thank the company who graciously sent me this bag of tees for me to review and I hope my feedback can help them improve their product.
They make the epoch™ tee similar to the Zero Friction ones, but they seem way less hurtful for the fingers. Now the question is do they bend or not. I will try them and let you know.
UPDATE: So I tried them early this morning and they are great. They are soft, strong and super stable.
They are also launching a new tee this year, vireo™ made from recycled material. Still biodegradable. Love it. Looks so smoooooth.
I got these this morning at the Golf du Medoc (my Club from when I lived in France) and I will try them shortly and update with my feedback. It is a FRENCH brand and the tees are made in the USA. They seem pretty solid and they disintegrate within 8 to 10 months. I also shot them an email to see where you can find them on-line. They look like this below (beige color, not white):
“Apiona® EnviroTee™ is mainly made from natural renewable polymers and based on aliphatic polyesters such as corn starch and Poly Lactic Acid, which are fully biodegradable, environmentally safe and one of the most abundant resources of the world. [...] Apiona® EnviroTee™ disintegrates into carbon dioxide and water according to the composting conditions. “
- too flexible, very hard to keep in shape and to insert in the ground
