People are emailing about the Japanese retailer in NYC. Well, it’s Uniqlo and their website is pretty nifty: uniqlo.com. Originally a division of Fast Retailing Co., Ltd., on Nov. 1, 2005, UNIQLO Co., Ltd. was born of corporate restructuring, and now exists as a 100% consolidated subsidiary of Fast Retailing, which is listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. UNIQLO is Japan’s leading clothing retail chain in terms of both sales and profits. The company also operates in China, Hong Kong, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In 2006 they opened their flag store in SOHO, NYC. Here some pics:

Today I started on one of my projects. Since moving to Santa Rosa last summer I came across all of these painted benches throughout the city. I had a feeling that this was a city initiative and tried to look for it online. I found the ArtStart website:

Artstart is an award winning privately incorporated 501(c)3 non-profit educational arts organization serving all of Sonoma County. Our mission is to provide job training, mentoring and fostering life changing breakthroughs by way of a stimulating work experience in the arts for all of Sonoma County youth, while creating public art for our community.

There was no information about the benches or a list were I could find all the benches. Well, a project is born. I will try to document all the art benches in Santa Rosa by the end of the year. I contacted ArtStart and see if they have additional information. You can follow the project here, or scroll to the bottom of the page and look for Santa Rosa Bench Project.

You can help as well! If you live in Santa Rosa and you know a bench that hasn’t been displayed in the slideshow yet let me know! Leave a comment with the location of the bench. Street name and closest intersection would be enough to track down the bench and add it to my project!

We just got back from San Jose and the exhibition was fascinating! The bodies are all human specimens but they don’t look ‘real’ due to preservation. Almost like a plastic mold but when you study it close up you really can tell that it used to be a real person. Kinda creepy as well but none the less interesting. Photography was not allowed but I didn’t know until some one told me this. So I only have a few photos to share.

If you around San Jose, CA this week it’s worth to pay the Tech a visit!

To achieve the preservation plastination is applied. Plastination is a technique used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most microscopic properties of the original sample. More about Body Worlds can be found here

Me and Aleisha have a day trip planned to Body Worlds 2 in San Jose, CA. Body Worlds presents the complexity and the beauty of the human body, preserved through Plastination the groundbreaking method of specimen preservation invented by anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens. More than 200 authentic human specimens offer visitors profound insights into the form and function of the human body, wellness and disease, and the mysterious world of the brain.

Body Worlds 2 at The Tech
Official Body Worlds website

I can’t believe this. The other day I read an article about artists on iTunes who take credit for great songs. They are actually a cover band and somehow got the song and artist name displayed as the original artist. I though: which dumbass is gonna fall for that? Well, that dumbass would be me… I wanted to download Little Steven and the disciples of soul - Forever (see YouTube vid). I searched for artist and song. Little Steven came up and I clicked ‘get song’.

Came back from lunch, popped up the headphones and… WTF? This isn’t Little Steven. It’s some New Jersey Douchbag trying to sing a great song but raping it instead! Dude… I got ripped off. Read the reviews first before getting a song. Advice for iTunes: change this kind of behavior or you are forcing me to go back to my torrents or p2p software… biatch.

This is for the Dutch readers: remember Curry en van Inkel? The first radio show that actually made an impact on me. Weekends would start with listening to the Friday night show Curry en van Inkel. And guess what? Last night I found this page with audio segments of the show. Call it old sentiment but it gave me some shivers. Check out the page with jingles and tell me if you recognize some of them. Now a little trivia about Adam Curry you might not have heard about:

In the late 1980s, before the World Wide Web, in the days of Gopher, Curry began experimenting on the Net. He registered the then-unclaimed domain name “mtv.com” in 1993 with the idea of being MTV’s unofficial new voice on the Internet. Although this move was sanctioned by his superiors at MTV Networks at the time, when Adam left to start his own web-portal design and hosting company, OnRamp Inc, MTV subsequently sued him for the domain name, which led to an out-of-court settlement.

Ever had to open up a docx file on a Mac and you had no idea how to? Here is the simple solution:

• Change .docx to .zip
• Unzip it.
• Go to Safari and File > Open File…
• Navigate to the /insert_name_of_Word_file_here/word/document.xml and open.
• Read text.

Update:

Microsoft released a converter for the Mac last December. It’s still in beta but it does the job perfectly. Download Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.2.1 (Beta) here.

Update:

See this post and links for Microsoft Office Open XML File Converter

Over the years I’ve been playing around with various blogging platforms and blogging tools. I started off in 2001 with Radio Userland, moved on to Typepad, had a little thing with Blogger but ended up with Movable Type. After all these flirts it’s Wordpress now. I’m extremely happy with Wordpress and its community. The plugins are a joy to work with. Same as their use of templates. So easy to incorporate. Besides using this awesome platform I want to discuss a few blogging tools that I use extensively.

Textmate (Mac only)
If you use a Mac this is a must have app. Promoted as the missing editor for Mac it all does what Textmate promises you:

TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

It is so easy to use and the possibilities are almost endless. You can even post to your blog straight from Textmate! Most posts on Mindplunge came from Textmate but I stepped it up a bit. This brings me to my second app.

MarsEdit (again, Mac only)
MarsEdit was developed by Ranchero Software (same company who developed NetNewsWire. More about this later). Last year it was acquired by Red Sweater Software and they just released the 2.0 version. MarsEdit is a blog publishing tool that lives on your desktop. No need to login to your blog account and use a sluggish online editor.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog’s web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.

MarsEdit has a intuitive interface, it’s widely compatible (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Vox), it’s Flickr enabled and the best thing in my opinion: if you decide to do so it lets you use an external editor (Textmate!). Awesome tool.

Last thing I want to talked about are RSS readers. A lot of people already know what I’m talking about but the majority of people surfing the web (yes, mainstream) are clueless. Let me quote Wikipedia about RSS:

RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

There are several ways to read your RSS feeds. NetNewsWire is pretty popular but in my case a go with an online version: Newsgator.com. It just saves me a bunch of time just going through my feeds and click on the articles I really want to read instead of navigating to a web page and see if they updated their site.

There you have it. Some tools in a nut shell. I could go on and on about this subject but for now you have a starting point.

What tools are you using and am I missing some major ones? Let me know!

I already got an email asking me how to navigate this darn site. Ha! Yes, this template surely is for the adventurous among us. If you don’t feel like digging around in the dirt here is a short manual. First of all this blog will show you only two posts. One on the left (the most recent one) and one on the right. In addition to this it will only show five lines of this post. By now you won’t see this sentence and for those who are reading this congrats! You have found the ‘read on’ button. See? Wasn’t too hard, was it?

From here it’s all ‘kinderspiel’ (that’s German for: ‘a 5th grader can do this stuff’). Leave comments, navigate to the archives, recent post etc. I hope you all made it by now. End manual. lol

Update: How to get back to the freakin home page: Just click mindplunge in your top left corner!

While playing around with the new template I found out it has this Flickr rss enabled block. Awesome tool. So I go to my Flickr account and guess what? Since I moved to Santa Rosa and now have DSL from AT&T they rewarded me with a pro account. Why didn’t they tell me sooner? My old account expired (pro that is) and it was getting so old I couldn’t even remember under which email address I originally signed up. I actually had to create a new account and all, especially with Yahoo! taking things over at Flickr. But I guess it all paid off now.