Bin workin' on teh new bloggins.

I've been workin', workin' on the new blog. It's actually going better than I expected it to from the get go. I got WordPress installed very painlessly, and all seems to be working correctly. Still very much in the dark regarding all this crazy CSS business that's gone down over the past years since I've been away from web design, but I'm getting there. I'm one paradigm shift away from Understanding.

Beloit College's Mindset List

Beloit College has published their College Mindset List for the class of 2011, making the rest of us old farts feel even older and fartier. Among the nuggets of perspective gnawing at the Peter Pan inside me, the list assures me that people going into their freshman year in college this fall:

#4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
#8. General Motors has always been working on an electric car. (Edit: Yeah, but will they ever deliver? HA!)
#12. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
#35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
#46. Most phone calls have never been private.
#53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre
#55. MTV has never featured music videos.
#70. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

Ye gods.

A Brief Message

I just discovered A Brief Message, via Subtraction.com. A Brief Message is a site that -according to its masthead- 'features design opinions in short form—200 words or less'. This is a great concept, and I've enjoyed trawling through previous entries over the past hour or so. Of note is this entry by Clay Shirky, on arrogance and humility in the life of a designer:

Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.

As someone who has alternately been accused of being impossibly arrogant and amazingly humble all throughout my adult life, I take this as some sort of strange vindication—apparently I'm doing something right. . . .