I just got a brand-new elliptical trainer, the Lifefitness X1. It’s in the bedroom and although it’s the smallest model they make, it’s absolutely huge. There’s this giant metal techno design thing sitting next to the bed.

Every time I walk into the bedroom I’m reminded of some memorable sci-fi movie apparati.

I’ll be the keynote speaker at Easy6, India’s conference on software usability. Held in Bangalore, India, in January, 2006. Here’s the page for Easy5.

BusinessWeek describes a curious design research initiative. A UK home builder has a family living in a sensor-filled concept house, where the people are all RFID-tagged. They’ll collect usage data for six months and then use the resulting who/where/when/how-long data to improve the home’s design. Just like using weblogs to redesign a website – you know what people have been doing, but you have no idea why. Unless you ask. And the families in this project will be extensively interviewed by a “consumer researcher” so we figure they’ll get that piece of the puzzle too.

We’ve got BirdBGone spikes to keep the peeps away from gutters and roofs, Stakestoppers to keep the boarders off of guard rails and retaining walls, and now The Anti-Sit Archives documents many ways to keep our tushes from everyplace else. Signs of our (sub)urban times: brutal after-thought products intended to force a fix to an unintended or no-longer-desired usage for the original (often more elegant and integrated) design.

In an article about a dispute between two cities, the SF Chronicle masquerades as The Onion

Campbell pointed out that neither Santa Cruz nor Huntington Beach qualifies to be Surf City, under the terms of the classic Jan and Dean song, as neither place has ‘two girls for every boy.”
‘I’ve done some research,” Campbell said. ‘Neither city has two girls for every boy, so neither should be Surf City.”

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Well here’s one I hadn’t seen – a fake “You’ve won” notification. An auction I didn’t participate in – sent to me seemingly from eBay, but of course, it’s not really from eBay. It’s pretty sneaky, if I was buying 30 things from eBay a week I probably would open this without thinking – at which point I dunno, they’ve got my password, or I’ve given them money or something awful.

Evil.

AirTroductions is something I don’t quite get. How can this possibly survive? You can try to meet a new person online based on your travel plans; then arrange to sit together. Maybe they should just call it NeedyExtrovert.com or something. Let’s combine the hair-pulling ennui of a long flight with the tedium/fear blend of a blind date! It must be the Web 2.0!!!

JenS, 29, Female
USA, Oregon, Portland
I’m a twenty-something public relations professional who travels mostly for work, several times a year. I love my job, my two Chihuahuas, and living in Portland.

I’d like to meet:
I’m looking for fun people to sit next to on the plane. Sharing of books, magazines, and music is encouraged but not required. Sharing of drinks and laughs are a must.

I’m more comfortable with (Pick as many as you like to let people know more about you!):
The W Hotel, Las Vegas on the Strip , Paris at night, The Emergency Exit Row, First Class, Vodka Martini, Diet Soda

I’m searchable as:
both business and personal

I’d be very curious to hear from people who have tried this or would try this; my bias is very personal and I know there’s more stories out there than mine.

As CNN reports

, a Belgian artist in China is giving pigs tattoos of mermaids, roses, cherubs, and the Louis Vuitton logo.

The pigs get sedatives before they go under the needle and are carefully raised until their natural deaths. The artist has been inspired by China’s rampant piracy of everything from DVDs to Paris’s latest fashions (i.e., the LV logo).

Video cameras will allow collectors (who may purchase the post-mortem pigskin art) or anyone else to watch the tattooed pigs cavort and sleep live on the Internet, a program dubbed “Pig Brother”.

I’ve posted a mini-essay called Title Goes Here on CPH127, a blog about design and innovation

We live in a Google world. Information/answers/solutions await us. We want to search, and so other people want to label, categorize, classify. New (and horrific) words like folksonomy emerge to describe the schemes by which we can sort and label the world around us.

I’m a brand new guest blogger there; this was my first post.

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The caption reads Alan Ball, with Peter Krause as Casey Fisher, in the background. Actually, Peter plays Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under and he played Casey McCall on Sports Night. Strange.