recurrie

Great video by Sam Chui about this posted a few days ago: https://youtu.be/csnaMnpU_BU?t=57

It's not that CRA doesn't cabbies to be contractors, its that they require all taxi drivers to register for and collect GST/HST- taxi industry does not qualify for the sub-$30K exemption. The reason for this was that otherwise, there were fears from full-time drivers that part-time drivers, making under $30K/year, would be favoured by customers over full-time drivers.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/gst-tps/txlmsn/menu-e...

Graphic arts film wasn't at all fussy about the shade of blue (as you note) and so while there were expensive non-repro blue markers and pencils, everyone I knew (at the very end of the era of graphic arts cameras) used blue highlighters, so design studios were full of them.

I've stuck with blue as the only highlighter colour I'll ever use, more than 20 years since the original rationale.

Also, used to freak people out scribbling (non-repro) obscenities on a flat that was going to be sent to photo and turned into a newspaper the next day.

I've spent summers at my family cottage, looking across the water at Oak Island for 40 years, and am always interested when it comes up. I've been on Oak Island and the myth is 100x more interesting than what is there now, the rusting remains of recent exploration efforts.

So if a crew of pirates|Incas|freemasons|French Royalty spent the effort to dig elaborate tunnels and traps, where are the remains of their campsites? The middens? The cooking fires? All infrastructure to support a huge constriction project, all with hand tools?

Everywhere else from that era you find the garbage that gets left behind - ashes, clay pipes, lost tools, buttons.

These particular mysterious builders were not just super skilled, they were also the tidiest contractors known to history.

Sadly, the whole story is a mishmash of charlatans, myth, and a lot of basic geology. There's no mystery.

If you optimize for cars, you get cities optimized for cars.

Funny that it was a American (Christopher Alexander)who write the most concise recipe for getting this right in "A Pattern Language." Pattern 88, Street Café.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

http://www.jacana.plus.com/pattern/P88.htm

Hype is amazing tool - only took a few minutes to get up to speed on it. We built an educational touchscreen kiosk in it, and then were able to deploy on an iPad by just scaling it down and downsampling the bitmap assets. A really polished tool.

Unless I've missed it, there isn't a way to cleanly add meta fields to the admin backend for products. It has to be done via an app, which means data entry needs to be split between built-in Shopify fields and meta fields via a Shopify app interface on a different screen.

I happened to be reading Make magazine's 3d printing guide, and I was struck the similarity to late 70s/early 80s personal computers. Lots of different technologies. Kits. (Mostly) terrible cases, even wooden ones. All sorts of "solution looking for problem" kinds of examples - 3d printing a coat hook is the "key all your recipes into a computer" of this decade.

To outsiders, 1970s computing looked like a bunch of kooky hobbyists, and it wasn't far off. I think in 10 or 20 years, 3d printing is going to be the solution to lots of problems we haven't considered yet.

CRTC Canadian content regulations don't apply to the internet.

That a tough one - it's always easier to identify a problem than craft a solution. Here's a shot:

* Projects should include screenshots or other visuals (no matter what their state of completion) on project pages. Browsing the usual Github page shows no visuals at all. Not every project is going to be heavily visually oriented, but most of the project pages I see look like a giant "Designers not wanted" sign.

* An environment where design can happen collaboratively. The "design thinking" ethos requires understanding what the problem is before trying to solve it. To really involve designers, some sort of sandbox where ideas can be expressed as something other than code, feature requests, bug fixes or "64x64px.png goes here." Would be ideal - a way to say "I see this working like this..." in a way a visual designer can express. Lots of discussion happens via chat, etc, but pretty hard to access if you're already feeling excluded.

* Something recognizable as a team structure. If projects need a designer, a project page noting an unfilled slot on the team would be ideal, along with some details. Icon designer? UX specialist? Copywriter? What do you need?

* Integrating rapid prototyping tools for design exploration. One of the tough tasks I find in interaction design is to get a feel for how a complex system is going to work without building it. I've see everything from Flash to Filemaker Pro used to build working models, to then be built out in another tool. Photoshop comps are great, but not a great way to simulate a lot of complex interaction models. If designers and developers are going to speak the same language, it's probably not going to be code.

I teach at a university of the visual arts, and I've often wondered about finding a way to engage students in open source projects, but to be honest, I've always been to fearful of what the outcome might be to really push this. My worry is that for a lot of developers, a logo and a few icons is all they are looking for. Fair enough, but not terribly attractive to the types of designers that projects really need.

Finally, designers need to understand what a big deal software is. You almost never see application design (web, desktop or mobile) represented in the big design award annuals, and the types of things that do get in tend to be gimmicky, Flash-driven web sites for consumer products.

Reframe the question: How would you get designers to start open source projects? The open source world is pretty much structured around serving the needs of those who can code.

In the field I work in, designers and developers have equal standing, and need to create a middle ground of shared workflow, technology and design processes that balance development and design.

In most open source projects, there are too many barriers to entry (real or perceived) for designers to see themselves as participants. Everything from version control systems that don't provide any real benefit for visual designers to project leaders that see design as "eye candy" all reduce the appeal to designers.

Remember, too, that designers have loads of options if they want to work for free. You know all those "Build a Facebook clone over the weekend, it will look great on your resume" jobs on Craigslist? Designers get that kind of pitch ("Design us something for free; it will look great in your portfolio") constantly. Open source projects looking to recruit designers need convey some tangible benefit to participating.

In the design world, peer recognition doesn't come out of working on open source projects that their designer colleagues have never heard of. Every designer I know of will jump at the opportunity to do really great work, for free if necessary. Looking at the open source projects I'm familiar with, few of these look like the kinds of places where a designer would expect to create really great work.