Le Département d'Etat a volé mes souvenirs

Zut alors!

That's French for "The State Department Stole My Memories" if you need a translation.

My new passport arrived yesterday and to my horror, my old one wasn't returned. To all of you non US-ians,  our passports are valid for ten years. When our ten-year term is getting close, we fill out a form, get a new photo taken, write a check and send all of that and our old passport to the State Department. After a couple of weeks, the new one arrives. In the same envelope is the old passport, only with a couple of holes punched in the first page, making it invalid.

Getting back the old passport means that we get to hold onto our old passport stamps and visas. Getting my passport stamped is one of my life's greatest thrills and I love to thumb through my old passports and remember different places where I've been.

Well, for some ungodly reason my old passport wasn't in the envelope yesterday. I know it's not a big deal but it really bothers me. I paid a lot of money to get those passport stamps and more than that, they represent a ten-year chunk of my life that I can't get back.

My last passport was stamped for the first time in the lovely country of Grenada and got its final stamp when I flew back to the US from The Bahamas last fall. Ten years, three continents and countless miles and experiences lived in those passport stamps and now they're in the bin of a shredder in Washington. Had I known I'd never see that old passport again I would have ripped out all of its pages before it sent it back.

So fellow US-ians beware. When you turn in your old passport send it off with a fond fare thee well because you're never going to see it again.

A bas la bureaucratie! Vive les anciens passeports!

Saxon Henry's Roaming by Design profiles the Blogger 19

The Blogger 19 from left to right: Andie Day, Saxon Henry, Cheryl Kees-Clendenon, Sarah Lloyd, Ann Porter, Johnny Grey, Kelly Morrisseau, Laurie Burke, Jason Wu, Susan Serra, Carmen Natschke, Jamie Goldberg, Aston Smith, Chuck Wheelock, Leslie Clagett, me, Pam Rodriguez, Adrienne Palmer and Sabrina Velandry

A little more than a month ago, I was honored to be one of the 19 designer/ bloggers invited to New York by Brizo to preview some of their new offerings and attend a fashion show. So far as I can tell, Brizo pulled off an industry first --they put together a focus group comprised of industry influencers, each with his or her own internet following. I blogged about the event and the attendees here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Geez I write a lot.

As of this morning, Roaming by Design started the definitive series on that event and it will continue tomorrow. Reading about it a month after the fact has left me marveling at the whole experience all over again. Check out her posts today and tomorrow.

Reading Saxon's profile of me has left me beaming and blushing at the same time. Thanks to everyone who put our event together and thanks to everyone who attended. We made history kids.

KBIS... there's an app for that

The Kitchen and Bath Industry show is in less than four weeks. If you're going to be in Chicago, let me know and we'll arrange a meet up. In the meantime, I'll be presenting at 11am, 1pm and 3pm at booth S1210. I'm speaking about my designerly process and the tools I use to express my vision. That sounds kind of lofty and I promise to make it interesting.

Anyhow, KBIS is always a whirlwind of activity and this year promises to be no different. In order to keep track of what's going on when, there's a mobile website that behaves like an app available. Navigate your phone's browser to kbis.tripbuilder.mobi and it will launch itself. There's nothing to download.

If you have an iPhone, you can make a button for you home screen that will launch the page automatically. Once you're on the KBIS Tripbuilder page, hit the plus sign at the bottom of your screen. Select "Add to Home Screen" and you're done. You can do that with any webpage by the way.

I'm sure that Blackberry has some inefficient and inelegant way to do something similar although it may involve a DOS prompt.

Psssst... Wanna be an unhappy hipster? Now's your chance

At first, she had attributed the strange scribble on the blackboard to her forgetful memory. Now she descended the stairs each morning with dread, petrified of what the poltergeist wanted to communicate today.
(Photo: Elsa Young; Dwell, May 2008)

If you've longed to have your home or a home you admire grace the pages of Dwell Magazine, now's the time to do something about it. In honor of Dwell's upcoming 10th anniversary, they're sponsoring a contest. To wit:

Dwell wants to see the houses YOU love. You admire our selections in the magazine, and now is your chance to add your own choice to the mix. The editors will review all the entries, and will select a top tier of twenty finalists. This is where you and your friends come in—once the top twenty finalists are posted online, we'll open the floodgates and invite a frenzy of online voting. We will make the final call, but the submissions that receive the most votes will have the greatest chance of appearing in the 10th anniversary issue of Dwell—October 2010.

Nomination period ends: March 30th, 2010.

If you're really lucky, Unhappy Hiptsers will pick up the photo after your spread runs.

Nutmeg sat stoically atop the cushions. Yet her internal dialogue was a cacophony of discordant thoughts, 

mostly centered on the absurdity of the double Nelson clocks.

(Photo: Joao Canziani; Dwell)

Color perception Wednesday

As a designer, I play with perception a lot. How human brains perceive their environments fascinates me to no end. I ran this gem last September and six months later it still amazes me.

I mean wow. It's an animated, inanimate object.

Well, I came upon two more good illusions on Twitter the other day. A web developer who writes Indigo Thoughts reprinted this one from Scientific American.

Follow these instructions:

1. Click on each of the graphics below, this will bring up a much larger image in a new browser.
2. Hold a finger in front of your nose and focus intently on it. This will cross your eyes.
3. Slowly remove your finger from view
4. On your screen you will see three boxes. The middle box will show the impossible color, a bluish yellow or a reddish green. Make sure the crosses line up.

Can you see yellowish blue?

Can you see reddish green ?

These exercises illustrate what are called impossible colors. Reddish green and yellowish blue are not the brown and green you'd expect them to be. Rather they are what they're called. These illusions takes a little bit of concentration to master but when you do master them you'll be observing a gaping flaw in your eyes' and brain's ability to process color. These impossible colors illustrate the opponent process and you can read more about it here.