dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

Just because I like talking about type: the Danish Design prizewinner for typeface of the year in 2004 was Kontrapunkt .

Man, one of the guys who helped develop the Firefox browser is only a teenager ?! For some reason I've become acutely aware of the fact that I'm turning 27 soon, which is hardly old by any standards, but seems to be a point to take stock and say "hey, what're you doing with your life?". And looking at people who've done big things at tender ages just emphasises the point. Of course, I did fritter away part of my youth playing Lemmings .

I've realised that for some reason people have been quite intrigued / horrified that I would choose not to buy an iPod because I don't like its use of Chicago as a font . ( Example - heck, I even got a link at the Cult of Mac blog .) To which I say, hey, it's not like Apple needs my money. And typeface design is a very big thing to me - when I was working at the Let's Go offices, I hung out with the designers and talked typefaces all day (and all night - we shared an apartment). So if I'm getting something that's being sold on the quality of its design, all the parts of its design have to mean something to me. Of course, now that the iPod Photo uses Myriad , I don't really have an excuse... That new Mac Mini though, I've thought about. Would be nice to have it in the house for my parents to use. Which I guess makes me one of those people Farhad Manjoo is talking about in Salon , who treat the Mac Mini as another household appliance, to run in parall...

J ust checked out Google Video , which returns results based on the closed captioning info of TV shows, along with a few freeze frames of the episode. Quite cool. Especially for those of us behind America in TV series - I get to see, for instance, what happened on the latest Law & Order .

Dr James Levine finds that fidgety people are skinnier than those who prefer to be sedentary - apparently you burn about 350 more calories a day if you're the kind of person who prefers to move about rather than sit still. More importantly, beyond genetic dispositions, the research seems to indicate that if you redesign your life so that you have to walk and move about a bit there'll be great health benefits. I personally like working on my desk , which is arranged in such a way that you have to stand up (or sit on a bar stool) to use it - given I haven't exercised in forever, I'll take the little chances I get. Dr Levine sounds like a fun guy to work with - here's his thoughts on the special underwear he designed to monitor movements from the study: "We had to be very creative," he said. "And you have to test them for comfort. I would put them on top of my suit. Mayo has a very strict dress code. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to wander arou...

My quick take on the Oscar nominees : seems like this is the Year of the Biopic, what with The Aviator Ray , and Vera Drake all receiving big noms, and Hotel Rwanda and Kinsey getting acting nods. Seems like the Great Man theory of history is on its way to a revival. Wish Richard Linklater had gotten a directing nod though, Before Sunset was quite an achievement.

It's sad, I know, but I get a cheesy pleasure from seeing a grammatical/stylistic mistake in William Safire's language column . This week, writing on the words associated with being vegetarian/vegan, Safire writes: ... the diet was being called vegetarian , a word popularized by the formation of the vegetarian Society at Ramsgate, England, in 1847. After its planting, that word grew (from the Latin vegetare , ''to grow'') for a century. Presumably the section in the parentheses/brackets (funny how American and British English have different names for almost every punctuation mark) should come after "that word", not after "grew". And I know he was using language associated with plants, but I still think "that word grew for a century" is a strange sort of phrasing.