While I was sleeping, Karim Rashid designed a series of vacuum cleaners for Dirt Devil.  One feels very Jetsons.  One feels very 2001 (the movie, not the year).  One feels very alien invader wearing a gladiator helmet (and is evidently meant to perch precariously on the edges of tables and counters).  You can view them here.

This photo was taken while the determining why there was a discrepancy between the sandwich that was received and the sandwich that was ordered.  The morale of the story - even though it’s raining outside, walk the extra 2 blocks to the deli that doesn’t sell food that tastes like paper (independent of what was ordered).

While in Denver, Meggin and I splurged on a capsule from the local grocery containing three animals.  I got the squirrel.  This squirrel, as well as the capsule toy genre, will always remind me of Shakespeare due to the sheer genius that is Tiny Ninja Theatre.  I don’t recall the exact circumstances, but a few years back I watched a performance of Tiny Ninja Hamlet.

Tiny Ninja Hamlet, for those not in the know, is Hamlet performed by Tiny Ninjas…

The ones from capsule machines…

The really tiny and sometimes hot pink ninjas from capsule machines…

They performed Hamlet!*

IT WAS AMAZING!!!**

* It was a one man show of Hamlet where he voiced and acted out all the characters via a combination of Tiny Ninjas, webcams, and large screen televisions (so the audience could see the performance).

** How could a one man show of Hamlet featuring ninjas not be amazing!?!

The students are almost halfway done with the Ugly Doll Project!  The project, a warmup to a larger plush project, is really fun. The students design and construct their own Ugly Dolls.  We started with drawing different character design concepts, leveraging the design ideology of Ugly Dolls (draw quirky characters, make flat plush based on quirky characters).  Of course, there is much more to the Ugly Doll’s story, but for the sake of simplicity, we boil it down to “He drew characters on his letters, she made him a flat plush based on his drawings, and Giant Robot, a friend to both of them, started selling the plushes, leading to a bagillion dollar empire”.

Being the bastard that I am, I force my students to produce multiple iterations and colorways of their designs such that, by the end of the project, they have a real sense of ownership of their ideas and have developed them to the fullest of their ability. Naturally, they just want to go ahead with the first doodle and colorway that they drop onto paper, so there is a bunch of minor teeth pulling involved.

To alleviate this and take a short break from sewing, I found some AMAZING paper craft vinyl toy templates to play around with next week.  The majority of the templates on the site are the regular front, side, back, other side view you have when designing a toy, and are great for coloring, but not so much for putting something together.  Hidden amongst these designer toy templates are some nuggets of delicious by FWIS called ReadyMech.  Super-quick design & build action figure templates to make little designer armies with! Now, if you’re thinking, “Yeah, the little figure you can make with the ReadyMech template are cute and all, but I’m looking for a little function to go with my form”, definitely take a look at the papercraft pinhole camera templates they made for Corbis. They are amazing.

Another little bit of fun and genius from the Vinyltoys.nl site - the We Hate Glue arcade template.  Designed by James Marr, it’s a template to build a little arcade cabinet (80s style).  What’s really cool is that he held a design competition in 2007 for who could create the best one.  The results are great (my favorite is Alberto Carazo’s Black Floyd).

Finally, in a super tangential way, the We Hate Glue competition reminds me of the Design For Chunks competition from waaaaay back in the day.  If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a plethora of super talented graphic designers went full blown creative all over airplane sickness bags, this is your answer.

I have yet to be able to effectively communicate how awe-inspiring this show was.  Between the full orchestra, Questlove on drums, Black Thought’s phenomenal performance, the three singers who did things with their voices I had forgotten could be done, Langston Hughes’ voiceovers, and the incredible video, I don’t even know where to begin.

The best example I can give is this:

• First, start with this clip of Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson and Shirley Temple from “The Littlest Rebel” projecting onto the wall.

 

  

• Then, imagine all of the orchestra’s drummers drumming along to the rhythm of their tap dancing
• While the drummers are drumming, have the orchestra’s horn and wind sections accompany them with kazoos.
• Next, slice and dice it all so it is finely mixed in and integrated into “Ask Your Mama”
• Finally, imagine seeing it happen live at Carnegie Hall.

This all happened about one-third into the show, and it was nowhere near the highlight.

Incredible.

The way this beautiful theme is written, it leverages Wordpress’s query_posts to set which posts appear in the Featured section and which posts appear in the Latest Posts section.  After digging through Wordpress’s forums, I found out that using the query_posts function sometimes disables paging.  The way this hiccup seems to manifest itself with the PageNavi plugin is that you will get a paged listing of all your posts, however no matter which page you click on, you will always be viewing the front page.

So, in order to get the Equilibrium Theme to keep its gorgeous layout while adding the invaluable PageNavi functionality, I added an if / else statement.  Written in conversational English, if the website is on its front page, run the code normally, otherwise, run the code without the query_posts lines so it navigates properly.  The modified index.php code is as follows:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if (is_home() && !is_paged()) :?>

INSERT ALL OF THE ORIGINAL CODE FROM RIGHT AFTER  <?php get_header();?> UP TO AND INCLUDING <?php endwhile; ?> <!– END –> </div> HERE

<?php else : ?>
<div id=”front-bottom”>
<div id=”latest-wrap”>
<h2>Earlier Posts</h2>
<div class=”content”>
<!– Edit Below 3 –>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”latest-post-wrap”>
<div class=”latest-post”>
<div class=”latest-title”>
<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
</div>
<div class=”latest-image”>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php image_attachment(’image’, 164, 119); ?></a>
</div>
</div>
<div class=”latest-content”>
<div class=”postMeta-front”><span class=”date”><?php the_time(’F j, Y’) ?></span><span class=”comments”><?php comments_popup_link(’0′, ‘1′, ‘%’); ?></span></div> <div class=”clear”></div>
<p><?php $excerpt = get_the_excerpt();  echo string_limit_words($excerpt,30); ?></p>
<p class=”moretext”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Continue Reading…</a></p>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?> <!– END –>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<div class=”clear”></div>

<!– page navi –>
<div class=”pagenavi”>
<?php if(function_exists(’wp_pagenavi’)) { wp_pagenavi(”, ”, ”, ”, 3, false);} ?>
</div>
<!– page navi end –>

<div class=”clear”></div>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<div class=”clear”></div>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

When implemented, this will keep your Equilibrium Theme’s front page looking exactly as it was (with the addition of PageNavi at the bottom).  Subsequent pages will be identical, except they won’t have the Featured posts displayed at the top.

It is also possible to use <?php next_posts_link(); ?> and <?php previous_posts_link(); ?> instead of PageNavi, I just wasn’t going for that aesthetic.

Hope this helps (and many thanks to Tudinh for putting together such an elegant theme).

Update:

Here is the code for my index.php.  One thing to watch out for is I use an H5 tag for my Latest heading, but H5s aren’t defined in the default style.css file.

Update 2:

Here is code for my archive.php. This is what gets my category pages to display in a similar style to my front page.

• Finished migrating all the photo galleries from using BananAlbum to using NextGen Gallery.
• Added the ability to comment on the photo galleries
• Swapped out the live Twitter feed on the sidebar to a link to Twitter

This last round was nothing too major, but from here on out I can focus on content generation.  So happy to finish tweaking php and css code.  So very very happy.

Now to decide if pictures in the galleries should be 800*600 or 700*525. The landscapes look fine either way, but having to scroll to see the all of the portraits is icky and unpleasant. Odds are there’s a setting or plugin I can install to fix this but work is a scant 7.5 hours away and there should at least be a token amount of sleep to be had.