Tim Berners-Lee says this is the first web page he served up with http, which means it is the first page ever on the World Wide Web. [source]

I found that, the first piece of the WWW, while reading an amazing online book by Mark Pilgrim titled Dive Into HTML5.  Amazing in its thoroughness as well as design.  If you are at all interested in the internet and where it’s headed give it a read.

It’s spring time.  And just as spring shows up I remember it’s about time to move, or at least has been for the past five years and will be again at the end of this spring.  Thus spring cleaning means figuring out what will move with me and what will stay behind.

If you, the reader, happens to be in the Chicago area and is maybe interested in mismatched plates and bowls or jackets or cheap rugs or a stack of back issues of the Wall Street Journal let me know in the comments.  Aside from miscellany, I’ve got so many bookmarks I need to do something with.

• Ryan Dodgson, I picked up a small book of his at Quimby’s recently and am totally enamored with his drawings and ideas.
• Nikki Graziano took art and math and stuck them right on top of each other.  Her resulting images are amazing, mapping mathgraphs onto photographs.
• Bill Gates started a new website since quitting at Microsoft.  As of yet I haven’t gotten around to reading it, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t pass on this web address.
• TED Talks is the place to go if you don’t get invited to the TED conference.  Some very amazing talks on there that can also be downloaded as a podcast.  I’ll leave sifting through these to you.
• Pivot is a web based experiment that totally blew me away.  It is based around viewing and sorting data but not in a linear fashion of more general > more specific, but with the idea that once you narrow down your results you can pivot back and alter the search quickly and effectively.  I’m doing a bad job of explaining this, so click that link.
• Finally, in preparing to move I’m of course looking for a new apartment, and PadMapper is the tool I’m using.  It cuts through the terrible user interface of Craigslist and adds amazing features such as comparing the cost of one posting to the median cost of nearby listings of the same category.  Did I mention the Google Maps API?

A few links today.  Maybe soon posts will be much more regular, but no promises.

First off is Once Upon A School.  This is a website started by Dave Eggers in response to being awarded the TED Prize in 2008.  The site has information about supporting public schools all across the country, specifically in cities that don’t have a chapter of 826, which if you don’t know about yet you really should.  If this is striking you as uninteresting take a look at the talk Eggers gave at TED in 2008 and I bet you’ll reconsider.

In the spirit of getting kids involved in school through creative writing, I recently stumbled across the site 750Words.  You can log in using your Google/Gmail account and then you are confronted with a nearly blank web page with a series of boxes across the top and a word count in the bottom right.  Until you get to 750 words the boxes are blank, and then the box that corresponds to the current day of the month gets a nice X in it once you reach or exceed 750.  What you write is totally private as well.  The site is meant to be a brain cleaning.  Unedited free flowing words.  Seven-hundred fifty is approximately three pages worth of words and has been asserted to clear your mind.  If nothing else it is fun and has a rather nice aesthetic design.  Clean and crisp, no scroll bars or visible text boxes.

And finally for today, an item on my to do list: cleaning records.  HiFiTubes details how to clean your records by coating them in wood glue, letting the wood glue dry and then pealing off the glue.  Apparently records and wood glue are made of such similar chemical compounds that the two substances do not adhere to each other, but the glue certainly does adhere to the dust on a well worn record.  I’m currently out of wood glue but once I get to the store and clean a record or two I’ll be back with the results.

It’s been a while since last I posted. If you’ve noticed though my shared items on Google Reader have been keeping pace.  However not everything has shown up on the blogs I keep current with, for those items I offer you this list:

• Verified as the Best Paper Airplane.
• Amazing realistic bas-relief pieces.
• A cool graph from GE about the Cost of Getting Sick.
• Newsweek has a series of graphs about how the U.S. and other countries perceive the tech/education race between China and the U.S.

They Draw You Out by Thomas Doyle.

Thomas Doyle is a New York based artist that makes amazingly detailed miniatures. Growing up I would go over to my Grandpa’s house where he had installed a really elaborate model train layout in the second floor with miniature landscapes. I’d spend hours watching the trains drive around on their tracks and imagining real events happening in the scenery. To be sure Doyle’s works are a bit darker in subject matter than my Grandpa’s train layout. There is something about the texture of miniature trees that I can’t get over.

Left: Northern Cardinal print from Josh Brill. Right: Austrian Ski Lodge travel poster from Boston Public Library’s Flickr account.

Next up from the internet, a series of beautifully simple prints of birds by artist Josh Brill in a style that reminds me of advertising from the 50s and 60s. Which brings me to the Boston Public Library’s Flickr account. Specifically the section of 300+ travel posters (via Design Observer).

Screenshot of How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis infographic from the New York Times.

Infographics. This is an interactive tree map of the financial sector since October 2007—when the market was at its peak—through mid September. The format seems way more informative than bar graphs or line graphs because it really shows the shrinking of the economy by using the size of the original rectangle to show just how much money has been lost. But lost to where, maybe just disappeared. (via Infosthetics)

Photo from the Wall Street Journal

The President of These United States puts his mastery of the force behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics by upsetting this very serious fencer. The Telegraph covers the story as well, with another lightsaber wielding shot of Obama.

“Supranuclear Palsy of Eyelid Closure” from Diagram 9.3

Organization.  That’s the power-word for September and on in to the future.  A good way to achieve complete ‘everything-in-order’ status is by using Diagrams.  Diagram with a capital D.  It’s an online periodical consisting of both short prose/poetry and amazing schematics/diagrams.  I highly suggest spending some time investigating.

NO. 7 SERIES I; NO. 11 SERIES I. from Diagram 3.2

More even than infographics finding ways to snack that aren’t Hostess is a real part of my life right now. In pursuit: a list of 20 snacks that aren’t Oreos. I have no idea who this person is, as in, is he a reputable source of nutritional information? At least nothing on the list is an Oreo or a distant relative of the Oreo.

Brian Harnetty, from Columbus, OH, is a music professor at Kenyon College.  That is how I first knew of him.  He’s also released 2 albums in the past few years.  The first American Winter is a sound collage of old recordings Harnetty dug up from Berea College’s archives down in Kentucky.  When it was released in 2007 it made Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s year end t0p-10 album list.  Probably the only thing better than finding out that your album is one of Bonnie Billy’s favorites is to have him sing on your next record.  Which is what happened with Silent City released earlier this month.  Here is a video for the song “Some Glad Day.”

Next up, Ann Arbor, MI.  It’s at least where Mayer Hawthorne was sired.  His first album is coming out this fall and based on the singles is amazing.  Soul music that sounds like it was made back then.  Enjoy these videos.

And finally, Chicago.  Pit Er Pat on Thrill Jockey.  I saw them years ago opening up for Do Make Say Think and just remembered they exist.  You can stream samples of their songs on the Thrill Jockey website.

This is the back-to-school post—for whoever is going back to school.

To start with: book jackets, book covers.  The University of Otago (New Zealand) recently put together an exhibit of book jackets along with a short history of the rise of the book jacket featuring the great pun “dis-covered.”  If you click around you can see a few dozen book jackets from the decades.

iTunes U is a free section of iTunes.  In between new Radiolab episodes I wanted more Robert Krulwich and first discovered three of his talks at the 92nd St. Y in New York.  Speaking of the 92nd St. Y, it’s not a YMCA.  It’s the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association and seems to be way more focused on culture than swimming pools and youth basketball.  There are pages of audio programs put on by the 92Y on iTunes U, all free.

Finally The Ohio State University had a selection of ten recordings of Ohio Bird Songs.

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I’m not going to mess this up with my own words.