otrops: jeff van campen's personal blog

Yesterday, Jason Kottke featured this tidbit from Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing short stories:

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Last night, I read this in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School:

Design a flight of stairs [...]

I might be getting slightly obsessed with Design for Life.
Despite my questions about the €90 bicycle, I very much enjoyed the first episode and am looking forward to the rest of the show.
Having one of the contestants respond to my post and another one follow me on Twitter made me curious about the online presence [...]

Update: I don’t think the BBC link I provided will work outside of the UK. Fortunately, someone has uploaded the first episode to Vimeo.
I’m not a huge fan of reality television, but I really enjoyed Design for Life on Monday. Not all of Phillipe Starck’s work appeals to me, but after watching him set [...]

The new Tube map is significantly less cluttered than the previous version, presumably in an attempt to address some of the criticism the Tube map has received lately.
Most of the information that has been removed isn’t essential for most commuters; however, as Londonist points out, the removal of zones might cause issues. Personally, I [...]

As most of you know, Joanne has been working as a freelance designer since March. We’ve been working on a professional site for her for a few months now. Between my job hunt, and Christmas, it’s taken a while, but everything is finally in place: I’m pleased to announce that Little [...]