bottom drawer

My wonderful and fantastically talented band (!), the Kudzu String Band , now have very attractive t-shirts for sale! They come in all sorts of colours and feature our beautifully designed logo alongside a witty little catchphrase. They are a bargain at $15 a pop. Get yours now before we run out!! I particularly recommend the blue, pink and dusty brown versions.

The whole Google Maps/Google Earth thing is really fascinating to me from an urban planning point of view. How amazing to be able to make hacks of these to show everything from real-time bus routes in Seattle , census data down to individual house level , crime , Iraq war casualties> , geo-linked photos , situationist-ish observations , housing for sale/rent etc.... So why not add layers of tree species, brownfield sites, derelict buildings, housing density, day/night activity levels, etc? let alone the more basic stuff like water, roads, houses or parks that could be on separate GIS layers linked in with the super-userfriendly Google interface - I'm sure there would be geeks queuing up to do the work. All the GIS data already exists in various federal government departments, both in the US and the UK. The UK already has MAGIC a useful GIS interactive resource for planning geeks like me. It's unheard of among the general public and certainly not terribly user-friendly, but

For me the internet is a tool. I appreciate its ability to link me up with people but my primary interest is not in making new best friends - it's in staying abreast with developments in areas that I'm interested in, and finding out stuff I want to know for work or play. I don't care about the online popularity contests. Now in MyWeb , if I save a link, I can't see if anyone outside my contacts has also saved it and therefore, whether they might be potential good new contacts of mine. It relies on finding people through the friendship-based 'degrees of separation' not the shared-interest based 'we share links' like in delicious , where I regularly link-hop to find people whose bookmarks might be worth raiding. And for my internet, the 'degrees of separation' through shared links/interests is way more interesting and useful than going through my buddies. Friendster, Orkut, etc seem to me to have really failed to stay popular with 'online'

I just went down to see our little house, because I heard that Miss Phillips, our wonderful client, had moved in! Very exciting for us to see her finally in the house. So I got there and she was sitting out on the porch looking beautiful as ever. And she really has moved in. Everything's there, looking spotlessly clean (of course) and incredibly touching. Her family photos, her ragdolls, her dining room set which looks just the same as it did before (see here for a picture.) I was so happy to see her inhabiting the space and seemingly pretty happy with it. She's an extraordinary lady and sitting on her porch just listening to her talk was a wonderful break from my computer-addled day. It's hard to describe the presence that she has and the way she arranges all her belongings with such serenity and personality. It's really interesting (or depressing) to see that she absolutely does not open her windows at all, despite the fact that she always has the doors open and ther

OK, so as everyone blog-related and probably no-one not blog-related knows, Yahoo has launched the public beta of it's answer to the huge social bookmarking thing , and Google now has Google Personalized . I just did a half-hour test-out of them both, and will keep testing them as I go. This is very much a lay-person's view of these services - I am not one of the many bloggers who has been secretly beta-testing for weeks. But I think, as an amateur enthusiast, it's useful to see how these work for the majority of web users who are even less tech-savvy than me. [And I've also not been paid by either company to say nice things about them.] First, Yahoo: I until now had no Yahoo account. It was irritating that I had to sign up, tell them my Zip code and the name of my favorite sports team, etc, just to access enhanced search. Sign up to del.icio.us and all you need is a username and password. Plus, once I'd done all the signing-up, there was no immediate evidence of w

Today I indulged a long-standing request from certain American friends to show them what a 'real English tea-party' is like. So, I gave a tea-party like no-one actually does any more...Since when has anyone in England actually had a tea-party that includes cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sandwich cake and jam tarts? Oh, but it was sooo fun...Yes, three types of sandwiches, scones, and the above-mentioned cake and tarts. I don't think I've eaten a jam tart since I was about five years old. They were good. So retro. So what you made when you had a doll's tea-party as a child. Altogether the whole affair was like a kid's drawing of a house with a door, three windows, pitched roof and smoke coming out of the chimney - houses don't really look like that, ever, but it's so fun to play dress-up and pretend that's what life is really like. The only gripe I had was that my part of the US of A doesn't sell the kind of bread you really need to make those litt

I've never been so proud...I just got an email read out on the absolute pinnacle of English culture, Test Match Special. If anyone was listening, I was the girl from Alabama.

Something I've just read that makes me want to rant and rave, rather... this post speculating about the future of American society after the oil starts to run out. Will the citizenry not attempt to return to some kind of social structure from the past? If so, what will that social structure look like? 1960? 1920? Does it depend on the pace of the economic and cultural decline? I spend a lot of my time thinking about the shape of 'communities' or 'neighbourhoods' or 'cities' in the present and the future - how people relate to each other and what this nice word 'community' really means. I write as someone who has always been wary of whatever community I found myself in, who relishes the anonymity of a big city like London but who now finds themselves happily ensconced in small-town America and with all the community acquaintances and network that the steroetype demands (auto mechanic, gas station attendant, lawyer, judge) The Oil Drum's posting m

Santos has probably thought I got drowned in the Black Warrior along with my little black book. Because to my eternal shame, I have been holding on to it for over two months when I was meant to write in it and pass it on in two weeks. Bad Hana. But now...I've done it, it is scanned in and will be in tomorrow's post off to Italy. Hooray. And here it is, for those of you who are curious.

Yes!! I found it...Conveniently located in Islington, when I'm back I think I will find a little Alabama at the Hillbilly Hop [scroll down, it's the second review) where I can wear my cowgirl boots and John Deere hat with pride. Oh...and I just found this site . Lordy. And bluegrass in Leytonstone? Wonders will never cease. I sense a new mission coming on...

There are some things in America that really need to become common in England. 1. Huggers [things to keep your beer cold] 2. Coolers [also things to keep your beer cold] 3. Lawn chairs [folding lightweight aluminium/canvas ones with a little bag and strap] 4. Boiled peanuts 5. Post-hole diggers [how do we manage without these?] All of the above are non-invasive ways to make your life so much more pleasant.

Among other things at the Mockbees, I picked up a copy of Joseph Brodsky's autobiographical essays which had been Sambo's and which he had heavily annotated. I somehow always stop myself from writing in my books, somehow believing it is a bad thing and spoils them, but it was so fascinating and wonderful to read Brodsky with Sambo's commentary. It was an extraordinary glimpse into seeing his mind at work on so many levels - comments like 'R.S.' [Rural Studio] attached to little snippets of sentences, or 'and architecture' next to a comment about art. You could sense his train of thought and his preoccupations in the words he had underlined, and reading it with his notes felt like reading with him, in real-time - a strange sort of time-travel, being with a man I never could meet. The book felt so alive in my hands. I'm not sure I can break my habit and start scrawling in my books. Somehow I always treat them as though they are slightly 'not mine'

Oh, what a lovely weekend chez the Mockettes. As you would expect, everything at their family home is beautiful. Amazing Sambo-designed house, lots of collaborative Butch-Jay-Carol artworks and installations in place from Sarah-Ann's wedding, perfectly mown lawn, etc. It was a really fun party too - lots of family and old friends. It's always so interesting and revealing to see where someone grew up and who their hometown friends are. I kept trying to imagine Sambo amongst all these (much more conventional) people and realised what a fantastic job they had done of on the one hand being completely individual, creative and crazy while on the other hand not becoming the neighbourhood freaks but being solid, normal members of Canton, Miss. society. They really had half the town there - the kids' high school friends and former sweethearts, the parents' friends, their old babysitter, and so on. It made me slightly wistful that I really don't have any such local community

It's hot. Right now it's 90F (32C) and the town is drowsy. You just can't move too fast in this heat, so everyone saunters, driving slowly down Main Street with the windows down. But thunderstorms are due tomorrow and the sky is clouding over. I've done my Saturday chores (pay phone bill, oil change, etc) and now I'm off to Mississippi to Carol Mockbee's brother's high school graduation.

I've booked my flights back to England for two weeks in July. I will be around and hoping to see y'all from the 9th to the 25th July! For those of you who send me letters, it's probably a good idea not to send me anything more as it most likely won't arrive before I leave and I'm giving up my tenancy of Beacon Street when I come back home.

To those who think like my father I'm staying up late tonight as I've got to be online when the UK gets to work so we can finish off this bid document. So in the mean time I'm catching up on some reading and blogging. I thought maybe both the geek and non-geek community might be interested in reading a little of the debate that I had with my father, who questioned why I had started to write more about technology (tagging etc) and why I was now including what he saw as nerdy and boring links. Well, maybe I'm nerdy and boring. But as my friends know, there's nothing like a little provocation to get me on a rant. So, some excerpts from my email rant/reply to my father: Whether you like it or not the internet is a really powerful tool and I think we need a broader debate and a better informed general public about what it can be used for [...] As I wrote in one post, the UK isn't very aware about the potential uses of blogs and various related new tools. And if you d

Interesting reporting of a MORI poll on liveability. Its assumptions regarding blocks of flats taller than five stories and terraced houses ("both viewed negatively") made my antennae twitch. High-rise apartment blocks are a usual target, but terraced houses? I thought Georgian terraces were everyone's ideal. The report is going to be launched tomorrow (I assume the Guardian got a sneak preview) so I can't check the basis on which they decided that terraced houses were bad. But the inbuilt bias against urban areas by this yardstick says everything about the misguided nature of such 'surveys'. Yes, in a rural area high-rises, or even terraces, may be out of place and residents may find they make their area less attractive. But in a city different aspects come through and the survey did in no way ask public opinion on whether, as the Guardian says, "the English vision of an ideal local environment still leans towards a bucolic idyll of green pastures dotte

Click here for more of my flickr photos. This is really an excuse to test my renewed flickr account which I had let expire...and so you get a picture of the firestation in Newbern which is looking pretty sexy these days as it nears completion. Can you believe that four (now reduced to three) people built this with their own bare hands and almost no outside help? Pretty awe-inspiring.

Links Fallen Fruit is a lovely idea about mapping fruit trees and campaigning for the planting of public fruit trees. They need to get GIS, though - the scanned-in maps look sweet but kinda ineffective when you think they could have a Google Maps hack shwoing where you could pick oranges in your neighbourhood. I love this! League of Musical Urban Robots - a group of crazy inventors and musicians who have a former deli full of weird and wonderful musical robots that they make and put on performances with. the documentary on their site is really worth watching. (via Boing Boing ) Some nameless member of my family (paternal side) has been expressing some scepticism about all these netbased things. If you feel like him , you need to read How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet .

Midnight welding and daytime teleworking I've been a bit underslept the last few days due to staying up for midnight welding with Carol and Butch on the Subrosa Pantheon on Monday and Tuesday nights. The Subrosa - a project designed by Sambo Mockbee as a memorial space for two friends of his, which is now being completed by Carol - involves much of Sambo's complex cosmology and symbolism, the side of his work that few think of when they think about his work housing the poor. So it has long steel rods that poke out of the top like beaver sticks, and that have circles welded to them to align with certain stars and planets and as it has been the solstice, this has been the time to weld them in the middle of the night to make sure they align. It all sounds very hippy, I know, but the result is actually fantastic and not hippy at all - much more deeply rooted in this place and the Southern landscape. Welding at night is great fun - up on a tall manlift, casting huge shadows over the

Ebooks and more I read my first ever ebook yesterday, after long putting it off due to my old-fashioned love of paper and libraries, and my equally old-fashioned love of sticking to old-fashioned ideas like that. But yesterday I dived in, appropriately enough, with Boing Boing coeditor Cory Doctorow's new novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. First a quick lowdown on the content of the book - in short, it was really good. Angela Carter/Margaret Atwood/Kate Atkinson-ish blend (why did I think of all female authors? that's strange) with, I felt, nods to many other authors working in the realm of parable and some sort of real/unreal world juxtapositions. I found it was funny, enthralling, and not at all what I would consider sci-fi which is how at least the geek community pigeonholed it. It is a literary fable, populated with characters who are half escapees from Edward Lear's nonsense verse and half punks, well-crafted and certainly good for anyone wanting an un

Some stats Gordon asked in the comments to this post about how we know that the USA has proportionally more bloggers than the UK. I didn't have time to share it just then, but I did actually look up some stats before I wrote that post. Obviously, no-one has done a proper survey of bloggers, so we're relying on totally incomplete info. Even the blog hosting services don't have stats by country. But the best reference I found was here at BlogHerald , and also here at Blogcount , a blog on, erm, counting blogs. But, lets just look proportionally. On Blogwise today the USA has 27,310 blogs to the UK's 4,062. On Livejournal today the USA has 3,608,675 to the UK's 199,598 Here a poll found that around 2% of Americans had a blog. That would be around 4.4 million blogs - and that was a few months ago. Technorati says that the blogosphere (arrgh, horrid word) is doubling every five months. That would mean 4% of the American population blogging. Even if Blogherald's

Fish...ah, fish... One of the things I can't get hold of here at all is fish. So when I go out of town to somewhere with Big Shops I get very excited and buy lots of fish and stick it in the freezer because I never have time to cook it just then. And then I usually don't get round to cooking it for ages because I never have the foresight to take it out of the freezer in time to defrost for supper. And thus it was with the two mackerel I bought at the temple of Whole Foods in New Orleans. Finally, however, on Friday I cooked my two mackerel. Now, I know they weren't at their best being frozen, and also I really wanted a proper grill to cook them on but I don't have one, so I roasted them instead. But still...they were good. I ate the first one as it was, simple with lots of lemon and a tomato salad, and I made the second one into fishcakes with mashed potato and some finely chopped onion. Yum. Fishcakes are good. They keep, too, and do mature a little with age (in a good

On taxes.... I just read this interesting post about Denver's new light rail system. There much be lessons for London in this one - why do we find it impossible to get our schemes for trams / dedicated bus routes built when they have managed to with such success? One reason is obviously in the way that London raises money as opposed to over here, where the electorate can vote on whether they want an extra tax that goes into a dedicated, ringfenced pot for transport. Who wouldn't vote for this in London? Well, we might argue that we are already being taxed enough already and why can't the government fund it without an extra tax. But I would like to see Ken stick two fingers up to Westminster, tell Londoners that this is his only option because central government has wrecked his chances with the Tube, and and propose a tax for above-ground transport which we can vote on as a London referendum. Denver (pop. 2.1 million) voted to raise $4.7 billion - what could London's

More river adventures, and today's links Yesterday was spent down at the Cahaba with the affluent young scions of the local old families. It's rather amazing and English in some ways - the same kind of boarding-school youngsters hanging out, drinking beer, flirting with each other and later descending on the local pub to mix with their social inferiors, who look on with faint amusement; but I feel really different about going to the Shack with the son of the local judge than I do when I'm with Chip. The judge's son is exactly like the best kind of English gentleman - slightly eccentric, one of those classic faces which looks older than his age, courteous and generous in a bluff patriarchal style, a good sport. But many of the other kids are fine enough but not more than that - the same kind of people that I get more uncomfortable around at home. But here I am more detached and able to play the role of the observer better than I can in England, where I get twitchy and fe

Last night was a classic Alabama night out, and it was great. Starting quietly, cooking myself a good dinner at home and having a beer, things hotted up when some friends came by and we headed out to the 28 Club. It had been too long since I'd been there and it was fun - although a Friday night is not the busiest - to drink, tell stories, play the jukebox and watch the poker game being played at the next table. And form a plan - the which was to go down to the river. So off we went, at 1am, down to the Black Warrior at Lock 5, took off our clothes and slipped into the water. It was real Huckleberry Finn stuff. Not an electric light to be seen, just the faint blue glow of the sky and the shadows of the trees on the water. The river was really warm, muddy on the bottom and with a lazy current, and the lightning bugs glowed like pinpricks. No sound other than the buzz of the crickets and treefrogs, and the occasional owl and coyote calling. We swam around a little, and mostly just fl

I'm on public radio ! very strangely, they decided that they liked to hear about Britney and the possum and it was featured as part of Open Source's Blogsday . Fame at last (or something. When Radio 4 come calling then I'll know I've made it!) I was more chuffed by the company I was keeping - not every day am I in any way connected to Talking Ponts Memo . But I was quite disturbed by the voice they gave me - like a stupid Southern housewife - could they not tell from my blog that I was English and, erm, more ironic than that?! Meanwhile in the world of links: This Open Democracy article about the Iranian elections gives a pretty good run-down of the political development of Iran since the revolution, but I'mnot sure about its concluding point in the last para. How, really, is boycotting the election going to help? I'm all for the 'soft' evolution that started to happen under Khatami. I know his hands were tied to some degree but the beginnings of chang

The mosquitoes here are getting extreme, as is the heat. I could do the latter without the former, but at around 5.30 every day the mosquitoes descend looking for blood and won't leave me alone until 10/11-ish, when for some reason they decide they've had enough. They ignore the citronella oil my mother sent me and are only just kept away by coating myself with noxious 23% DEET bugspray. And even then they will find the one sqaure inch of your body that isn't protected and suck on it until you have a huge misshapen welt. These bastards are black with stripy legs and they stop at nothing. My legs look like I have some kind of awful parasite and I'm very glad I don't have to look even vaguely attractive to anyone here. I don't know how the locals appear to get away scot-free. But apart from that, everything is good. The slow summer days here are American movie-classic. Long evenings, the thick heat meaning you can't move fast. I'm glad our house is finishe

Links for today: Oh. My. God. If you don't click on any of my links, click on this one . This is a work of genius. The dog even sounds exactly like Jack Straw. (via Observer Blog ) The BBC's free Beethoven series has attracted 600,000 downloads. Can I tell you again how fab the Beeb is? How any of you who look at the TV and think they are sliding down the drain...well, that's because they are putting so much energy into the web side of things and they are just flattening the competition. More reading for wannabe geeks like me on RSS and the future of tags and searching.

On the subject of tags, del.icio.us etc (a bit of a follow-on to the Britain's Missing Bloggers debate, at least in my head) this talks about the interesting divide between hardcore/old-skool techies and the social software-ites. And how social software is clearly the way forward for the net now its expanding too fast to handle in an automated, non-human way. Basically, as the post says, del.icio.us is exactly like Google only better because it's a human filtering the info. (Or rather, better for some things - Google will always still be useful for picking up references in pages where your search subject is not the main point and therefore not tagged.) And collaborative blogs are way better than individuals like me rambling on at length. And y'all out there [my friends who read this but no other internet stuff] really need to get into RSS. And wikis. And for those of you who think I'm a total geek, I'm not, but this stuff is really interesting! The semantics...th

Rant of the day: Erm - has anyone told Jonathan Glancey that oil is a precious commodity? so cars that fly might be a really silly idea? The celebration of this kind of toy - which is damaging out of all proportion to its usefulness or fun quotient - really annoys me. Before the world tells me I'm a killjoy, I have nothing against occasional, really fun and really useless things. Fireworks, for instance, are wonderful - although I was interested to see that in India they are an air pollution problem during Diwali due to their excessive presence. But fireworks, once or twice a year and done in style, give so much pleasure to so many people compared to the amount of energy they use up that it seems a fair deal. Similarly the extravegance of buying a Chanel dress or getting decadently drunk on expensive cocktails in Loungelover or a lot of other things that give the thrill, status and sheer pleasure that this weird-ass car probably does, while doing a helluva lot less damage to thos

Why is it that 16 yr old boys here think they have a chance at chatting me up? I feel like a jaded old granny when I have absolutely no compunction at telling them straight out that they'd better not bother. Every day it seems some shy black boy will stop outside Beacon Street, look hesitant and then ask me how I'm doing. Sometimes it takes a few seconds, and right now I had one sweet shy one sit watching me work for fifteen minutes before he summoned up the courage to ask my age. Some of the older kids are more cocky - but even if they are 18 or 20 - sorry, they don't have a chance, whether or not they believe me. Yes, you're welcome to sit in my kitchen and watch me work, but no I won't take your number, I won't go for a drive with you and I'm not going to go for 'just a walk'. I never see 16 yr old white boys - they don't walk around town, they are whisked in SUVs back to their houses with big yards to hang around in. (A bit of a generalisatio

Yesterday was a bit of a write-off. I decided to take the morning off to compensate for working till 3am on a Sunday night in order to email some stuff off to England in time for first thing Monday morning. But I did get some of our drawings for Rural Development done before heading to the Mexican for a meal followed by drunken dancing till late in my friend's huge and beautiful apartment (think classic Greenwich Village loft but with no rent). America has the best music culture. Everyone knows every song - whether country, soul, rock'n'roll, hip-hop, bluegrass classics - and they intertwine in ways that we never conceive of in England. I'll really miss the enthusiam for such diverse music and the lack of snobbery that you find here (I know, NYC isn't the same, but they don't have the roots culture like here.) And my friends can really dance! And then, you find out that one of your friends (a blues guitar genius) is Britney Spears' second cousin! like, wowee

I felt like this post warranted a bit of rambling: Where are all the missing bloggers? (via plasticbag.org ) Well, there are probably a lot who are like me...writing for a small audience of friends, family and the randomly interested (hello, whoever you are from Mexico who logs in faithfully every day!) and who don't have blogrolls linking to every well-known British blogger. So when you do a clickthrough starting at, say plasticbag , you will never get to me, reinforcing the feeling of a closed community. Aren't blogrolls a bit passe now what with del.icio.us and everything, anyway? But, of course, us semi-anonymous bloggers exist in the USA as well. The question is really, why are there proportionally fewer Brit bloggers? and does this matter, either to the country as a whole or to the new media sector? We all know most of the reasons why there will be more bloggers in the USA. There are more politics/news blogs because of the well-rehearsed reason that US TV and newspapers

More procrastination: I now have a del.icio.us page , finally, and the most recent links will start popping up in the sidebar once I start adding them in, thanks to BigBold's RSS digest feature . So now my sidebar won't look so hopelessly out of date...

The venerable Ben Hammersley's concise and incisive powerpoint from the Reboot conference, well worth a look. (thanks Boing Boing !) Ah, coffee houses - not something we have in West Alabama. Can't wait to get back to Bar Italia and the fact that my office wireless reaches downstairs to Monmouth Coffee. Today the tropical storm rain has hit and going to a cafe to work on the laptop in a cosy warm place, watching the storm rage from the inside, is exactly what I want to be doing. That, or going to the Shack to play dominoes for hours... If only I wasn't so behind with my book stuff! This is it for today; I've got to stop blogging and do some real work. Turn off the RSS feed, turn off Limewire , turn up the music and get down to it!

I spent all day on AutoCAD today and forgot how boring it is and how glad I am that I'm not going to have to do much more of it ever again. Tropical Storm Arlene is heading towards Alabama and threatening hurricane status. I'm excited it's hurricane season again. The last couple of days, the thunder has been rolling around and there have been bouts of dramatic pink lightning at night like an omen, without much rain falling but with that gorgeous wet rain smell in the air. Links: I love this: The Corrugated Iron Club which is actually maintained by Common Ground thus further cementing my utter admiration for this fantastic organisation. Don't trust food that refuses to grow mould. The wonderful kidnapped Dalek . There's a ransom note genius at work out there. (thanks, plasticbag !)

I wish I wasn't so forgetful. It's all too easy for me to forget about certain ingredients that I really like and to think that my meals have become rather boring, without realising that for some reason I'd just completely forgotten that things exist out there that I like to eat but haven't bought for a while. Today, I had even forgotten about something I had bought from the shops - a cabbage. I really love cabbage. Someone had better keep reminding me of this, though, as the humble, self-effacing vegetable has a habit of disappearing from my diet. This particular cabbage I bought a few days ago because I had bought some real sausages at Whole Foods in New Orleans and I remembered that cabbage and sausages go rather well together. Then I put it in my fridge, ate nothing but toast and pasta for a few days and forgot about it...until today I got out those sausages, wondered why I didn't have anything to go with them, rooted around fruitlessly among old potatoes and tu

A bit of a redesign, you may notice...I was getting fed up of the cheesy graphic that I thought looked cool a year ago and this is the first stage of more changes to come, when I get the time. On the news front, I just got home from playing with a new band - County Road 4 , whose frontman stopped outside Beacon Street a couple of weeks ago to ask if I had wireless internet and ended up asking me to jam with them. So I get to indulge my guilty pleasure in playing along loudly to cheesy country music. I [heart] America and Toby Keith. Look, you guys who think it's just not cool, it's ironic, alright? All of Hoxton will be dancing to George Strait in just a bit - the 80s and fake bootleg mash-ups are just so passe. Todays links: This is pretty interesting for those of you who have missed the open-source movement. Alongside the news that nearly half of all technorati/deli.cio.us tags are in non-roman alphabets, the impact of non-Westerm countries on the development of IT and the

Linklog: Looks like Baltimore's copying the London buses posters (remember those watchful eyes ?) This is along the same lines, only with a more British tone, as the previous item on sprawl that I blogged. He is right: suburbia does yield more biodiversity than intensive agriculture. But again, what about energy use and cars, what about long-term sustainability. (via Urban Cartography ) Have you noticed that Google is commemorating Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday with a special logo? That's the kind of thing that makes me think they must be OK to work for ...(via A Daily Dose of Architecture and Slashdot ) And in more Google news, this is pretty interesting and could be damn useful for all us architectural/urban design types, assuming they're going to make it pretty accurate...the days of counting bricks to measure your site may be numbered...(via Boing Boing ) Cuban immigrants doing it in style .