I’d love to blame Twitter for cutting down the rate of actual blog posts, which is partially true, but certainly doesn’t account for a six week gap. I have noticed a decline in posts from almost all the personal blogs I read. I assume most people are using an RSS feed anyway and get updates as they arrive. Is the age of regular posting pretty much dead? Probably.

I’ve been sick in bed for almost a week now, and contrary to those who suggested this was a “man-cold”, it has developed into the worst flu I’ve had in years. Writing this post is painful. So, with that in mind, we all need a bit of comedy diversion in these tough times, right?

On a lovely trip to Leuven, Belgium, I came across this sticker on the front door of my hotel. Does it deserve a place alongside the 2012 Olympics Logo or other absurdly suggestive graphic designs? I assume this sign is supposed to mean that guide dogs are welcome. It could be argued that there is nothing suggestive at all about any of these logos until someone points out they might suggest more than they were intended. But at the end of the day, isn’t that a failure of the design? No unintended meaning should be applied.

Murphy’s law. Shit happens. Whatever you want to call it, today was my day. I’ve been traveling for ten days now and am wrapping up a tour worthy of t-shirts with a workshop in Cork. I love to set up the evening before, and upon arrival I asked if I could have access to the conference room. “Yes, that’s a workshop from 9-4:30 tomorrow?” “That’s right,” I said. I dropped my stuff off and left to hit a few sights and grab dinner before returning to the hotel. I staged the room and went to bed.

Cue this morning. Nice Irish breakfast. Reading the paper in the room waiting for attendees. 9AM came and went. 9:10 … right, well it’s not like the Irish to typically be on time. By 9:15 I sensed something was wrong, and sure enough, I was at the wrong hotel. I was at the Jury’s Inn Cork, not the Jury’s Cork Hotel. (How’s that for brand differentiation!) I nearly had a heart attack tearing down the room and racing to the right venue, stopping every two blocks to ask directions, because Cork’s roads are a one-way system from hell.

What I can’t figure out is how I booked a room, got directions from a colleague, checked-in and confirmed a workshop, etc, etc, etc and no one caught the blunder? No one took responsibility either (including me).

Either way, I became the schmo showing up one and a half hours late to lecture a group of business people on good design and service. No irony in that is there …

The 400th post. A modest achievement, but the signaling of a turning point in my own life and the life of this blog. Many, many years ago I turned to Lisa with one of those flashes of inspiration and said, “Doing laundry is the perfect opportunity to create a cafe or pub with books and other activities.” Add it to the pile of good ideas never acted upon and then stumbled upon at some later time like the Laundromat Cafe in Copenhagen. Well, never again. It’s time to take some action.

I used to shoot black and white almost exclusively when it was film. Also had the habit of not cropping my photos, even printing the border around the negative to prove the shot was composed in camera. Now that I have been shooting digital, photos are always presented in color. And typically, only when shooting sports stuff, do I crop. (You just don’t have time to compose when you’re shooting sports.) I’m not sure why I never felt quite right about post-processing images as black and white. Perhaps putting black and white film into my camera was a choice, and it certainly influenced the pictures I took. There was also something to be said for only having thirty-six exposures.

Is the final image the only thing that matters?

FLOWmarket at the Dansk Design Center reminded me of the first time I heard Bruce Mau speak in New York. Following a presentation on the design and release of the Venus women’s razor from P&G, he took the stage drinking water that he proclaimed was treated sewage. The talk ended with a question / challenge as he looked out at the audience of hundreds of (corporate) designers, “We can do anything, what are you going to do?”

The question occurred to me again tonight that why do people seem to want what everyone can have, yet fail to recognise those things that have limitless value? What should we really be struggling for?