The Highline project has taken New York by storm. If you're not in New York, you might have never heard of it - it's a plan to turn an abandoned elevated railway into a linear park of sorts, and it was the dream project of practically every architect and urban planner in existence last summer. Here's a very cool flash demonstration of what it might ultimately look like.

It's also gained incredible amounts of local support and enthusiasm - I went to the unveiling of the 4 finalist designs last summer at the AIA and there were so many people there you couldn't get in the door - I've never seen anything like it. To me, this alone is confirmation that the project is a really good idea. Still, critics have pointed out that linear parks can be problematic (Galbraith) and in the case of the highline, there is the added dark and potentially dreary underside of the rail line to come to grips with.

But New York is such a unique city that it's almost impossible to predict what will "work" and what "wont". Given the fast adapting nature of Manhattan these days, I find it hard to belive the project will fail, or fall into obscurity.

Every once in a while technology fails in ways that can cause me to want to punch holes in walls. Tonight's experience with Skype was one of the all time worst.

Skype is a fantastic way to allow people to have two-way voice chats over the internet. If you pay them a little money, you can call phones around the world for next to nothing (although the quality is pretty iffy). Anyway, I wanted to use Skype to dial-in to a few conference calls I have to sit through, which is a lot cheaper than using my cell phone. Skype dials through ok, but when it comes time to use their dial-pad to enter the conference code, it fails to work about 50% of the time. Sometimes it's a total loss, as in the 20+ times I tried to get it to work tonight. I think this bug is related to the length of the tones the dial pad sends. At anyrate, I suggest you DO NOT give them any money until they address the problem.

Today's linguistic challenge: I was having a long, complex conversation last night and was observing how the topic slowly mutated from one thing to another, sometimes waiting long enough for an issue to be resolved before moving on and sometimes bouncing several degrees away in rapid succession. So, the question is - what's a word to describe those jumps in conversation? Themes? Iterations? Issues? Acts? Let's call it the 'X' for now.

The sense that I am thinking of is this: "Several Xs ago, we were discussing such and such... i'd like to go back there and talk more" or "let's hold on to this X, and send the tangential Xs over to the other table to talk more"...

Does such a work exist in English? Perhaps some other language?

And the genius award goes to... Paul Rademacher, who managed to hack together craigslist property listings (presumably using RSS) and Google Maps to create a magical interface that maps the apartments, while simultaneously displaying photos and descriptions on a little bubble popup. Check it out.

My laptop is nearing death. As a result I've had to back everything up and wipe the hard drive completely. Reinstalling everything you lost is normally a major chore, especially when it comes to email, bookmarks, mail rules, RSS feeds, saved passwords, and all the zillions of little things you probably forgot about. Well, since I'm using Firefox as my browser, and Thunderbird as my email/RSS client, I was able to run a program called "MozBackup" to back up everything imaginable - even the myriad of rules I set up to organize my email. This is the way catastrophes like laptop meltdowns are meant to be handled. Plus it only took 10 minutes. Awesome.

What do you call fizzy drinks? Soda? Pop? or Coke? (I still don't understand the generic "coke" thing) Anyway, this popular survey has been conducted many times, proving to me that people really want geographic differences to matter, even if they are trivial. Either way, it's fun. The latest development is a county map of the US shaded according to preference. I've always lived in hard-core "soda" territories... What does it mean?... click for full size.