Wednesday January 18, 2012
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Help Stop SOPA and PIPA
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Sunday January 1, 2012
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Happy 2012
A week or so ago, I had a phone call from a guy from St. Petersburg, Russia. It wasn’t clear from his preliminary emails what he had in mind to talk about. I assumed it was something about type, or an iPhone app he was working on, or both.
Turns out, he is a fan of my blog. It was an interview about blogging. Blogging!
I felt a little embarrassed. I’ve posted only eight items here in the last two years. And most of those were to promote something. Some blog.
But talking to him rekindled my interest. I like what I used to do here, and I really want to get it going again.
So, here’s my first post of the year. No promises, but I’m going to try to post at least one item every day from now on. We’ll see.
Wednesday September 12, 2007
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Site Redesign
I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and it’s finally ready. I’ve just finished uploading the new files for the rest of the site. The last step is to paste in the new templates and style sheet for Notebook. It should only take a few minutes, but things might look a little odd halfway through…
…and finished! If things still look a odd, try hitting the “reload” button in your browser.
UPDATE: For those arriving from RSS feeds and such going to “permanent links,” sorry about the mess earlier. I forgot to update the archive template with the new design. It’s fixed now.
Friday May 12, 2006
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
ATCG
Reader Egemen Sentin wrote to point out an odd coincidence he noticed on the “How to Spot Arial” page: “The first four characters (a, t, c and g) that you chose for distinguishing between fonts Arial, Helvetica and Grotesque are also the first letters of the four bases of DNA, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine – proof that fonts have genes :)”
Saturday January 21, 2006
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Battle of the Ad Blogs
Sounds messy. My Notebook (this here thing) has been nominated as one of the best typography blogs in Adland’s Battle of the Ad Blogs 2006. I didn’t even know this was an ad blog, but I’m honored just the same.
Monday September 12, 2005
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Outage
In case you tried to visit my Notebook earlier today, well, you couldn’t. Los Angeles had a big power outage today and Dreamhost, the service that hosts this site, is located there. So, no Notebook. A bunch of other sites were affected, too. All back to normal now (knock on wood).
Sunday May 8, 2005
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Lettering to Wear
For a while now, I’ve had a little project simmering on the back burner. Frankly, I don’t get as many lettering assignments as I’d like, so I’ve taken matters into my own hands: I’ve hired myself to design some t-shirts. The first batch can be seen here on a little online store I have set up at CafePress.com. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like much now, but the shirts can actually be ordered. New designs will will be added regularly, and perhaps more kinds of products besides T-shirts.
For now, I want to keep things simple; see how it goes. The most exciting part of this for me is the chance to use my lettering skills on my own terms, just for the fun of it. If people actually buy something, that’d be cool, too.
Thursday August 5, 2004
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Safari Glitch Fixed
I’m not sure when this started happening, but there was a problem with the shopping cart feature on the Font Sales pages for visitors using Apple’s Safari web browser (no other browsers were affected). Basically, font selections made on those pages were not being remembered by the browser, making it difficult, for example, to order fonts from more than one page at a time.
It’s fixed now.
Sunday July 4, 2004
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
More Downtime
I’m still seeing problems with the MySQL server causing Notebook to go offline. I’m told this is a hosting problem. Jean François Porchez’s blog goes out at the same time because we both use the same hosting service: DreamHost. It’s looking more like NightmareHost this weekend. They’ve answered none of my pleas for help or explanation of the problem.
Update: They just replied, explained the problem, and expect things to be back to normal soon.
Saturday July 3, 2004
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Troubling Downtime
The MySQL server that underlies Notebook was not functioning for an hour or two this morning, and then it just suddenly started working again. I am investigating how or why this happened. I hope it’s just an isolated incident.
Wednesday June 30, 2004
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
About "Notebook"
Last fall I acquired the domain “marksimonson.com.” It used to belong to another Mark Simonson, but apparently he didn’t have a use for it and, happily for me, let it expire.
I have decided to use this new domain as an adjunct to my existing site (www.ms-studio.com). It will house a new section called Notebook. I will of course be using this in a self-promotional way, but I also plan to put things here that are not necessarily related to my business—things that I hope are interesting, entertaining, useful, informative, educational, etc.
There are only a few categories now (see list at left), but many more will be added as I write new entries.