… I started out on Blogger (before Google), trying to find my groove. It took a while before I had a better idea of this blogging thing and what I wanted from it. I added a comment plug-in (Blogger did not have comments then), and finally decided that I wanted to host my own database. I managed to move everything over to an early version of WordPress and kept updating. In some of the older posts there are still formatting problems from the Blogger days and references with the old URL. But on a whole, the move in the summer of 2005 went well. Now, many of the people whose blogs I am following have started to “post” on Twitter and the frequency of their blog posts has decreased. You can follow me on Twitter here: snurl.com/ewubt.

When I had a new main desktop computer built a couple of years ago I decided to go the RAID route – to use two identical hard drives in a “Redundant Array of Independent Disks.” The computer had a controller with its own processor to make sure that the content of the second disk was always an exact mirror of the first disk’s content. Initially, I thought that this arrangement would be an easy, automatic backup system.

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Many (most?) people think that has already happened. Many of those same people, of course, spell “your” as “ur.” Established publications edited by grown-ups, however, are holding the line.

(From Sharp Points by Bill Walsh.)

In German, this question has an added wrinkle: “Email” (as in [ema:j], das; -s, -s) is an entirly different word with an entirely different pronunciation. Electronic mail is “die E-Mail.”

… to Wendy Holdenson on her new position as Consul-General and Trade Commissioner at the Australian Consulate-General in Fukuoka. Wendy and I used to work together in Tokyo for several years during her time at Canon and we continued to stay in touch after her return to Australia. At Canon, Wendy was the editor for the bimonthly English in-house Canon Chronicle. Our company provided translation, typesetting, and layout services for additional four European languages, which later were supplemented by Chinese as a fifth language.

In 1956, I went on a school trip to nearby Trier where, among other things, we visited the printing plant operated by the archdiocese. Standing next to the Linotype hot-type machines and watching the operators build the columns of the weekly Paulinusblatt was the start of a life-long interest in and fascination with type. Much later, during my time in Tokyo, it was the ignorance and indifference shown by Japanese printing companies toward “western” type that made me put a lot of effort and money into opening a phototypesetting shop. I managed it for eight years and learned invaluable lessons about type and print production.

I just saw (belatedly) the 2007 film Helvetica, a 50th anniversary tribute to the ubiquitous typeface that was born as Neue Haas Grotesk in Münchenstein, Switzerland. If you think that a film about a typeface is bound to be boring, you are very wrong. This is a fascinating, entertaining, and educational tour that tries to illuminate why the world of design was ready for a typeface like Helvetica, why it spread so far and wide, and why there has not been an improved version in 50 years. Among the people who comment on Helvetica in this film are (and you may recognize some of the names) Hermann Zapf, Bruno Steinert, Massimo Vignelli, Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Stefan Sagmeister, and Neville Brody.

If you want to read more about typography, I recommend (despite its age) Jan Tschichold’s Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie, which, I believe, is translated as The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.

I returned to Southern California via the Bradley International Terminal at LAX, a particularly sophisticated form of purgatory. Luggage retrieval and customs processing must have been designed with the objective to inflict as much discomfort and waiting time on arriving passengers as possible. I am sure that all officials working there had to undergo special training that allows them to suppress any human emotion and to exude so much subliminal (and not so subliminal) threat that conversations stop mid-sentence. Why anyone thinks that this is an effective or desirable way to introduce arriving passengers to the United States is way beyond me.

My trip to Germany was, weather aside, useful and enjoyable. I met with a number of clients and with people who serve as information resources throughout the year. I spent some time looking at new reference materials and, generally, recharged my language batteries. Here some highlights:

• Best rediscovered dialect expressions: dabba (quickly) and Scheesewänsche (pram).
• Best beer: Bruch’s Märzenbier. Bruch, founded in 1702, is the last independent brewery in Saarbrücken.
• Best meal: Bratkartoffeln and Lyoner (hasn’t changed from 2005).
• Best place to eat it: Restaurant Zum Stiefel (has changed from 2005).
• Best cake: Cherry crumb cake at Café Schubert.
• Cutest airline: Luxair. No matter how small the plane, they always have a “business class,” same kind of seats but separated by a tiny curtain, and at least two flight attendants. And even on my 40-minute hop to Munich they served food (which was not too shabby) and drinks.

One of the great discoveries during my visit to Saarbrücken was this excellent telephone message pad (click to enbiggen):