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Tired of those old Christmas classics, had too much “Grandma got ran over by a reindeer” have you? Sounds like you need to spice things up this Christmas and broaden the families listening horizons. The latest edition of Sound Opinions (The world’s only Rock and Roll talk show) features Andy Cirzan aka DJ Lo-Fi playing his “Santa Set …. further adventures in holiday obscura”. It’s a collection of random Christmas tracks that DJ Lo-Fi has spent years accumulating by scouring dusty record bins. There’s even a collection of some nice Christmas album artwork.

I ran across a suite of JavaScript based development tools for web designers called “Design“. The suite is comprised of four tools: Grid, Ruler, Unit and Crosshair. I currently use a lot of Firefox extensions that perform similar tasks but this bookmarklet has advantages because you can use it in Internet Explorer (no IE 6 support), Safari and Opera and it’s an all in one package. It’s also a JavaScript bookmarklet so it’s easy to install in any browser. Just visit the site and drag the “Design button” up to your bookmark bar and presto it’s installed.

“Grid” is probably the most robust and impressive of the bunch. Quickly create grids with any number of columns, tweak gutter space and vertical row height. “Ruler” functions the same way as it would in Photoshop or any other design app with rulers on top and left and it allows you to pull grid rules for alignment. “Measure” is my least favorite. I find the “MeasureIt” Firefox extension to be superior and easier to use for grabbing quick dimensions. The biggest thing missing from the Design suite is a color tool. Maybe it will show up in the next release. If you’re using Firefox a substitute is the ColorZilla extension which allows you to sample colors via an eyedropper.

As 2007 comes to a close it’s time to look back at he albums we’ve listened to and the ones that flew under the radar. Pitchfork just posted their list of Top 50 albums of 2007 and it looks like I’ve got a lot of music listening to catch up on. Pitchfork for the first time this year is also conducting a reader poll, be sure to give your two cents. For a more comprehensive list of top albums from the year be sure to check out Metacritic’s Best of 2007 listings.

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Chicago based poster designer Jay Ryan of the Bird Machine has an exhibit on display at the University of Illinois’ I Space gallery down in River North. If you’re unfamiliar with Jay Ryan’s work he’s known for his whimsical hand drawn posters promoting rock band shows which often include images of an assortment of animals. I believe the exhibit focuses on some of his newer work from 2005-2007.

Luckily the exhibit just started last week (Dec 7th) so there’s plenty of time to check it out. The exhibit is running through February 12, 2008, check the I Space site for the gallery address and hours.

“See, I’m a designer, and I make my living off my award-winning, mind-shaking creativity. While lesser designers settle for gilded edges, pillow embossing, and premium fonts for their visual identity, my business card is unto itself an interactive experience”

Business card directions here.

Last week I attended the PhizzPop Design Challenge in Chicago. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and and it was pretty much a big marketing event to raise awareness of Microsoft Expression Suite and woo the creative web community into trying the product. I’m not one for attending events as such but I decided to give it a shot since I heard about it through the IxDA group. I was pretty much clueless as to what was to take place other than the vague description of designers competing in some type of challenge. The event was held at the Underground and I figured at the very least it would be worth attending for the free drinks.

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The ChicagoTribune has a nice set of 30 vintage winter photos to get you in that holiday spirit. In particular I especially like photo number 16 (shown above) of the motorists snowed in on Lake Shore Drive up near Foster Avenue. That reminds I need go toss a bunch of random junk in the street to reserve that parking spot i just shoveled out!

If you haven’t heard the latest effort from our government to try and infringe on our rights you should read this post about the new bill called the “Safe act” proposed by the House of Representatives.

Our government want’s to keep us safe from all smut peddlers online by creating legislation that would enforce the monitoring of all publicly open WiFi networks for “obscene” image downloads. I’m all for keeping our children safe from pedophiles posing as 13 year old girls online but this clearly is not the answer to those problems. We don’t live in China nor a police state and I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to enforce such a ridiculous law. It’s guaranteed if this thing passed we’d immediately see a huge reeducation in public WiFi.

It begs to the ask the question, what lobbyist are behind this B.S? Telcos and ISPs seem to be the only ones who’d benefit from the bill.

Google recently added a new feature that allows you to easily embed Google Map Street Views in any web page just by copy and pasting some generated HTML. After you’ve drilled down to a street map location just click “link to this page” in the right hand corner. From there you’ll notice the second form field on the page reads “Paste HTML to embed in website”, that’s the code you want. Another cool thing to note: below the form field you’ll see another link that says “Customize and Preview embedded map”. This links to a new popup window that gives you a choice of selecting predetermined view port sizes (small, medium, large) or entering your own custom dimensions.

I’ve entered my office address and customized the view port sizes for my page layout. Here’s the example:

View Larger Map

Looks like Adobe is working on a new product that would give designers another tool to help bridge the communication gap between design and development. The product is code named “Thermo” and after viewing a demo video it looks to be some sort of WYSIWYG product for flash/flex applications.

There is definitely a gap that needs to be addressed in product development between design and dev and with the advent of the “Rich Internet Application” a simple tool that would allow designers to work with data and specify functionality and behavior would be welcomed. As the demo illustrates you can start with a Photoshop comp, bring it into Thermo and then turn items into functioning components with just a few clicks.

On the plus side described in the video, Thermo supposedly will write code that’s reusable to developers, so the designer is actually creating a functioning prototype. This allows the designer to contribute more than just static comps. The problem is I’m a little skeptical on how usable the generated code from Thermo would actually be. And Is it realistic to think that a developer would use the code?. It reminds me of the garbage html and JavaScript that Dreamweaver would spit out. Sure, your front end developers loved using that stuff right?

At the very least It could be a powerful tool that would help convey the designers vision, regardless if the code was used or not. It seems like the product could be quicker and friendlier than using flash.