I recently re-stumbled across Christian Swinehart's incredible personal site, samizdat.cc. It's a great example of someone with strong technical skills combined with an amazing aesthetic design sense. His choose your own adventure analysis is amazing in its attention to detail and beauty.

As far as online role-models, he's a great one. Everything I do looks clunky and amateurish in comparison. I have several half-baked projects which I want to put online, but with the bar set this high I'm really going to have to step up my game.

We're all familiar with the expression "a penny saved is a penny earned". Seems like good financial advice, but really? Pennies? I can hardly bother to bend over to pick one up if I drop it. Here in Canada we're talking about abolishing them, and they already have in Australia. The penny is in its death throes; so too could be this proverb.

So I looked into it a bit more: searching Google books' archive, the earliest reference I can find to the expression is from 1702 in an old French-English dictionary using an archaic form "A penny saved is a penny got" (which, incidentally, is "Un sou épargné, est un sou gagné" en français.)

The popularaity of the phrase really seemed to explode around 1800 as shown below. It appears, however, that it has been losing relevance slowly ever since.

So no wonder it feels dated; it is! In 1800, an (American) penny in modern dollars has a value of... $0.13!

So, in these modern times, where frugality is as important as ever, I humbly submit that we update the expression [*] to something with more (ahem) currency. "A dime saved is a dime earned".

Update: of course the same logic applies to other financial idioms. "penny for your thoughts" seems to come into written popularity at a similar time, although its roots are much older. The fact that we still use this expression indicates the deplorable lack of respect we have for the opinions of others in this day and age. Just my two cents.

In a moment of obsessive frustration, I have converted several beautiful old maps from the Toronto archives into more usable file formats. Check em out here.

New decade, new tech.

A few years back, I wrote a Processing sketch to play with semaphore. That project is suprisingly one of my more popular, but I wasn't too happy with the fact that it was a Java applet.

So, I rewrote it in Javascript!