P’unk Avenue
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- 1168 E. Passyunk Aveneue
- Philadelphia PA 19147
- Phone: 215 755 1330
- hello@punkave.com
Junto: Rethinking the Library
Please join us on February 5th at 6pm for the Junto. This month we will be discussing the evolving role of the library. We have assembled a great panel to help lead this discussion. Jim Pecora is the Chief…
I'm not popular, just popular-curious
The notion of popularity used to be a hierarchical, fascistic one. Stereotypes were developed and fine-tuned in popular culture and broadcast media. We then absorbed them and the privileged among us went to the mall to buy what we were…
monome moves up
Today our friends at monome finally moved from Philadelphia to the Catskills. When first heard about the interfaces monome creates, I assumed they were in a city like New York or Berlin. It was a great treat to discover…
Exactly when is it time to be awesome?
If not now, then when? If not today... Ah, but hold your horses there pardner. Back in the day, you did the same darn thing over and over. That was before you knew better. Back when you were a dumbass.…
Separation of Work & Home
For about 6 years I lived next door to P'unk Avenue. A few weeks ago, I moved to Collingswood, NJ. It is fresh enough that my daughter still refers to the place I work as "next door." This move…
Fun with Contextual Semantics
So, the tricky people that defined the word semantics thought they could keep things simple by limiting its definition to the study of the literal meaning of words, leaving the interpretation of figurative meaning up to the folks in…
IDES 322: Techniques Studio
"Creativity is as important as literacy." - Sir Ken Robinson Today marks the first day of a new project that all of us are very excited about. The five of us will be collaboratively teaching a course - IDES…
Bike Business
Today I looked out our window and saw someone delivering Grid, a new magazine about sustainablity in Philadelphia. It spurred me to write about some ideas that I care about. If you know me, you know I am pretty…
Producer, consumer, dancer
Human intelligence didn't evolve just to bring down woolly mammoths with engineered weapons and clever tactics. It also evolved to impress da wimminz (and da menz). Entertaining people, clever people, are people we want to be around. You can do…
Going Out To Dinner
When is it too much? anniversaries, tuesdays, wednesdays, mother's day, divorces, first dates, second dates, thirthieth dates, revenge dates, instead of grocery shopping, for fun, laziness, the experience, for the love of poached eggs, for the love of oysters, brunch,…
What should a modern library's website be?
Last week, I posted some thoughts on what a modern library should be, and promised to follow it up with a post on how a website could support that mission. In case you didn't read the previous post, it…
Post-Consumerist Waste and the Weapons of Mass Reproduction
I won't bore you with too much of a history lesson, but through a certain sequence of events we (you and I) have taken over the role of industry (since industry totally sucked in 2008). For the purpose of this…
The Examined Life
The start of a new year allows us all the chance to reflect on all the things we did in the last one. In this age of ubiquitous data collection methods, this habit manifests itself ways that can be…
What the heck is a front end developer?
Refresh Philly is a new organization aiming to bring the local creative community together both to broaden our skills and to work toward the betterment of Philadelphia. Or something. It's a great mission but it's a little fuzzy. Narrowing that…
t-shirt problem
Raise your hands in the air if you love t-shirts. Now stomp your left foot if you've ever rummaged through rack after rack of dusty second hands in a thrift-store-salvation-army-friends-closet to find that perfectly ironic, exquisitely vintage, super soft, one-of-a-kind…
What should a modern library be?
Last week, Ed Tettemer (formerly of Red Tettemer) gathered together a group of people for a charette to rethink the Free Library of Philadelphia's website. A little back story is probably necessary. Ed and I met last year as…
A few tenets of Metabolism, maybe one tenet of Essentialism
In 1977 the Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris. The design of a museum had not previously been approached with such an inverted set of goals: accommodate the public first, then consider the art. The museum was an immediate success…
The Invention of Air
Generating some excitement at P'unk Ave this week is Steven Johnson's new book, The Invention of Air. From the cover: It is the story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker…
DRY, DRAEE, FDLFRTE
Most of P'unk Avenue's projects are built with Symfony, a web application framework that greatly accelerates the process of developing web sites like the GPTMC Pressroom, DukeLIST and (to be a bit more frivolous) 5seven5. You'll note that these sites…
Will 2009 liberate us from Internet Explorer 6?
This is my inaugural post and I am writing about this topic because it has been on my mind a bunch lately. Really, when will this browser die? Will 2009 be the year developers slam their coffees down and say,…