Well, Me. My name is Shawn Day and I am a PhD student in the History Department at 
(if this image is just a pretty palace, click refresh to reload the animated gif and enjoy a quick look at the rebuilding of the schloss)
I am always both fascinated and charmed to see an older building lovingly restored and doubly so when its role is thoughtfully reconsidered and creatively re-purposed. The magnificent ducal place in Braunschweig has been carefully reconstructed and redeveloped as part of a shopping arcade in the city centre. The palace itself was torn down in 1960 following years of gradual disintegration and bomb damage during the WWII that left much of the city centre devastated. Although remnants of the old palace were used in the reconstruction begun in 2005, the bulk of the construction material is new. Despite this, the effect overall effect of the reconstruction is gorgeous, and tribute to the craftsmanship of those involved. There have been a number of critics that feel that such a building should only be used as museum or a public non-commercial space. I heartily disagree.
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A great online historical tour of the University of Guelph campus is now available. It doesn’t feature whizzbang flash effects or implement AJAX functionality. Instead, it delivers a smooth and effective tour in a simple and compelling fashion with simple html. It’s pleasingly lo-tech, well executed and a great example of matching technology to needs.
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Over the past couple of months I experimented with the daily direct feed of links that I added to del.icio.us that day. Around 10pm every evening there was a routine posting to my blog with the del.icio.us pages that I had tagged that day. The feed worked fine and (pure laziness) ensured that I made daily postings to this blog without lifting a finger. While its cools to consider how data can be easily repurposed and exchanged amongst your various web persona (I am leaving the Facebook feed in place) I am rethinking my strategy and have shut down this feed.
The tags are all still publicly accessible at my deli.icio.us page.
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The folks at CommonCraft have put together an awesome little video. It explains, as simply as is possible, how RSS works, why its something of value to to you and how you can go about hooking yourself up. The short video is making the rounds and I stumbled on it over at Blogging Pro News. Its fun, short and definitely worth sharing.
Answering the question, what’s up with the weird look to Randomosity today…I am trying a strange Wordpress theme today using simple ASCII charters. Its actually a rather complex theme and its surprisingly difficult to actually make Wordpress look so low-tech. The theme is called ASCII and is designed by n.design studio Chris Ensell (sorry Chris). Its extremely well done in my opinion.
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