Top 10: Aid to Japan

This week instead of running a list of sites I’m going to do a round-up of charities who are doing important work in Japan. At Herman Miller we’re responding in a few different ways. As a business we have made donations to the relief efforts and so have our employees. We will also be donating 5% of our online sales to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. The American Red Cross is in daily contact with its counterparts in Japan. We’ll continue those donations through to April 16. We feel this is one thing we can do together.

Above: Devastated Landscape: An emergency worker cycles past debris in Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, March 17, 2011. From Time magazine’s excellent photo essay of the disaster. Photo credit: ALY SONG / REUTERS

Below are 10 sites I found that give you more chances to help.

1. The Red Cross: Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a one time $10 donation from your phone. ou can also donate via iTunes or Causes on Facebook. Living Social is also offering to match your $5 donation to the Red Cross. They’ve raised over $1.5 million so far.

2. Japan’s Red Cross: You can donate directly to the Japanese Red Cross Society on Google’s Crisis Response.

3. International Medical Corps: Text MED to 80888 to make a $10 donation from your phone.

4. Global Giving: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. Provides relief and aid to victims.

5. Save the Children Text JAPAN or TSUNAMI to 20222 to make a $10 donation from your phone.

6. Ark (Animal Refuge Kansai) Help for animals made homeless by the earthquake and tsunami.

7. Doctors Without Borders

8. Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund

9. ShelterBox provides emergency packs. To give directly click here.

10. Help fund Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s partition system for emergency shelters. Donate here.

Thank you Yanko Design Design, Yukiko Matsuoka of Greenz.jp and Google’s Crisis Response page.

Shigeru Ban and Aid to Japan

We’ve been following the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami with a heavy heart. So when I saw that Shigeru Ban, one of my favorite architects, had designed an incredibly simple partition system to help make emergency shelters more habitable I had to post it immediately. Click here to find out more about the shelters. And here to see the other work he has done in helping victims of earthquakes around the world. I’ll post more tomorrow on Herman Miller’s response to the disaster along with a round-up of charities who are doing good work in the region.

Ideal Live/Work Space: Thomson Reuters’ China Bureau Chief Don Durfee

As Thomson Reuters’ China bureau chief, Beijing-based Don Durfee oversees news coverage for mainland China, including the work of over 100 journalists, photographers and TV staff.  For this post, he remarks on notions of the ideal, shifting priorities and using collaboration.

First, let me say this: there is the workspace I fantasize about, and there’s the one I actually need.

In my dream, I lean back in my simple, comfortable chair and gaze across an empty maple desk, sunlight streaming in from the windows. My books are all neatly arranged on a bookshelf. I hide my Macbook in a desk drawer when I’m not using it. I swivel around in my chair to pour another cup of Sumatra coffee and adjust the volume on my stereo, which plays only my favorite songs.

But back to reality. I’m sitting at my desk in the Reuters News Beijing bureau. It’s a big, open—and sometimes chaotic—room, where about 100 journalists work, including cameramen, web designers, translators and reporters writing about everything from earthquakes to money. A drab Chinese official is speaking on one of the dozen TV screens around the room. Someone is yelling to me – “Can you believe that someone just called me to say that radiation from Japan has already arrived in Beijing? Ridiculous!”

I’m a reporter. Or, rather, an ex-reporter who now attempts to run a news operation through email, blackberry, online chatrooms, phone calls, meetings and conversations with the writers sitting a few feet from me.

When there is breaking news—and there’s been a lot lately, with Japan’s crisis and China’s crackdown on reporters—we have to work quickly and together. Hence the absence of walls and our desks, which are arranged in clusters of four so we can easily discuss stories, complain and tell jokes, all without getting up. That’s important, because nearly every story is a collaboration. At times five people will all be on the phone, conducting interviews for a single article that one person is typing up.

Every desk has at least two computer monitors, to make it easier to keep an eye on messages while writing.

The bureau isn’t the tidiest place. There are stacks of newspapers, and some broken printers and unused fax machines. Several of my colleagues keep great heaps of unsorted papers and books on their desks — treatises on China’s environmental policies, statistical almanacs and well-worn Chinese dictionaries. One especially prolific writer has so many papers that he can barely find his computer screen. The building management sent me a note the other day suggesting that his desk violates some fire code.

My office wasn’t always like this. In earlier days, I was a magazine writer. I had a dim, but warmly lit office with a mahogany desk and a shelf full of reassuringly familiar books. Pictures of my wife and two girls—babies back then—were on the wall under my favorite poster depicting Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow. There was always an iPod nearby so that I could find just the right music to match whatever I was writing. Astor Piazzolla for the long articles, Frank Black for the stories that called for a little aggression.

In other words, pretty close to my fantasy. (I’ve also tried to get close with my desk at home — pictured above — but in truth my daughters spend more time there drawing than I do writing.)

But my newsroom, rough around the edges, noisy and friendly, has its charms. At least there’s someone to talk to.

Cabin Fever

Wallpaper magazine recently did an excellent round-up of small houses in rural settings and they titled it ‘Cabin Fever‘. Perfect for this time of year when the winter seems to have stretched on forever. Here’s three of the gems they found.

Wood Cabin by Atelier St in Germany

Chilmark Guest House by Charles Rose Architects in Massachusetts

Normandy House by Beckmann-N’Thépé in France

Unplggd: Hide Hard-to-Remember Passwords

There’s something to be said for going old-school. While you think you’re being secure by recording all your login information in a password-protected excel file labeled “wordpass,” you’re only fooling yourself. If somebody really wanted to get in there, they probably could. That’s why, despite the prevalence of secure password-stashing apps, we think it’s a good idea to take things down on paper—using this clever bookshelf trick to hide your passwords, of course.

It’s true! You can hide your most important passwords in plain sight on your bookshelf. The trick is writing them down in an obscure spot that only you would think to look.

One Lifehacker reader suggests that using a little bit of word association, you can tap into your unique psyche and find the perfect hiding spots for your login info—written down in book margins where only you would think to look.

Lifehacker suggests you should write all your passwords down in your dictionary next to words that relate to the sites requiring hard-to-remember passwords, but we think you could do a lot better (and get more secure) by using your whole bookshelf.

Think about the site you’re recording the password for, and write down the very next word that comes to your mind. If you’re stashing the password for your online banking account, that might lead you to Riverbank and the key word, “River,” so grab for a copy of A River Runs Through It.

Think of your favorite number and write your password down on that page so you’ll know where to look for it again. You could even change your password to reflect the page number it’s hidden on.

Do you have any memory tricks for hiding your written-down passwords? Tell us in the comments!

By Taryn Fiol

(Images: Flickr member niznoz licensed for use under Creative Commons, Flickr memberdorywithserifs licensed for use under Creative Commons)

The Playlist: Music critic and author Amanda Petrusich

What’s better than record-store recommendations from a music critic? Find out three all-time favorites and more from Amanda Petrusich, contributor to The New York Times, Pitchfork, and Spin (among others) and author of It Still Moves and Pink Moon.

What do you listen to while you work? I spend so much time writing about music that my assignments tend to dictate the day’s soundtrack, but when I’m working on a longer project or something not tied to a specific artist or record, I typically like really rhythmic, almost mesmeric things—that can be hip-hop, or pop, or old hill country blues songs. I think as writers, we’re all aspiring to get music on the page, in a way—that sounds so stupid and pretentious, but it’s also true! There’s an elusive rhythm to good prose.

How do you listen? Like all music nerds, I like vinyl, I like headphones. I like closing the curtains and having an all-encompassing, stupidly dramatic listening experience. If I’m listening for pleasure, I’m almost always listening to an LP. That’s not practical, work-wise—these days, it’s fairly common for critics to only get a watermarked stream of a high-profile record in advance, and then I have to listen through my computer, usually on headphones (I’ve also had to review records that I was only allowed to listen to in a conference room at the label’s office, with the door closed). If I get something on CD, I’ll play it on my stereo (we have an old vintage Marantz receiver that’s a little temperamental) or put it on my iPod and go for a run or ride around on the subway with it. I like to get it out of my office, if I can—let it breathe, let it move.

I’ve been writing a lot about record collectors lately—specifically, the guys hunting down old, pre-war blues 78s. For Christmas last year, my parents bought me this stunning, four-foot tall Edison phonograph, probably from the 1910s—it’s the most beautiful thing in our home (besides, obviously, our cat Dominic). 78s only contain about 3 minutes (or less) of music per side, so I wind it up and just let it blow—honestly, it’s incredible.

Do you have any favorite music websites/providers? I’m terrifically biased, since I’ve been writing for Pitchfork since (yikes!) 2003. But I will happily tell you my top three, all-time favorite record stores: the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ; Shangri-La in Memphis, TN; and Bop Street Records in Seattle, WA.

Read more

Remember to Celebrate

There is so much to celebrate.  Spring is in the air.  The snow is melting (if you live in one of those winter wonderlands).  Buds are popping through the earth and the sun is shining more and more. I’ve been doing lots of celebrating myself lately!  A few weeks ago I proudly put a copy of my completed book manuscript in an envelope to send to my editor to review.  I’ve been working on it for nearly two years – since my youngest son was three months old. I wanted to share the coaching tools I use with my clients, with everyone.

It would have been so easy for me to put the manuscript in the envelope to my editor and to sit right back down at my computer to get crackin’ doing all the other work that is involved in the next steps of self-publishing the book.  And, believe me, I had that impulse.

We are all conditioned to keep checking things off of our list, to keep plowing through – searching for that unattainable high we dream of when our list will be completely checked off, when we will be, finally, “done”.  We rarely stop to celebrate what’s in the “now”.

Read more

Five Fabulous: Hits of Spring Color

Spring is almost here (March 20 is the official date). And we thought you’d appreciate a little shot of color to brighten up these last days of winter.

1. M3 Seat/Storage, 165.00 EUR A piece by Mikko Kärkkäinen that works overtime: a bright storage box and a seat combined in one. Get it: finnishdesignshop.com

2. Nelson Swag Leg Desk, $1949.00 Surprising pops of color (orange! spa blue! chartreuse!)help make this desk legendary. Get it: HermanMiller.com

3. Great Balls of Wire, $20.00 Organize wires and cords (and add a little fun) with this award-winning design. Get it: sfmoma.stores.yahoo.net

4. Cammeo Jar One, $46.00 Store everyday supplies within this bone china jar–then secure it with one of six brightly hued rubber bands. Get it: gretelhome.com

5. Round Calendar, $176.00 Not totally practical, but practically a piece of art. Get it: yoox.com

Images linked to their sources within the numbered text

Unplggd: Using Those Pesky Bookmarks Properly

As much as we like to think that Unplggd is your only daily stop on the internet, we recognize most readers shuffle through a set of favorite websites throughout the day while taking a a break/avoiding work. We recently implemented a little shortcut that has made it much easier to stay on top of the primary sites that we like to read that we thought we’d share.

All of the major web browsers let you save bookmarks to folders. You can then open all of the shortcuts in any given folder all at one time, each in its own tab. If you’ve got a slow computer and a ton of links, this may take a slight bit of effort on your computer’s part. Then again, should you really be reading blogs all day at work? [Perhaps!]

General initial steps
- Create a folder in your bookmarks and name it “Daily Reading”
- Save all of your favorite sites to this folder

Mozilla Firefox
In Firefox, you can store this folder in either your Bookmarks Toolbar or your Bookmarks Menu. Wherever you prefer to keep the folder, simply click the folder from either location and then select “Open in All Tabs.” You can also right click the folder to see this option as well.

Microsoft Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer requires you to open the Favorites Bar and then mouse over the folder you want to open. A little arrow shows up to the right and you click it to launch all of the sites into separate tabs. Microsoft doesn’t give you the option of using the file menu to launch all of your sites at once.

Google Chrome
Chrome has a bookmarks bar where you can keep your daily reading folder. Here you simply right click the folder and select “Open all bookmarks.”

Apple Safari
Safari has a Bookmarks Bar as well. You can click normally or right click on your daily reading folder and then select “Open in Tabs.”

You’re done
Now it’s quick and simple to take a break during the day and get through all your favorite websites in one fell swoop.

By Jason Yang

iPad2 Drama

The iPad 2 line was forming down at the Santa Monica Apple store at 10am on Friday morning. I didn’t care. In fact I took the photo above and felt sorry for all those people who had to wait til 5pm when the iPad would be released.

Earlier I had been lulled into a false sense of security by the guy at Culver City ‘s Best Buy. The result? I am the only person in Los Angeles without an iPad 2. At least that is what it feels like.

The guy (we’ll just call him ‘the guy’) told me they had 100s of iPads and not to worry about lining up. He said no one knows Best Buy sells them. Come back tomorrow and we’ll have one. So I did just that and not only were they sold out, they wont have any more for at least 3 weeks. In a panic I called around and found out the Apple store at Santa Monica might have them in on Tuesday. So I’ll head out tomorrow and stand in line like everyone else. Or I could just wait for the hype to die down!

(In case you were wondering we went out to dinner for our anniversary and it was lovely.)