PepsiCo Americas Beverages is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice.

I have never been more excited about my orange juice packaging. Read the full story here

The Credit Crisis Visualized reminded me of my favorite artist, Mark Lombardi

you can see more of his work here and read about him here

The Credit Crisis Visualized

Hard Times - Retold.

Part of Penguin Book's new digital fiction project. This 'retelling' of Charles Dickens' Hard Times is written by Matt Mason and designed by Nicholas Felton (who by the way is doing some pretty cool stuff with mapping and data). It is a great writer/designer collaboration.. You can see the entire presentation here

Walking Maps

When I first moved to Chicago, I kept track of all the different routes I walked in between my apartment and my studio. Here are some maps for the month of November.

Today I looked at a lot of maps

1. After reading an article about the agreement between Pakistan and the Taliban - I tried to figure out where the Swat District was in relation to K2. The Swat District is about 100mi northwest of Islamabad. You can see a map here

2. I also read a great article in the NYT about mapping and navigation as it relates to cell phones. really fascinating stuff. a kind of new cartographic landscape of sorts.

3. This made me think of the project at HUGE Inc. in Brooklyn

4. During lunch, I continued perusing the web for info on anything to do with Marco Polo and watched some more videos of the two guys that retraced MP's route I looked up all kinds of info on the Wahkan Corridor, the Taklamakan Desert and Cambaluc, founded by Kublai Khan and what is now modern day Beijing.

It was a good day for maps.

blogging vs thinking.

Sometimes I wonder if blogging is just a lame excuse for not thinking. It's easier to click on a link than to have to actually form sentences into cohesive thoughts. There are obvious benefits for both, and I would even venture to say that they are not mutually exclusive.

some books that i like

I'm trekking to K2 basecamp in the summer of 2010!

When Ahsan, my rowing coach from high school, asked me to go trekking with him in Pakistan next summer it was hard to imagine that it would be anything less than amazing. K2 is the second highest peak in the world (Everest is the first) and is situated on the border of Pakistan and China in the Karakoram mountain range. You can see a map here. We trek across the Upper Baltoro Glacier, which is ringed by 10 of the 30 highest peaks in the world, for 6 days before hitting basecamp at 16,300 ft. The summit is another 11,951 feet up, topping out at 28,251 ft. Don't worry. It's the first 16,300 that interest me... not the last 12. Updates and more details to come!

I LEGO N.Y.

These are so fantastic. Click here to see the entire post

IDEO and other places I would love to work

I was on the train reading the newest issue of Fast Company and flipped immediately to page 78 to read the article on David Kelley - founder of IDEO. I've decided that the thought of working at IDEO is kind of like having a crush on the hottest boy in school. You know that if only they would get to know you you would have a pretty good chance - but the chances of them getting to know you are slim especially when you're up against the likes of Drew Barrymore and Gwenyth Paltrow. it kind of sucks most days.

.. but despite my cynicysm, my over-active imagination assumes eventual success - so i tend to think that I have little to lose and usually go for it. (employment... not movie stars.) Today I started to wonder if the ridiculous crushes and IDEOs of the world exist to push us into other places and meet other people that we wouldn't have pursued had we settled for something less. I wonder sometimes if our expectations for ourselves propel us towards things that may actually exceed those expectations one day. In moments like these, I try to keep the cynic in me at bay and spend a little more time working on the things that I believe in.