The excellent Chris Glass linked to Copy Paste Character, a free tool that lets you click on any character to copy it to your keyboard.

I wish I had this tool when I worked on the foreign language companion sites at Thomson/Heinle, and often had to get an “a grave” or “e acute” at a moment’s notice.  Now that I’m using a large screen to work on, I can open up this site as a new window and keep it going whenever I need to get a character.

This seems to be a new brand of web site – no navigation or hierarchy, just a single point on the Internet that you can pull up and use as a useful tool.

The site is provided by Konst & Teknik, which have a very interesting site of their own.  I like the way their site seems more web-based than print – no primary nav (save for the bottom) and no three column layout messing up the works.  The simple “Sorted by” in the lower left is my favorite part – you have to play around with it to realize that it changes the list to match your desired sort order, but once you understand the function it’s easy to manipulate.

The whole site has that aesthetic – exploring the (pretty simple) navigation leads to hidden wonders and neat little surprises.  I didn’t even know who they were until I clicked on Contact, and found that they are a two-person agency based in Sweden.

Cengage Learning is on the move:

Real estate sources said the Southport, Conn., developer reportedly has a 120,000-square-foot lease deal with Cengage Learning, a developer of educational technologies and support products that previously operated as Thomson Learning. Cengage will be the first office tenant in the redeveloped Channel Center complex in South Boston.

More at: Cengage Learning lease is a lift for Channel Center

A quick Google search for Channel Center Boston brought up a few pics. Looks like a nice new home for the merged Thomson Learning and Houghton Mifflin.

The Google map below shows that the new digs (B) are only a short walk from the old digs (A). Not that far to move, though it’ll be a brisk walk back to Flour and Lucky’s.

View Larger Map

Good luck to all Cengagers involved in the move!

The “Big Picture” feature of the the Boston Globe web site convinces me that it’s time to expand the width of this blog to 1024 pixels.

London from above, at night

I just stumbled across Google Forms, which lets you create forms and record the results in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

See my test form here.

I am slightly agog at this functionality, having spent 2-3 hours setting up a similar form at www.altarserverappreciation.org that just records info in a database.  Took about 15 minutes to set up a test on Google Forms.

This is a good night to play around with technology – seeing what’s out there on the web.  I am constantly amazed at the amount of free, reliable tools out there waiting to be used.

The Washington Post published an article discussing the rise of Graphic Novels:

I’ve wandered into an alternative universe, and I’m trying to decide if I want to stay. The setting is the lovely, old-fashioned library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, in midtown Manhattan. The event is a gathering called “SPLAT! A Graphic Novel Symposium.” I’m here because the organizers have promised to lay out, in the course of a single day, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Graphic Novels.”

What I want to know is: How did this formerly ghettoized medium became one of the rare publishing categories that’s actually expanding these days?

More at: Drawing Power

Found at: Metafilter.