So this morning, as with most mornings, I was reading MacSurfer’s Headline News between application loads,

[Side rant: Windows makes it too easy for me to close an application. On the Mac, if you close most apps’ windows (Safari, or Word for example) the application stays open until you actually quit it. That way, you might load Word once, and you can use it throughout the day without having to wait for the app to reload into memory. You can see the app is still running because the little black arrow’s still below that app in the dock, and there aren’t any annoying windows cluttering up your desktop. Bonus: if it’s an app you use regularly it’s in the Dock anyway, so you’re not even imposing on your dock space. On the PC I can close many applications’ windows without closing the app, but I’m still stuck with a big ugly window – or if I minimize that ugly window I still have the app taking up space in my taskbar. Ugly.]

and happened upon an article on Computer Science on a bog called Call Me Fishmeal, which made me giggle. (Yes, Dad, I have read Moby Dick. No, I still have no interest in watching the movie.) It turns out to be Wil Shipley’s blog, and while I’ve never heard of Wil Shipley, I have heard of Delicious Monster, a Mac developer that’s created Delicious Library, which everyone tells me is the world’s best track-all-these-books-in-your-house software on the world.

Anyway, Wil has a pretty cool blog, and while wandering said blog, I came across TED, which I’d never heard of either.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Our mission: Spreading ideas.

Pretty awesome. Especially awesome is the section called Design like you give a damn (which sounds like a good idea to me), where I watched one of what I’m sure will be an awesome assortment of talks about design, this specific one covering everything from Prada’s fancy-schmancy dressing rooms to entrepreneurship in Kenya.

TED’s got a boatload of neat ideas and I suspect I’ll be checking out a lot of new things in the near future. You should check it out too.

[So in a way, Windows’ crappy design lead me to find more on good design. Go figure.]