I need one of these! A ceramic toaster that pulls the bread through this little stand-up thingy and spits toast out onto a nice forked-catching rack on the other side. This design won first prize at a "Ceramics for Breakfast" competition over at DesignBoom. According to the designer, "This toaster is designed to engage the user, re-invigorating the social context of toasting by questioning everything about what we toast with today." Read more about it.
I really could've used one of those last week and earlier this week while in the grips of la grippe. I'm well on the road to recovery at this point, but I believe that was one of the worst colds I've had in recent memory - perhaps ever. Holy crap that was no good....
In other good news, I read on BoingBoing today that they're going to be turning one of my favorite books into a SciFi Channel Miniseries. George Clooney is executive producing a miniseries based on Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. (see SciFi news blurbs here).The book is set in a pretty distant-future type setting with a society based around the wonders of nanotechnology. It's a big departure from my favorite Stephenson book (Snow Crash, which is a gritty pure-cyberpunk type book - in fact, IMO it's one of THE definitive cyberpunk stories. I'd LOVE to see an adaptation of that), but I still really enjoyed it. I'd say I'm definitely excited to see the miniseries here, but I'm also pretty skeptical on how well they can pull it off - all the nanotechnology effects in the book are going to make for some pretty hardcore special effects and CGI-work, and the book's immersive interactive storybook/illustrated primer (as mentioned in the subtitle) leads the book on some pretty odd tangents which, while interesting, could have a hard time translating to a TV audience. Since it was only just announced, it'll be a long time before it makes it on the air, and there's always the possibility it'll die on the production shelf and the project will never see the light of day... I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
