Face it, we are surrounded by ugly.  Every where we look the buildings, landscapes, cars and other gadgets are constructed, arranged, or designed without much imaginative spark. But it isn't this way everywhere.  Functional things can also be interesting and there are a number of websites out there that make the point.

One of the best design websites I've seen is Bill Tikos's The Cool Hunter.  The site has been around since 2004, features stunning photography of innovative designs from every imaginable area of human endeavor: art, food, restaurants & bars, architecture, fashion, gadgets, kids, offices, stores & transportation.  It includes bicycle dispensers, light sculpture, tapas bars & tree houses.  The site won the 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards for Best Culture Blog.

The ubiquitous PC is a good example of an object that would be helped by a little originality.  A PC doesn't have to be ugly to perform well and another remarkable site, Million-Dollar PC, shows us some spectacular alternatives.  Here artists, architects and other design professionals have focused on the PC as Art. 

Toxel  is an excellent site devoted to imaginative design for everyday objects.  There is, for example, the runaway alarm clock that gets you out of bed by making you chase after it.  Or the scanning toaster than burns a design of your choosing into your morning slice of bread.  It's just good to know there are some folks still using their heads out there.

The above picture, by the way, is totally unrelated to any of these sites but has the undeniable advantage over other, more relevant, pictures in that I have the rights to it (requests for permission to use others weren't answered in time for this post).

Tropical storm systems (i.e. hurricanes & such) aren't anywhere near the problem in the Baltimore-Washington area as they are elsewhere on the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard. Occasionally though they do intrude in a major way and every year the remnants of tropical storms give us a bit of heavy weather -- as the remains of Tropical Storm Nicole are now. For those of you who want to know about tropical storms before they arrive, the National Hurricane Center maintains email advisory lists and an RSS feed. You can sign up at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/signup.shtml . It’s free and you only need to provide an email address.

There are a number of advisories to choose from. The daily Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook is the the best all-purpose advisory. It provides a text weather forecast plus a link that takes you to a satellite image showing tropical disturbances and more links that allow you to track storms 3-5 days out and determine whether high winds are going to occur in your area.

Pretty handy, and you'll never have a day without mail (during hurricane season anyway).