BBC Learning English

The Learning English section of the BBC webpage is quite a good site to listen actual conversations, not like the school kids stories that I often had to listen a couple of years ago.
I listened to “6 minutes English”. A 6 minutes length podcast where two persons talk about one word and its uses within a context. In this case they talked about the word Manage, its origin and where do you use it. It’s not so hard to understand them and the way they explain everything makes it funnier.
After that I “Faced Up to Phrasal” It’s kind of a TV soup that you can listen at and then learn some vocabulary used on it that is written below.
After listening a couple of podcast I tried to play a little word quiz that made it all a little funnier.
“Learning English” was a good site, I think I’m gonna keep visiting it.

Design Boom!

I can’t say I have one very favorite site, but amongst the tons of game-sites, technology blogs, design blogs, and of course video based web pages like You Tube or Meta Café, where I pent a lot of time playing online games or watching funny videos, there’s a very special one that helps me keep in touch with design trends around the world. I’m talking about DesignBoom (www.designboom.com). I met this site when a teacher recommended it to us. When entered for the first time I immediately like it. This site it’s a kind of blog about design and architecture news, they show vanguard projects from everywhere, also some really important events like the Milan Design week. This is very useful sometimes to take some ideas of or simply to read some interesting articles.
In this site you can also find famous designers’ interviews and design competitions being realized in USA or in Japan with very creative solutions.
Also it has some history of common objects and their evolution over time.
I use to visit this page at least twice a week.
PS. When I’m really bored I visit www.porlaputa.com to watch some funny and stupid videos :).

Victory City

Victory City is not a futuristic idea of how people should live nor a utopia but an old-fashioned premonition of future. It makes me remember about 50’s films or Big Brother book where they showed us the future, where man acted like robots following one man’s desire.
May be, people at first would like this new way of life, being safe from crime, living in a clean environment and close to their jobs, but it wouldn’t take so long for people to get kind of stressed, bored with their day-to-day lives and start to complain and asking for more freedom to do what they want to and not follow a schedule that tells them what to do, what to eat, where to live, etc.
Actually what we hate becomes what we love. We may not like crowded places but we love going out and meet different people or we don’t like everyday’s disorder but a life without it would become exhausting. In urbanistic or in enviroment terms the Victory City would work efficiently, but is the human behaviour what Mr Orville has forgotten.