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This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com

And it is powered, in part, by Blogger.

about this

site

Sylloge (pronounced: sill-oh-zhee) is a anglicization of a latinization of the greek stem "sullog" (collect), as used, for example, in sullog-os: an assembly, concourse, meeting of persons.

The (New Shorter) Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "a collection or summary". While the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus lists the following: Compendium, aperçu, digest, précis, sketch, survey, syllabus.

Despite the fact that it is extremely rare (and the horrible-sounding pronounciations that people assume: "sigh-lowjuh", "sill-lodge", etc.) I love this word. Aside from the obvious association with "syllogism" -- any logician's favorite -- it actually means exactly what I wanted for this site: a collection, a summary, a précis or a sketch.

person

Stewart Butterfield <stewart@sylloge.com> in Vancouver, BC.

Born to living-off-the-land hippies (ex- New York & Montréal) in coastal British Columbia. Moved to a city once it was time for school. The third or fourth thing I remember wanting to be "when I grew up" was a graphic designer (signage).

I was six years old when the Apple II first came out and seven when I first got to play with one. Throughout elementary school I created terrible early multimedia and interactive games in AppleBasic.

In high school, I stopped using computers and turned to music (though I was taught composition using a MIDI system and transcription software). In between high school and university, I tried my hand at being a professional musician but wasn't terribly successful.

When I got my first UNIX account (in university), the internet opened up to me and I have been a "heavy user" since 1992. I didn't pay much attention to the web until the second generation of graphical browsers were released and from that point on I have been experimenting with markup and scripting.

During university I worked in the family business (sustainable & New Urbanist land development and planning), getting the opportunity to meet and work with the most prominent architects in the genre (Duany, Polyzoides, etc.). The principles of sustainability and neighbourhood-centered development remained with me as a constant design influence.

At the same time, I studied philosophy of mind, neuropsychology and cognitive science and became interested in their application, especially in human-computer interaction. Cross-pollination lead to web usability; long-time interest in visual design lead to web site creation gigs.

For a while I was torn between being a designer and being an academic, and returned to academia as a grad student. But the increasingly lucrative web explosion drew me back and I abandoned the pursuit of a PhD. Since then I've been a usability consultant, interaction designer, manager, entrepreneur and done a lot of cool internet things.

I consider myself fantastically lucky to be able to apply my philosophical studies to anything at all and doubly so to something so interesting.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
Someday to get its own home.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.