06.25.2008

10:52 pm

Getting more experience with the D40x

So I’ve been spending some more time playing around with my camera lately, doing a buncha self-portraits for my application to the MTV Engine Room and just general camera mischief. I bought a little wireless remote for the camera a couple months ago and I’m absolutely loving it. It makes doing night and delay-exposures so much nicer.

These first two images are playing around with the Merge to HDR function in Adobe Photoshop.
HDR Self Portrait
HDR Self Portrait 2

And these ones were just more experiments exploring long-exposure times.


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06.22.2008

11:59 pm

R.I.P. George Carlin

George Carlin passed away today, June 22, 2008 at the age of 71 due to heart failure. RIP good sir. You will be sorely missed.
George Carlin

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06.12.2008

11:17 pm

WP 2.5.1 Media Gallery

Okay, so I’m having some funky issues going on with Wordpress 2.5.1. I’ve been doing a lot of blog developments lately and one of the blogs I’m working on was having issues inserting images through the Media Gallery. Now, the really weird thing is that it’s only happening in Firefox. I can insert images through Camino and Safari with absolutely no problem. Essentially, what happens though is that when I click “Insert Into Post” from my browser, the Media Gallery pop-up goes completely blank white and I can do nothing but click the “x” to close the window. Additionally, in Firefox (I’m on version 2.0.0.14), the lightbox-style black overlay in the background of the Media Gallery doesn’t show up whereas it does in both Camino and Safari. Bizarre, will edit this when I figure out wtf is going wrong.

Additionally, here’s the error that Firebug caught if anyone knows what the hell it means or it might help fix the issue:

uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Window.send_to_editor
tb_show("", "[URL REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]", false)thickbox.js (line 230)
tb_init()thickbox.js (line 26)
e(Object type=click target=img currentTarget=a.thickbox)jquery.js (line 11)
e()

[edit]

Okay, it appears that there’s a cross-domain issue caused by the “www” in front of WordPress domains. For example:

http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28 and
http://domainsname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28

are treated different and that’s why the error was showing up in Firefox. If I had just domainsname.com, then Insert Image works, but with the www. in front it did the blank white screen thing. Safari also went blank with the www in front of it. Camino though, for some reason, appears to go to the www-free domain automatically. That is, I tried entering “www” in front of the domain and it would convert it back to the www-free domain. Weird.

It appears that the WordPress URL/Blog Url under the “General” tab in “Settings” determines which domain it is that you can upload images from, so if you’re having these issues, make sure you double-check the domain that your WordPress blog is configured to and that might fix the issues.

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06.11.2008

2:01 am

Recent Photos

Just a few of some photos I’ve taken recently. Head over to my Flickr account to see everything I’ve tossed up there recently.

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05.24.2008

3:16 am

Gen Y vs. The Newspapers

I was reading an article on how Gen Y doesn’t read newspapers recently that got me thinking a bit. Although, declining readership is by no means new news, I think what really triggered me was that they specifically targeted Gen Y (app. those born from 1981-2000, also called ‘Millenials’). Being that I’m one of those Gen Y’ers who doesn’t read newspapers, I thought it might prove valuable to extract the reasons why I don’t read the newspaper.

+ Continue Reading

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05.09.2008

4:39 am

I Admit Defeat

I’ve been getting extremely interested in programming as of late, particularly in regards to Flash AS3 and Processing. And within these two, I was getting extremely interested in their integration of sound analysis being tied to code-based visual experiments. There’s been a number of people doing some pretty amazing things already with code-based visuality, including Jared Tarbell, Eric Natzke, and of course the first major Flash code-artist superstar Joshua Davis (among many, many others). + Continue Reading

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05.06.2008

3:43 pm

First foray into 3D

So I spent a few hours last night playing around in Cinema4D and getting used to the interface, working with the tools, modelling etc. Also spent a number of hours trying to figure out reflections and playing around with C4D’s Mo-Graph module which is pretty fantastically dope. I forgot to render out some of my different scenes as I was playing around except for this last one. C4D Render 1

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05.05.2008

2:28 am

The Slip

The Slip

Okay, seriously, I don’t know what kinda vitamins or super-berries or what Reznor’s taking now that he’s sober, but apparently three albums in less than two years is no big deal.

First it was Year Zero which featured an alternate reality game building up to and coinciding with the release of the album in early 2007 (plus the Year Zero Remixed album, which fair enough is all remixed by other artists, but it’s still another project on the guy’s plate).

Then it was the lyric-free, musical 4-disc exploration Ghosts in February 2008. Additionally, coinciding with the release of Ghosts, Reznor announced a YouTube video contest to create visuals for the Ghost album.

And now, a mere three months after Ghosts, Reznor releases The Slip, for free. That’s right, he’s giving the entire album away for free online. I haven’t listened to the album yet as I just finished downloading it, but I imagine it is pure class like all of his work.

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05.02.2008

4:08 am

Carolina Drama

The Raconteurs performing Carolina Drama, which is far and away my favorite song of the year so far, live at the recently passed Coachella ‘08. I really wish I could’ve gone to Coachella to see this live:

I’ve been listening to this damn song on repeat for like…. 4hrs straight. I just can’t get enough of it. I really wanna find the damn milkman now though…

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05.01.2008

8:54 am

Pinup Illustration

This originally started as a design for a Design With Image and Time project. We were matched up with partners and were told to design a tattoo for our partner. The instructor gave us a number of evaluative research methods to try and drill to the emotional core of our partners so that we could create the most representative tattoo for our partners.

I ended up being partnered with my very dear and beautiful friend Blair who is very much a girly girl that has a strong art-nerd side running through her. I immediately thought of a Gil Elvgren pinup picture for her. One of the things I’ve always liked about Elvgren’s pinup pictures is that they’re always extremely beautiful women, obviously, but when you get into the image a little bit more they always have some sort of dorkiness to them. I thought that that was almost the epitome of Blair. After bouncing the idea off of her I found out that she had a love of pinup girls and had actually been thinking about getting a tattoo eventually of a pinup girl. So it was a resounding success. Pinup Illustration

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05.01.2008

8:29 am

Glass Castle Apocalypse

A visual response for my English 101 class to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are-A Changin’. We had to select a poem or reading from the semester’s coursepack and then interpret it into some sort of visual response.

I read the poem before I went to sleep to give my sub-conscious a chance to chew on it for a while as it tends to be how I get my best ideas. Lo and behold, 4:30am rolls around and I’m woken up out of a dead sleep by a nightmare/dream about the meek inheriting the earth, which is essentially what Dylan’s song is about. My dream was significantly more violent and was placed a number of years in the future, but essentially the image below was the last remnant of the dream when I woke up. A lone anguish cry of the repressed before they revolt and tear down the glass castles of lies, greed, corruption, and manipulation.

The final version was a 19″ high x 27.5″ wide poster. The final .psd file was a few megs over 1gb (!). Glass Castle Apocalypse

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05.01.2008

7:12 am

May 1st Reboot

Welcome to the re-launch of my online portfolio (as well as integration of a blog) at theflattestcat.com. It went through a lot of different ideas, concepts, and technologies over the last couple months before I landed here with this, so I hope you like it. Additionally, I’d like to send out a very special welcome to all of the visitors from may1reboot.com, take a look around let me know what you think and I look forward to seeing all of the other new work today.

I’ll also be posting more work over the next couple hours as I have some school stuff that I haven’t posted yet.

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05.01.2008

4:04 am

The Devji Group

The Devji Group is a group of Edmonton brothers who own seven different clothing boutiques in Edmonton. Their stores cover the gamut from high men’s and women’s fashion to classic rock tees and motocross brands over to hip hop, skate and urban culture for both genders. In summer 2006 they were looking to enhance their online presence for all seven of their clothing companies to better inform their customers as well as promote the rather diverse selection of top-quality brand names that their stores carry.

I worked in co-ordination with Zaar Marketing to create designs to accurately capture the various target markets of each clothing company and help thematically separate each store from one another. I was responsible for logo revisions for many of the stores, the design of all of the websites as well as development of xhtml-strict templates for integration with the WordPress Blogging Platform.

Project Link: Soular ClothingSoular Clothing

Project Link: Method StreetweaMethod Streetwear

Project Link: Queue ClothingQueue Clothing

Project Link: Sophia’s Clothing
Sophia\'s Clothing

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05.01.2008

3:20 am

O

An illustration experiment I created for the Emily Carr viewbook.
O

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05.01.2008

3:11 am

Couple of TED links…

I’ve been busy watching movies over at TED lately whenever I’m eating lunch or something as a break from work/friends/whatever, much more informative and entertaining that trying to find something on that useless thing we call the tv (although, really, I don’t even pay for cable and haven’t for about 4 years, so I guess that’s kind of a void point). Anyway, found a couple of gems that are worth looking at if you have some free time:

TED | Talks | Michael Pollan: The omnivore’s next dilemma :: this video makes me beg the question, why isn’t everyone switching over to this type of farming?

TED | Talks | Helen Fisher: The science of love, and the future of women :: interesting video on the actual bio-chemistry behind that infamous feeling that has been at the center of some of mankind’s greatest achievements as well as failures

TED | Talks | David Gallo: Underwater astonishments :: a brief talk that’s pretty interesting, make sure to watch near the end where he shows an octopus appearing out of an algae plant. I don’t think humans can claim to be very damn special until they can make something like THAT reality for us, hah.

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