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.

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

Category: Life

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.

Category: Life

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

Tagged in: Gen Y
Category: Life

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

Tagged in: Adobe, Flash, Generative Art, Pixel Bender, Processing, Quartz, VDMX
Category: Inspirational, Life, Music

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.

Tagged in: Music, Nine Inch Nails, The Slip
Category: Life

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.

Category: Life

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.

Tagged in: TED
Category: Inspirational, Life

One of those Moments that Makes You Go “Duh”

Rendered with sIFR 3, revision 407

I spent probably 20 or 30 minutes scowering the internet trying to find information on this damn error and couldn’t find anything that fit exactly the problem I was having.

I was working on integrating sIFR 3.0 into a website for a client. Now this client happened to utilize the same fonts that I had used for another recent client job, so I just copy>pasted the sIFR info that I had used on the old client site into the new client site, adjusted the domains in the css/js and figured I’d be done ahead of time. However, no matter what I did I would get that damn error above with stupid amounts of padding below each of the elements using that style.

Turns out I had set the domains in the first sIFR export so that it wouldn’t work on any domain but it’s own, which was of course the smart thing to do. I definitely didn’t REMEMBER that though when I was fighting with this dumb thing, at least not till about half an hour after the fact. Duh.

So if you’re here because you had a similar problem, fix your domains in the Options.as file and re-export. That is, if you’re not trying to greedily steal someone else’s bandwidth and fonts :P

Tagged in: sIFR 3, Stupid Moments
Category: Client Work, Life