Ok, so the speech bubbles post I made really got my inner reptile creative mind working. My link, unfortunately, takes you straight to the speech bubbles. What you really need to do is to visit Ji Lee’s Homepage and take a look at some of the other stuff he’s done.

First of all, the site Universrevolved (spelled correctly), shows a 3D alphabet, which made my mind go wow. I think someone needs to use these letters in a puzzle such as The Game. Funny, I sent my friend Lynda a link on that to read, and told her she could blog about it cause I was done for the day, and then my brain went into hyper-drive. So I’m not talking about The Game, I’m just referencing it… /me sticks out tongue.

Now, Ji has some nice links to follow. I’m going to be thinking about this one ALL FREAKING DAY. Remember my position as a photographer? This is just an amazing concept to not only come up with, but to visualize and put onto a website. It’s a fantastic merger of technology, social interaction, and (as well as) commentary. How’s this for a discussion… Can the author of Human Clock still be considered an artist even when he’s using images that other people have taken?

So I’ve got that clock running in a webpage for over 20 minutes now. Every minute, it flashes and a new random image comes up. You want to talk about a way to distract yourself throughout the day? Do yourself a favor and read the FAQ as well.

It’s not a matter of maybe… I am going to take a picture and send it in. He’s looking for things that aren’t mundane though. That definately means a group from Tadcaster, all dressed up at the next event. Oooh.. I wonder if we can find ourselves a sundial somewhere.

My mind is still reeling… I’m not sure if I prefer the analog or the digital clocks….

Current Mood:  giddy

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Guerilla Art is a interesting way for a photographer to interact with the world around them. The thing about Guerilla Art is that the unpredictability of the environment in which it is part of, is what helps to make it interesting. Unfortunately, by its very nature it can sometimes be considered graffiti, and often times illegal.

From Wikipedia: Guerilla art is the surreptitious, and often sudden, creation or installation of unauthorized public art, often with the purpose of making an overt political statement.

One of the more famous pieces of guerilla art in recent months can be attributed to the artist known by the pseduonym Banksy. It depicts a caveman pushing a supermarket trolley. Here’s an interesting article with the author.

Fun times with guerilla art, Ji Lee printed 50,000 speech bubbles and plastered movie posters, advertisements and whatever with them in NYC, then came back and photographed what people added.

So naturally, as a photographer, this site regarding Speech Bubbles caught my attention. I’d love for you to comment with an included link on your favorite bubble, as well as why you picked it.

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While I may currently be persuing a career in computers, I’m still at heart an artist. As a photographer, I’m constantly aware of the visual impact of my enviroment, and I find myself moved and intrigued by the photographs of others.

When I read this article and went to visit this website, I was enthralled by the images. I applaud the artist for thinking outside the box and finding the beauty in the littlest thing.

Yoinked from Boing Boing (Original Website)

High-speed art photos of splashing water
Liquidsculpture is photographer Martin Waugh’s collection of high-speed photos of pouring and splashing liquids in motion. The pix are really striking, especially the gimmick shots done with viscous creams and colored liquids.

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So now that I’m scrolling through my blog with my nice new calendar type dates, I notice that it’s not working as expected.

The first problem happens on days with multiple posts. Only the latest entry displays properly, the others collapse the date and don’t display it all. Guess I gotta go back and figure out why that’s loused up. I’m sure it has to do with the css layout and the way it’s marking subsequent portions of the post. (\* Update \*: It had to do with the use of the WordPress function calling the date which only happens once per page. I changed to use the time, and formatted it that way, and fixed the problem. Though my kludge calls the time function 4 times, instead of 1, because the array wasn’t exploding properly. I’ll try to figure out why *that* is later.)

The other one is where I lead off with a blockquote instead of regular text. Because I tried to integrate the date into the heading without leaving too much extra space, I have it wrap the text of the post around it. Problem is when it encounters a blockquote which has it’s own rules on how to align itself, and WHAMMO, they overlay each other.

Option 1 is to switch back to the other layout while I fix it, so it looks nicer. Or Option 2 (which I am going with), is to leave it the way it is for now, and make the readers deal with it until it’s fixed…otherwise the entries which discuss it make no sense!.

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So my wife got a chance to read my blog for the first time yesterday. With the twins keeping her busy all the time, she saw me working on it, but didn’t really understand what I was doing.

She reads my 20 questions and tells me that there are about 3 or 4 things on there that she didn’t know. Of course, I’m taking the stand that I’ve told her everything on there and she’s just forgotten about it. The quote was “You’ve forgotten more things about me than most people know”.  They were probably just inserted into conversations over time, and then didn’t have any real impact, so they got forgetten.

Of course, she found it extremely humourous that Jason threw a knife at me and that he’s now a cop.

She had a pleasant time reading the comments too.

Then I had her follow some of my links and read some of the 20 question responses from some of my friends, and again had her chuckling outloud.

I doubt she has the time to read any of our blogs regularly, but I’m going to try and get setup with a LJ account anyway. Just to read others and post some comments, even if she doesn’t have time to post. It’s a way of connecting with the rest of the world, and I think that’s really needed right now. Even if you aren’t picking up the phone and talking to people, or replying to email, you get a chance to read some real world entries about how life’s treating everyone else.

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Well I got a chance to screw around with the layout of the blog over the weekend. I’m still trying to get the OpenID login to work correctly, and by doing so, I found some faults with the theme implementation I was using.

So I stripped it down, and cleaned it up a bit. I still have some work to do with the loop for the post content. It looks like the theme was based on an older version of WordPress, and just wasn’t updated with the newer functions.

At least now, it looks much cleaner on the backend.

While I was in there, I changed the way my date display is shown for each entry. Something I wanted to do since the beginning, but managed to cobble to php and the CSS together to make it work the way I wanted.

My next order of business is to get the threaded comments working. I don’t like the current display, but why should I waste time making it look pretty if it’s going to be overhauled anyway?

Current Mood:  tired

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I’ve added a new feature, based on a recent discussion about LiveJournal. That is, the ability to subscribe to comments.

This means when you leave a comment on my blog, you can be notified (via email, if you entered a valid address) when someone else posts a comment on the same topic.

I’m working on adding a threaded comment list as well, but I have to hack it up a bit. It’s designed for a white background, so I have to convert the collapse images into their inverse. Problem is that stupid IE can’t handle Alpha channels in PNG, so it can’t deal with the transparancy. So I added a fix (via javascript) to each page to handle IE’s crappy alpha support. Now the problem is that the fix prevents the image from being clickable, which means IE users can’t collapse/expand the threads. I think I might just wind up saying screw it, and letting the IE users suffer. I just have to redo the whole css for the dang thing so it matches my colors and layout the way I already had it.

Current Mood:  cynical

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It seems that recently, a good number of the blogs that I read are really just ongoing meme lists. I like to call them “me me lists”, cause it’s like the next person in line waving their hand about crying “Oh! Me Next! Me ME!!” While the first several are cute, the remaining 4711 get particularly boring… especially when there are only 5 or 6 possible outcomes. I guess it all depends on how much work goes into the production of the questions and possible answers that really determine if it’s diversified enough. There are even online automated sites which help you to design your own meme for your friends. There are also variations on the quiz meme, which can take facts about you, such as your birthday and provide answers for you.

These quizes and lists seem to dominate the personal blogs. The thing is, there is more to this whole blogging thing besides just the memes. Of my list of LiveJournal friends whose blogs I read, ld_lorenzo‘s (Mike) is particularly insightful, and memes are not the primary content.

I guess that’s what really frustrates me… when it’s the only content.. I don’t mind the occassional ones.

That being said, one of the things floating around from blog to blog right now is a list of 20 random facts about yourself. After you answer it, you’re supposed to “tag” others from your friends list, so that they in turn have to list their facts and pass it along. Problem is, I got tagged twice. Once by Math5 and once by fencerm2. And the only other people I have on my friends list have already completed the damn thing, so I can’t really tag them back.

That aside, after my spiel on meme’s, you might wonder why I bring up the tagging list? Because I actually found them to be insightful additions to my friend’s blogs. Since you did the searching through your own history for those facts, rather than answer the questions to help you determine what kind of vegetable you are, it caught my attention.

So much in fact, that I decided to actually answer the tagging and present my own facts. I think I’ll only do these things when they actually make you sit down and answer personal questions, rather than having something pregenerated. Since I’m not tagging anyone else, I figured I’d fill out each fact with a bit of detail.. so you’re getting several facts in one and it’s more of a topic. I’m also going to make it as interactive as possible.

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Current Mood:  accomplished

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