Born Ruffians and some String Theory videos
listened
Born Ruffians, Badonkadonkey
watched
The Elegant Universe (chapter 4 here.... more on the tubes)
Musicish
Watched
Thanks to @djdeedle for this. Reminds me of my old sound editing days with Cool Edit
I've been studying up a lot on partcile physics. No. I'm not kidding. More to come on that. For now, here are the links I've been collecting.
Busy busy
watched
I can't believe I missed a chicken-fucker meme. Thank goodness for the Daily Show and the YouTube.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Intro - Ernie Anastos' Catch Phrase | ||||
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listened
This posting of a 1970 reading from Breakfast of Champion's by Kurt Vonnegut is awesome. Originally found on Merlin Mann's blog, kung fu grippe.
learned
It's been a huge first month at my new job with a lot of new techniques and responsibilities. I'm getting to focus a bunch more on front-end development and am lucky to have some new colleagues with years of front-end experience to help me get ramped up. I'll also be traveling a bit, which is a nice change of pace.
In addition, I'm studying up for a presentation I'm going to give to friends on The Big Bang, The Large Hadron Collider, and (time allowing) String Theory.
So, yeah, lots to do. I have managed to almost completely finish up some work I'd been doing to help the Art Director's Club of Metropolitan Washington with their new website, which I'm hoping will drop in the next few weeks. The only sidework left on my plate is a super-secret Twitter app that I'm hoping to get out the door by the end of September if I can find some weekends with terrible weather to keep me in front of the laptop.
Random Image
Found an old book around the house. Scanned a page.
Listened
These podcasts from Doug Benson are quite amusing.
Fever Ray, Lego, etc.
Listened
@crowls mentioned Fever Ray, which is the sister from The Knife's side project. Pretty good and awesome that I can just click on listen on pitchfork and hear the whole album.
Watched
A ridiculous lego time-lapse video, which you've probably already seen.
Learned
I learned that butter stains are really hard to remove from a couch. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible.
Also, I've found a few images and scanned them recently and I'd like to keep it up. Random old ads, packaging, that sort of thing. THis one is from a box for some headphones that dad-in-law had lying around:
oh hi
Been a while. Too long, in fact. But whatever. R and I took the month of July and traveled around. I switched jobs. Etc. Etc.
Listen to this:
Then revist http://threeframes.net/ because it's awesome.
Then stay tuned as I'm going to try to keep things more, shall we say, current.
Wolfgang is a Pretty Awesome Name
Watched
Ran into this somewhere in my internet travels. I've been on a classical music kick lately. Which reminds me that I should probably hit up mom for suggestions as her collection beats my cliche smattering of Beethoven, Bach and Chopin.
I did, however, run into this deal on Amazon for 99 mozart tracks for $8.00. Granted, the music is no longer under any copright or license, so I should just be able to plug the sheet music into a MIDI and get the same thing, no?
Hint: The answer is: "No."
Journalism and Some Inspiration
I got some great news this week that I'm really excited about. If you want to know what the hell it is, you'll probably find out soon enough or just email me and ask. In any case, I ran into this video (really long) and it seemed fitting:
Watched
Australian journalist, author, film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, US military's quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9/11 era, false history in the guise of 'objective' journalism.
"Media cliched language normalizes the unthinkable."
Listened
Found this track on record label. I recommend headphones.
Learned
I leaned that, "senior citizens, although slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose." I went down to the museum after dad-in-law pimped out my knowledge of macs and offered for me to help an elderly coworker, Marcia, to "get the web working." It turned out that Marcia I was assisting was 74, had an awesome rig (23" AND 30" Apple Cinemas running on a G4 with a Wacom tablet the size of the fattest of our two cats) and by "get the web working" meant "publish things to the museum website with Dreamweaver." I'm not a Dreamweaver expert, but it turned out she knew her way around the application and just needed a refresher on how to find files on the mac and move things from development to test to live. She'd been used to a PC - so we worked to get some similar key commands operating in the Mac version of Dreamweaver. At first, Marcia seemed slow. Then I saw her open up a picture in photoshop and deftly remove a strap going across someone's shirt using more key commands than I could count. Next, she flipped over to the HTML code behind the dreamweaver design to get the dimensions of the image off of the <img> tag. I was impressed.
It's seldom I meet someone over 50 let alone over 70 who still has such passion to learn new technology and the patience to do it. Marcia is an illustrator and sculptor by trade, but taught herself photoshop and dreamweaver as they started to become required technologies.
Cruising around the live site looking for what she was supposed to edit, she pointed to a butterfly flying across a banner.
"That's what I want do learn how to do: make butterflies," she said.
"Oh. That's Flash stuff. I don't even know Flash," I said.
"Well I want to do it, so I'd better get to it and learn Flash."
Truly inspiring.
Fun with Frames, Scott Tenorman, Wikileaks
Listened
Saw this posted on Kung Fu Grippe
Watched
These gifs on Three Frames are an awesome idea.
Learned
I learned that ticket prices from DC to Portland for the end of July really suck. Big time. Meh.
I also learned that wikileaks has some pretty badass stuff on it. From Frat Ritual Handbooks to Bomb diagrams.
I also learned about this Opera Unite thing that no one will use... well, at least one one (me). It probably would have been better if they just sold this as a browser data store like those in Google Gears or Safari. Or maybe I'm missing something. But then again, if a full time web developer can read your "Here's what it is" article and still not get it, you've got other problems.
Busy
I've been running around doing way too much at once. I won't apologize for my absence, though.
Watched
We've been getting some pretty serious storms in DC - definitely a lot more than last year. This one looked like the end of Ghostbusters:
Listened
Went and saw the TV on the Radio show last week. Excellent.
Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io
Learned
I've been playing with subversion a little bit for version control and I learned that I really, really like bazaar better. Git is probably better, too. My main complaint is how hard it is to move files around once they're in subversion, having to explicitly add things, and that the methods for ignoring files aren't very clear.
I also learned how to make German potato salad from this recipe. The secret? Bacon makes most things good. It actually came out much more like hash browns... which are also tasty.
