Archives for the month of: April, 2004
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Sideville Comic

April 26, 04 //
6

sidevillecomic.jpgI’ve decided to let the cat out of the bag and make a pre­lim­i­nary announce­ment for Sidev­ille, my web­comic in the works. The rea­son for this early announce­ment is mainly to modi­vate me to the extent that I will actively pur­sue this project with­out drop­ping it by the wayside.

Sidev­ille will be based on an inde­pen­dent stop-motion ani­mated film of the same name that I was co-creator of. The basic premise of the story is as follows:

> A 12-year old boy named Trevor runs away from home and on his jour­ney hap­pens upon an unkempt pirate vil­lage called Sidev­ille. He learns the inhab­i­tants of the vil­lage are retired cir­cus performers/pirates who have gath­ered together in an effort to hide from the soci­ety that shunned them, thus form­ing the com­mu­nity of Sideville.

sideville-concept1.jpgThe comic is as men­tioned still in the pre­lim­i­nary stages, but I expect to update the Sidev­ille site with con­cept sketches and fur­ther details on the char­ac­ters and story development.

As I flesh out the char­ac­ters I will be post­ing their respec­tive con­cept sketches and other infor­ma­tion per­tain­ing to the comic. I’m hop­ing this will pave the way for the offi­cial unveil­ing of the comic sooner than later.

For now I need to work out the design of the Sidev­ille web­site which will be built with Mov­able Type in order to main­tain the data­base of comics. I’ve nar­rowed down the webisodes to a total of 3 per week (updated every Tues­day, Thurs­day and Sun­day). Since this isn’t a punch­line comic nor does it fol­low the con­ven­tional lay­out for­mat of 3–5 boxes (i.e. Mel­on­pool) it will free me from try­ing to com­pact the sto­ry­line in order to meet the deadline.

Regard­less, as I’ve noticed, many (or should I say all) web comics evolve since their ini­tial debut. It’s amaz­ing to see the evo­lu­tion of the draw­ing style, sto­ry­line and over­all qual­ity of a web comic over time. I’ve taken this into account because in the past I just wasn’t sat­is­fied with the out­put and gave up. Now I real­ize that web comics only get bet­ter and not worse.

As always, stay tuned. 

Imagination fosters civilization

April 26, 04 //
0

> Imag­i­na­tion has given us the steam engine, the tele­phone, the talking-machine, and the auto­mo­bile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became real­i­ties. So I believe that dreams — day­dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machin­ery whizzing-are likely to lead to the bet­ter­ment of the world. The imag­i­na­tive child will become the imag­i­na­tive man or woman most apt to invent, and there­fore to fos­ter, civ­i­liza­tion. — L. Frank Baum 

Is there an Expert among us?

April 23, 04 //
4

In response to the arti­cle ‘This Pisses Me Off’ on phark.typepad.com I wrote the following:

After read­ing Zeldman’s Design­ing with Web Stan­dards, Eric Meyer on CSS and a slew of other books I’ve been pick­ing up on CSS and imple­ment­ing it accord­ingly. To be hon­est, how­ever, I learn some­thing new every­day and for some­one to even con­sider CSS to be chal­leng­ing.… well, I’d explain to them that any­thing is chal­leng­ing — at first.

Any­one can read a book on Rocket Sci­ence and if they devoted enough energy and atten­tion to the sub­ject they could eas­ily learn to become a rocket sci­en­tist. The unat­tain­able is for those peo­ple that don’t feel the need to learn about the sub­ject or don’t have any interest.

I chose to learn CSS (albeit grad­u­ally) to break my HTML “spaghetti code” habits. I real­ize how bloated and non-semantic the code was and had an awak­en­ing if you may. Never would I quote on my site that I’m an expert because I feel that noone is an expert in their field no mat­ter how many cer­tifi­cates you have hang­ing on your wall.

To me, we are con­stantly learn­ing and hon­ing our craft. Be it a hobby that we picked up over the week­end (bikini belly danc­ing or what­ever) or tak­ing the time to learn CSS, we’ll never become an expert. Any­one that claims to be should take a step back and real­ize that learn­ing is part of life and it’s some­thing that will never cease.

I’ve been in debate about this for the past cou­ple of years. Show­ing peo­ple that any­one can learn what­ever they please but please remem­ber that even teach­ers and idols are human beings and peo­ple that are learn­ing as well.

The guy who wrote that arti­cle doesn’t have a clear idea of what he is writ­ing about. It’s like these reviews of video games or movies wherein the reviewer (or critic) spends about 3 min­utes with their sub­ject and then spend 2 hours writ­ing an arti­cle explain­ing their dis­plea­sure for said subject.

It’s easy. Spend time, hone your craft, con­tinue learn­ing and enjoy life. Our skills are never per­fect and nei­ther are we. 

Meme 23

April 22, 04 //
0

A follow-up to the page 23 meme;

Ryan told me to:

  • Go into your blog’s archives.
  • Find your 23rd post (or clos­est to).
  • Find the fifth sen­tence (or clos­est to).
  • Post the text of the sen­tence in your blog along with these instructions.

>It’s really a treat and makes you truly appre­ci­ate how far the indus­try of video games has progressed.

Taken from The Story of Pong in which I dis­cuss.. well, the story of Pong of course. What else? 

Hospital Time

April 21, 04 //
1

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that hos­pi­tals suck the life out of you. Early this morn­ing my wife and I trav­eled to the white-walled fortress for her gall blad­der surgery. The appoint­ment was sched­uled for 6am and after around an hour and a half of wait­ing she was trans­ported to the OR.

The oper­a­tion took about 45 min­utes and the rest of the time we spent in the com­pact room–6 hours to be exact in what seemed like sus­pended ani­ma­tion. I fig­ure hos­pi­tal time is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the time we are famil­iar with. It’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent beast where one hour is equal to about 6 of our hours.

If my cal­cu­la­tions are cor­rect that would equal to about 66 hours of lost time. 

Spam-free and loving it

April 19, 04 //
5

nospam04.gifLit­er­ally only after one week of sign­ing up with knows­pam I’ve noticed that my inbox has been breath­ing bet­ter unlike its pre­vi­ous pol­luted self.

Before sign­ing up with a spam ser­vice my inbox resem­bled that of a 70-year-old chain smoker with tarred gums and a scratchy voice.

knows­pam reports that it has blocked (since roughly April 9th) over 76,000 spam-related emails. Granted I’m no Lance Arthur but that to me is a sub­stan­tial amount of spam in such a short time frame.

Some­thing that I am at fault for con­sid­er­ing my inces­sant need to sign up for a vari­ety of email ser­vices in the early 2000’s and pro­vid­ing said ser­vice with my main email instead of a Hot­mail box.

My own fault for clut­ter­ing my inbox with via­gra and mar­ket­ing announce­ments which before knows­pam I had to wade through–picking out the legit­i­mate from the sup­posi­ti­tious emails.

Enough to the point where I was con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a gov­ern­ment agency to sift through my emails but tossed out the idea in favor of a ser­vice that would do that for me.

77,909 spams later and count­ing I feel like email has a fight­ing chance. 

Turn to Page 23

April 16, 04 //
0

Photomatt.net among oth­ers sug­gested that I do the following:

  • Grab the near­est book.
  • Open the book to page 23.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the sen­tence on your blog with these instructions.

Got it.

Like Butch and Sun­dance jump­ing off a cliff into a busi­ness and mar­ket­ing canyon–the fall will get us if the sharks in the super­mar­kets don’t.

 

Believe it or Not: A History

April 14, 04 //
1

ripleybion.pngDid you know Archivist George Red­monds of Great Britain dis­cov­ered that a girl born in 1379 in York­shire, Eng­land was named “Diot Coke”? How about the soft­ware engi­neer Jon Blake Cusak and his wife who named their baby boy Jon Blake Cusak 2.0 or the 60-inch 121-pound cat­fish caught by Jason Hol­brook and Cody Mul­lenix at Lake Tex­oma, Texas.

These are obscure facts that tran­scend the bizarre and unusual, began by a man named Robert Rip­ley who in his trav­els doc­u­mented these strange facts with car­toons. Rip­ley, a fact hound, was born on Christ­mas Day in 1893 and orig­i­nally began his career as a sports cartoonist.

In 1918 Robert Rip­ley cre­ated what is regarded as the first “Believe it Or Not” car­toon (Champs and Chumps) but did not pub­lish the ini­tial BION car­toon until a year later in 1919. Ripley’s Believe it Or Not was an agglom­er­a­tion of facts col­lected from his trav­els to over 198 coun­tries, a way of doc­u­ment­ing and shar­ing his odd and extra­or­di­nary cul­tural find­ings. This included his most prized pos­s­e­sion; a sculp­ture of Japan­ese artist Hananuma Masakichi.

Masa­kichi incor­po­rated his own fin­ger­nails, toe­nails and hair to make the statue appear more life-like. The statue makes it’s rounds today to the var­i­ous Rip­ley museum loca­tions but at one time was kept in a spe­cial cur­tained sec­tion of Ripley’s bed­room. This and many other items as men­tioned are dis­played at the sev­eral Ripley’s Believe it Or Not Muse­ums around the globe in addi­tion to a prime-time tele­vi­sion show star­ring Dean “Super­man” Cain. All for a man who made it his hobby to log his trav­els with bizarre find­ings and cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful comic strip to dis­play them.

The offi­cial web site for the Ripley’s tele­vi­sion show refers to a man named Wayne Har­bour who made it his life­long mis­sion to debunk Ripley’s claims and prove that he was in fact a liar. The site explains “For 26 years, this post­mas­ter wrote a let­ter a day chal­leng­ing at least one of the claims in the daily car­toon. As of 1970, he had writ­ten 22,708 let­ters to peo­ple high­lighted in the car­toon. He never received a sin­gle con­tra­dic­tion to the claims Rip­ley made. His let­ters are now part of the Ripley’s collection.”

Despite Wayne Harbour’s claims, Rip­ley received 3,500 let­ters per day result­ing in over one mil­lion let­ters per year from fans from around the world.

Believe it or not!

Resources: 2 | 3 

XFN’ize

April 12, 04 //
1

XFNXFN is a sim­ple way to rep­re­sent human rela­tion­ships using hyper­links. It is essen­tially a method of build­ing a net­work of links indi­cat­ing your rela­tion­ship with that par­tic­u­lar per­son or com­pany you’ve linked to.

I’ve imple­mented XFN and proudly dis­play the but­ton on the side­bar. It is some­thing I’ve been kick­ing around for a while because I wasn’t edu­cated as to what XFN’s pur­pose was. Not until I read ‘Friend, XFN and Hyper­links’ by Shirley Kaiser (of Brain­storms and Raves fame) did I fully real­ize the poten­tial of XFN. Shirley describes XFN as “a sim­ple way to rep­re­sent human rela­tion­ships within hyperlinks”.

The process of imple­ment­ing this is delight­fully sim­ple, for example;

Let’s say you’re link­ing to your girlfriend’s web site. The link to her web site is http://www.bayareachicawica and her rela­tion­ship to you would fall under the rela­tion­ship cat­e­gory of ‘roman­tic’. A quick look at the XFN cheat sheet and you notice four sub-categories; muse, crush, date and sweetheart.

At this point you would need to decide which sub­cat­e­gory she would fall under. For this exam­ple we’ll go ahead and use ‘sweet­heart’ which accord­ing to the XFN descrip­tion is some­one with whom you are inti­mate and some­what com­mit­ted to.

A link to her web site would nor­mally look like this:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site">My
girlfriend</a>

To XFN’ize the link we sim­ply add a rela­tion tag (rel) like so:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site" rel="sweetheart">My
girlfriend</a>

After­wards, sub­mit your site to Rub­hub, the rela­tion­ship lookup engine. As described on the XFN web site “Rub­hub will index your XFN rela­tion­ships, add you to its global net­work of XFN Friendly sites, and let you see how peo­ple relate to you and how you relate to other people.” 

ATM Hijinks

April 9, 04 //
2

A co-worker of mine (we’ll call him Tod) relayed a thought of his deal­ing with a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion that he’s had to cope with in the past. He men­tioned that when­ever he uses an ATM some­times he’ll find a bal­ance receipt hang­ing from the slot, the result of some­one walk­ing away with­out first either:

  • Tak­ing their bal­ance receipt and stuff­ing it into their pock­ets, or simply
  • Crum­bling the receipt into a ball and shoot­ing a free throw into the trash.

His first instinct is to look at the receipt. Upon doing this you are given a glimpse into another per­sons bank account and some­times depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion this will either make you look supe­rior or infe­rior (men­tal note: don’t look at receipt if the fel­low rides up in a Fer­rari) in regards to your finan­cial predicament.

He says his wife gets after him for doing this — I’m assum­ing because of pri­vacy issues — and scolds him for look­ing at the bal­ance of a stranger’s account. Yet, this seems super­flu­ous to me con­sid­er­ing the receipt doesn’t show the name of the account holder. Rather a typ­i­cal ATM receipt only shows the last four dig­its o f the account, the trans­ac­tion activ­ity (be it a with­drawal, deposit or both) and the end­ing balance.

To be hon­est, I too am at fault for doing this. It’s an imme­di­ate reac­tion to look, sim­i­lar to our instinct to pry into other people’s lives at times. Just the other day I found a receipt show­ing an end­ing bal­ance of $105.00. Was it nec­es­sary that I pick up the paper lying just beneath the slot? Not really.

How­ever, it makes for a good obser­va­tion and the great­est mate­r­ial for writ­ing and com­edy rou­tines comes from real­ity — from real life sit­u­a­tions and occurences (not includ­ing “scripted” real­ity television). 

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