Archives for the month of: April, 2006

Where was I?

April 23, 06 //
5

Memes. Try as one might, there’s just no way to dodge them. Yet, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing about them and thanks to Jon Snook, I’m (yet again) par­tic­i­pat­ing in another meme, this one deal­ing with the past (which I’ve nick­named Soy Loco) and present (Muy Loco).

One Year Ago

Wow, answer­ing these are a bit more dif­fi­cult that I had orig­i­nally thought.

A year ago I was enrolled in Typog­ra­phy (I even inter­viewed fel­low 9ruler Robot Johnny for my final) and Mass Media. After the semes­ter was over, I found out my Mass Media pro­fes­sor — through serendip­i­tous means via a chance encounter at Barnes & Noble — was a fan of the Black Eyed Peas and used to tour with The Grate­ful Dead as a media producer.

My daugh­ter was only a year old and was just learn­ing how to walk, after mas­ter­ing the art of crawl­ing at a blaz­ingly fast pace. Think Peb­bles from The Flin­stones (whale spout and all), but with blonde hair.

As far as any spe­cific mile­stones for this site I gave away Flickr Pro invites, revis­ited my child­hood, pon­dered the rid­dle of retire­ment, dis­cussed food phases and grum­bled about Adobe and CS2.

Five Years Ago

As clear as day, I can remem­ber my wife and I were vis­it­ing my Aunt in Ari­zona when, in the mid­dle of edit­ing a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial (more on that later), we received the call that my Uncle Steve had passed away. Years prior he was diag­nosed with Scle­ro­derma, a chronic autoim­mune con­nec­tive tis­sue dis­or­der. It was an extremely sad occurence con­sid­er­ing he was only 47 years old at the time and had plenty of life to live.

Not long after, I can remem­ber wak­ing up to the events of 9/11 and at the time wasn’t sure if what I was watch­ing on tele­vi­sion was real or not.

Ten Years Ago

Oh boy! At this time I was just a young pup barely start­ing his High School career, if you can call it that. Frankly, ten years seems like last week and yet very dis­tant, if that makes any sense.

Other than that, I do remem­ber Duke Nukem 3D (share­ware) was released out in the wild in addi­tion to Quake, Rent offi­cially opened on Broad­way and Dolly the Sheep was born, only to later pass on in Feb­ru­ary 2003.

Back to Now

Today I’m a father to two lovely mon­keys, Zoe (2 years old) and Quinn (Almost 3 months), con­tin­u­ing my aca­d­e­mic pur­sual of even­tual world dom­i­nance and still try­ing to learn how to play chess.

I’ll pass this on to Mike David­son, where memes go to die. 

Acquisitions and Movies

April 15, 06 //
18

Update #3: (drum­roll) Arno is/was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke. What a crazy — but funny — bloke!

Update #2: Jeremy Keith responds to Arno after receiv­ing a sim­il­iar email, but for perfume.

Update: Arno responds to this post. (read below first if you haven’t already for the full scoop)

You know, I’ve sifted through a truck­load of emails in the past few years about instant credit reports, money-making oppor­tu­ni­ties and not to men­tion sales­peo­ple inter­ested in sell­ing me every­thing from pet rocks to laser-guided golf ball retreivers.

In all this time I’ve never once received a domain acqui­si­tion email, until today of course.

Not more than 8 hours ago, I received an email from an Arno Zim­mer­man in regards to pur­chas­ing, or actu­ally acquir­ing this domain for a “well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio”. The email was a bit hazy, but to keep this on record for future con­ver­sa­tions I’m pre­sent­ing it here in it’s entirety.

Read on as I really can’t make this kind of stuff up:

Dear Mr Sagen,

My sin­cere apolo­gies for writ­ing to you unan­nounced. My name is Arno Zim­mer­man and I am CEO of an Inter­net domain name acqui­si­tions agency based here in Los Ange­les, California.

My agency is cur­rently engaged by a well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio. The stu­dio is pro­duc­ing a new action movie called The Kar­tooner. The movie has an all star cast, includ­ing Bruce Willis in the title role, and will be released in the fall. My client is there­fore very keen to pur­chase the rights to the domain name kartooner.com from you.

I am sure that you will under­stand that I can­not pro­vide you with much in the way of infor­ma­tion about our client at this time. How­ever I can assure you that they are sin­cere in their offer, and that they are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly.

I would be inter­ested to learn how much you would require for this trans­fer of ownership.

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man

Okay, admit­tedly, you caught me off guard Mr. Zim­mer­man. If some­one were to tell me — like you just did — that Bruce Willis would be star­ring in an action movie called The Kar­tooner, I’d be hes­is­tant to believe such a thing.

How­ever, if you want to talk about the green­back, I might be will­ing to budge for about $66,000 dol­lars, give or take.

Let me know, alright? In the mean­time, I’m going to try and fig­ure out what I’d pur­chase with that kind of money.

Arno Responds

Dear Mr. Sagen,

My client’s legal team have informed me of your arti­cle regard­ing our offer to pur­chase your domain name. While I was a lit­tle sur­prised, as I have not yet had a reply from you directly, I do not think that this will cause us a prob­lem as The Kar­tooner is now in full pro­duc­tion, cur­rently shoot­ing live action in Manhattan.

As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous email, The Kar­tooner will star Bruce Willis in the title role. Bruce plays an impov­er­ished artist in New York who pays his bills by draw­ing car­toons for the New York Times. Through a series of unfor­tu­nate acci­dents, Bruce’s char­ac­ter mis­tak­enly becomes the tar­get of a Mafia hit squad and must use all his wits (as well as his artis­tic skills) to stay alive. Need­less to say I can­not divulge any fur­ther plot details.

You men­tioned in your arti­cle today that you would be pre­pared to accept a sum of $66,000. Unfor­tu­nately this is over the bud­get that my agency has been autho­rized to pay for the aqui­si­tion of your domain name. How­ever I won­der whether you would accept a smaller sum, in addi­tion to a small walk on part in the movie?

Would you please be so kind as to let us know your deci­sion as my clients are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man
CEO and Inter­net domain name acquisitions

 

The Redesign

April 13, 06 //
10

For the past few days I’ve been work­ing dili­gently on a brand spank­ing new design for this site, as the cur­rent design has always been meant as a tem­po­rary place­holder. When I say brand spank­ing, I mean it, as it will include pre­vi­ous ele­ments I’ve used in other site incar­na­tions (mainly heaps of beige) and for the first time in this site’s his­tory there will be an “art­work” sec­tion. (Oooh.)

One of the main rea­sons for this realign­ment “re-envisioning” is that I’d like to tie the blog together with my other domain, eriksagen.com which includes a work­ing port­fo­lio and a resume for the time being. Even­tu­ally there will be a slick com­pany site in place of what’s there now, but that’s far off a bit.

Brand­ing is cru­cial to me at this point and has worked well for other peo­ple, like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dan Ceder­holm (and Mike David­son) to name a few. There’s an instant famil­iar­ity and con­nec­tion when you visit these sites and that’s inten­tional, so bring­ing every­thing under one roof (albeit a some­times leaky one) is impor­tant to me.

Back to my men­tion­ing an art­work sec­tion, I’ve decided to beef up my port­fo­lio. Over the years it’s become, well, a bit stag­nant due to other pri­or­i­ties and dis­trac­tions tak­ing focus. How­ever, shov­ing all that aside briefly, I’ll be putting up art­work from the past, present and future, which will be the present by the time I hang them up in a dig­i­tal gallery.

Many thanks to the hand­ful of sup­port­ers over the past few months (even you, Anton) for encour­ag­ing me to do this, espe­cially since I adver­tise that I’m an illus­tra­tor and yet have very lit­tle to show for it. Who would’ve thunk?

In a nut­shell, things will be chang­ing for the bet­ter around these parts.

That’s all folks! 

Naked for CSS

April 3, 06 //
7

You read that right. This site — along with a slew of oth­ers — is par­tic­i­pat­ing in Dustin’s CSS Naked Day on April 5th, 2006, a spe­cial day in which var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als will be strip­ping their sites of pre­sen­ta­tional CSS, thus drop­ping full trou with only seman­tic markup remain­ing. It’s crazy, I know.

Why did I decide to par­tic­i­pate even if it sounds kind of silly? Easy answer really, I love par­tic­i­pat­ing in weird events like this and also just to show how impor­tant stan­dards really is with­out hav­ing to thump the “stan­dards” bible. Plus, Nathan is par­tic­i­pat­ing and wher­ever he goes, I will follow.

If you haven’t already, why don’t you join the fray and get naked for a day!

 

Fool’s Gold

April 1, 06 //
2

You know what? I love April Fool’s Day.

I’ll admit to it and frankly, I’m not ashamed because it just so hap­pens to be the most lop­sided day out of a year’s worth of aver­age week­days and weekends.

What other day can you think of where you can pull the ulti­mate prank on some­one and then later be for­given — with hearty laughs and cheer — because you’ll be saved by tra­di­tion? Off the top of my head, there is no other day where you can be as fool­hardy as you want to be.

Although, I’ll make another con­fes­sion. I’ve never actu­ally pulled the “ulti­mate” prank on some­one because my con­scious con­vinces me oth­er­wise. I fig­ure if I just ignore him for a day (just one day), only then will I actu­ally be able to fol­low through. Another thing entirely is that I typ­i­cally can­not come up with any­thing that seems worth­while to prank some­one on.

Most of the time it seems too unap­pro­pri­ate, like the time where I wanted to just dis­ap­pear for a cou­ple hours and then call my wife telling her I had been car­jacked. After think­ing it through, it would be more upset­ting than play­ful and that’s just not the route to go on for a fool’s joke.

What kind of mas­ter­mined jokes have you played on some­one in the past for April Fool’s?