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The Boy Who Lived

August 18, 07 //
10

It was ten years ago when I first saw Harry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone sit­ting on the shelf at Borders.

I dis­tinctly remem­ber the front cover illus­tra­tion, how col­or­ful it looked from afar and think­ing how geeky the boy on the cover looked with his round glasses and oddly-shaped scar. Yet, because it was a children’s book I fig­ured it wasn’t worth my time.

The Cho­sen One

I would’ve never guessed that not only would I read (and digest) every book in the series and watch every movie to date I would finally say good­bye to such a rich and imag­i­na­tive world and a char­ac­ter that, next to Mickey Mouse, is so well known around the world.

The road to under­stand­ing Harry Pot­ter wasn’t so smooth for me. It took some con­vinc­ing on the part of my best friend’s father, who in his late 40s fig­ured out some­thing that I could not; that children’s books are writ­ten for chil­dren but also meant to be enjoyed by adults.

Adult fic­tion can be stress­ful and com­pli­cated, tak­ing itself too seri­ously at times which is not to say children’s lit­er­a­ture doesn’t stray from com­pli­cated plots, it’s just writ­ten in a man­ner that even at its most basic level a child could understand.

If you think for a moment of the best children’s sto­ries turned to movie adap­ta­tions, sprin­kled in there will be films that prob­a­bly rate high on your all-time favorite list.

A few that come to my mind are:

  • The Wiz­ard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
  • Bambi by Felix Salten
  • Jumaji by Chris Van Allsburg

There are sev­eral oth­ers that have had such a pro­found impact on all of our lives and to think they all began as sto­ries intended for children.

Moral Align­ment

As for Harry Pot­ter, after hav­ing read the first book, I had a cul­ti­vated ini­tia­tive to fin­ish the series to the end. It was my goal and since I’ve reached it there are thoughts that have stayed with me through­out the course of the story.

Many of which deal with the fact that Harry doesn’t fit the mold for a hero. He isn’t bulky, doesn’t have strength beyond his wand and depends on the aide of others.

How­ever, he is the epit­ome of hope and strength to the wiz­ard­ing world, which shares par­al­lels with groups that in a his­tor­i­cal con­text have been sup­pressed in every cul­ture under the sun. While Harry never truly rec­og­nizes his impor­tance, he remains hum­ble and lov­ing and these are traits that ulti­mately keep him on the straight and nar­row, resilient to the evil that is always at bay.

This strug­gle between good and evil, right and wrong, deci­sions based on the protagonist’s moral stand­ing are com­mon threads shared by good lit­er­a­ture. Lit­er­a­ture that pulls you in, makes you feel sor­row and empa­thy and lays the ground­work for the ulti­mate showdown.

A World That Seems Real

While I con­sider myself a healthy reader there’s never been a series that has cap­ti­vated me as much as the Harry Pot­ter story has. I’m a lover of fan­tasy and while the Lord of the Rings books are grandiose, they can be dif­fi­cult to read because the lan­guage itself (explored in depth by Tolkien) is a char­ac­ter unto itself.

The enjoy­ment of read­ing Harry Pot­ter stems from the fact that Rowl­ing doesn’t take her­self too seri­ously and instead has fun with her mate­r­ial. I believe that beyond her shy per­sona is a woman who is witty and con­stantly imag­in­ing things as evi­denced in the books. She man­aged to make read­ing inter­est­ing again for chil­dren and that alone deserves attention.

There’s a lot to like about Harry Pot­ter and for that he’ll remain as real as other char­ac­ters in fic­tion have become. 

Book Meme

July 20, 05 //
17

BookEither peo­ple are anx­ious to see fresh con­tent or I’m just read­ing into it, either way, I’ve been passed a book baton by Greg, Phu and Khaled.

Num­ber of Books on Shelf

Oh wow. Truth­fully, there are about 100 books on the small book­shelf in our liv­ing room and scat­tered through­out our apart­ment I’d esti­mate that I’ve col­lected over 3–400 books that run the gamut as far as dif­fer­ent sub­ject mat­ter. The plan is that when we finally take the plunge and pur­chase a house to store our mate­r­ial items, that we’ll set up more book­shelf space to prop­erly (for once) store these books.

Last Book Purchased

Harry Pot­ter and the Half-Blood Prince. While I didn’t go to one of those overnight par­ties, I did pur­chase it from Amazon.com and received it the same day it was released, which was a com­mend­able feat in itself on Amazon’s part.

Book Read­ing Right Now

Harry Pot­ter and the Half-Blood Prince. Unlike Greg, who fin­ished the lat­est Pot­ter book in a few days, I’m about halfway through. I’d say this book is much more historically-driven than the pre­vi­ous novels.

Last 5 Books Read

I typ­i­cally read about 5 or 6 books at a time, mean­ing that a lot of the con­tent kind of mashes together into what I can only describe as a vividly stitched and inter­wo­ven storyline.

Books That Mean A Lot To Me

As Greg stated, this is a bit dif­fi­cult since there are a slew of fan­tas­tic books that have in some way or another effected me on an emo­tional level.

Pass it Along

Instead of choos­ing a select few to pass this along to, I’ll just sug­gest that any­one that’s inter­ested, feel free to steal this book meme and make it your own. 

The State of Animation

March 28, 05 //
12

Oliver and Company [1988]My wife and I were watch­ing the mak­ing of Disney’s Oliver and Com­pany on DVD. Unlike today’s exten­sively (and some­times exhaus­tively) researched “making-of” fea­turettes, you could tell this one was used more so as a mar­ket­ing tool. Halfway through the fea­ture, the announcer men­tions that Dis­ney used “state of the art” com­puter tech­nol­ogy as an aid to tra­di­tional 2-D animation.

The next scene shows an inter­view with Roy E. Dis­ney who seems excited about the adap­ta­tion of com­puter tech­nol­ogy and sug­gests that it’ll be a use­ful tool for future Dis­ney films. Now here’s the kicker — towards the end of the com­puter ani­ma­tion bit the announcer reminds the view­ers that while com­puter ani­ma­tion is a fan­tas­tic tool to aide in 2-D ani­ma­tion, fear not, for it will never replace tra­di­tional animation.

15 years later we’ve seen the imme­di­ate clo­sure of Disney’s Florida Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio in 2004 which “put approx­i­mately 250 ani­ma­tors, tech­ni­cians and other per­son­nel out of work.” — a move that many say ended the era of tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion and the rumor that Dis­ney will redo many of their clas­sic films using CGI (or Com­puter Gen­er­ated Imagery).

Like many I’ve been extremely impressed with Pixar’s films, but also feel a bit sad­dened by the fact that tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion is viewed as some­thing arbi­trary and stone aged. To me there are tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated films that impress me more so than computer-animated movies. Put it this way, to this day I’m still moved and in awe of many 2-D ani­mated films (like The Jun­gle Book and Bambi) and mostly because of the flu­id­ity and beauty that res­onates via a few pen­cil strokes.

The secret to Pixar’s suc­cess, at least from what I’ve gath­ered from watch­ing “making-of” fea­turettes and books, is their abil­ity to dig deep into their sub­ject, into the core of their film and its mes­sage and then flesh it out with CGI, some­thing that is lack­ing in other ani­mated films.

Start learn­ing graphic design in Philadel­phia and look for­ward to cre­at­ing the next famous ani­mated char­ac­ter in movies.

Related: The State of Ani­ma­tion Fea­tures by Michael Heilemann 

CSS Refresh

March 8, 05 //
10

Two years ago, after read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards by Jef­frey Zeld­man, I made an oath to myself that I would kick my old web devel­op­ment habits and take my Jedi train­ing in CSS-based design.

I can remem­ber the exact moment when the prover­bial light­bulb appeared above my head because it was around the same time my daugh­ter was born. In a short span of time two pin­na­cle moments (albeit with seper­ate mean­ings) changed my per­spec­tive on life; the birth of my daugh­ter and becom­ing a bet­ter web designer.

Chang­ing my Habits

It hap­pened as I was sit­ting there in the hos­pi­tal cafe­te­ria, care­fully read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards while I munched on over­cooked scram­bled eggs. Comb­ing through the text I felt the need to change my habits, dance to a dif­fer­ent drum and work towards bet­ter­ing my skill in web design. Prior to this, I only used Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG edi­tor because I couldn’t get a grasp of the mean­ing of HTML code. To me, if Dreamweaver han­dled the code, there was no rea­son to muck around and poten­tially cause dam­age to the code. It’s amaz­ing how wrong I was.

The most impor­tant step towards becom­ing a good web designer is first learn­ing how var­i­ous tags work in your code. Oth­er­wise there’s no rea­son to even take that plunge let alone con­sider it as a viable career option. I’ve seen sev­eral good design­ers feel the need to rely on WYSIWYG edi­tors rather than under­stand how HTML (or XHTML) func­tions. I know because I was one of them at one point but after invest­ing in a library of web devel­op­ment books I’ve scram­bled out of the hole I had dug myself into.

CSS is a Tricky Beast

After re-learning how to code prop­erly I hit the books as far as edu­cat­ing myself about Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets. I had used CSS pre­vi­ously, in a lim­ited fash­ion, to style text. I remem­ber think­ing it was a huge deal to change the color of a word or sen­tence using inline CSS but at that point I really didn’t see the value in using it for lay­out, nei­ther did I real­ize that it could be used to con­trol an entire lay­out. Cut to a few years later and I’m sur­prised I didn’t catch on ear­lier but just as well since ear­lier browser ver­sions had lim­ited CSS support.

While CSS is an amaz­ing tool it’s also a tricky beast and that’s due to Inter­net Explorer’s poor CSS sup­port. I know many design­ers who’ve given up sup­port­ing IE all together and while that’s a per­sonal and comend­able choice on dif­fer­ent lev­els I feel the need to con­tinue sup­port­ing IE because it’s still used by a major­ity of the Inter­net audi­ence and mostly because it comes pre-installed on most PC systems.

Also, as Molly and I have dis­cussed, design­ers that have tran­si­tioned from print to CSS-based lay­out have dif­fi­cul­ties mainly because of their inabil­ity to make their lay­outs pixel per­fect. Speak­ing from expe­ri­ence, I come from a print back­ground and quite hon­estly using CSS came quite nat­u­rally for me and a lot of this had to do with my atti­tude towards it. Let’s face it, the web and print world are on oppo­site sides of the spec­trum of design. One can eas­ily fire up a copy of Adobe InDe­sign, choose a two or three col­umn tem­plate and using the Shift + Arrow key method align cer­tain com­po­nents to the pixel. CSS, on the other hand, isn’t as easy to manip­u­late and mainly that’s due to browser sup­port and cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions with the tech­nol­ogy. Instead of cre­at­ing a pixel per­fect lay­out you have to be in the mind­set that you’ll get close to align­ing cer­tain aspects the way you want them to, but cer­taintly not perfectly.

The Road Ahead

Even though I have a good work­ing knowl­edge of CSS and apply that knowl­edge on a daily basis I’ve decided to make a per­sonal goal; to refresh my expe­ri­ence with CSS and web devel­op­ment in gen­eral by hit­ting the books and relearn­ing every­thing from the ground up. To do this I’ve added a few notable books to my library and to date my library of web devel­op­ment and CSS books is com­prised of the following:

Wish me luck. 

Holidaze

November 29, 04 //
5

OrnamentsNow that the long awaited 4-day week­end has come and gone, at the blink of an eye I might add, it’s time to patiently await the arrival of Christ­mas and more impor­tantly pre­pare for the onslaught of hol­i­day shop­pers, cranky dri­vers and bell ringers. Every year around this time I ready myself for the crazi­ness of the hol­i­days and yet it never really mat­ters because I become caught up in the hol­i­day fever as well.

This year how­ever, my wife and I have already decided that the major­ity of our shop­ping will take place online. We fig­ure by tak­ing this strat­egy we’ll avoid most of the hol­i­day craze when peo­ple are caught in a zombie-like trance to pil­lage and plun­der local Tar­gets, K-Marts and KB Toys for the lat­est and great­est toy gad­get for their chil­dren. Luck­ily, for the time being, my daugh­ter is still young enough where she isn’t entranced by toys but con­sid­er­ing her first birth­day is next month it won’t be long until she’s tug­ging at our pant legs and star­ing up at us with those sting­ing puppy dog eyes.

I’m reminded of John Grisham’s Skip­ping Christ­mas (renamed Christ­mas with the Kranks for the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion), a satir­i­cal view of the hol­i­days. The main char­ac­ters, Luther and Nora Krank, decide that they’ll skip Christ­mas after send­ing their daugh­ter off to Peru for Peace Corps. Luther tal­lies up the pre­vi­ous years expenses for Christ­mas and esti­mates they can save in the thou­sands if they take a 10-day cruise instead of cel­e­brat­ing the afore­men­tioned hol­i­day. Of course chaos erupts and the rest of the book is per­fect mate­r­ial for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood Christ­mas com­edy, includ­ing a mad­cap sequence with a plas­tic snow­man and the embarass­ment of set­tling with a scrappy look­ing tree.

It just goes to show that no mat­ter how hard you try to ignore, strate­gize or avoid Christ­mas it’s never going to dis­ap­pear. You sim­ply can­not wipe Christ­mas from your cal­en­dar. It’s the prover­bial mon­key on your back, but in this case he’s wear­ing a santa cap with a 30 pound sack of presents slung over his shoulder. 

The Joy of Reading

August 14, 04 //
10

Reading bookIf I’m not cod­ing a web site, I’m read­ing a book. Read­ing puts me in a tran­quil state of mind and for those few moments my imag­i­na­tion takes over, tak­ing me some­where I’ve never been and putting me in the shoes of a com­plete stranger. Ever since I was 4 years old I’ve never been reluc­tant to pick up a book that maybe I didn’t fully understand.

With book in hand, I could just scan the pages for words I rec­og­nized and maybe piece together the story. Also, ever since I enrolled in Children’s Lit­er­a­ture in col­lege it has sparked in me a new inter­est in read­ing children’s books, which at times feel more ener­getic than a run of the mill adult novel.

Nowa­days, I’ve been known to read around 4 or 5 books at a time. For some peo­ple this might seem like overkill, but for me, I can eas­ily divide my atten­tion to each story and every one of these books vary in genre. That said, I’m cur­rently reading:

What are you reading? 

Melonhead

August 12, 04 //
3

MelonpoolI’ve been an avid reader of the online comic, Mel­on­pool. The comic fol­lows the adven­tures of “two aliens, a tele­pathic dog and a 220-lb. ham­ster” and the inter­ac­tions of the char­ac­ters are as hilar­i­ous as they are intriguing.

When I stum­bled upon Mel­on­pool 5 years ago it was the result of a ran­dom Yahoo! search. Typ­ing feve­ri­ously (65 WPM and chicken peckin’) at my key­board I came up with some­thing along the lines of “aliens and hamp­sters.” Why I linked these two together I’ll never know, but lo and behold the first link on the list was Mel­on­pool. I sat there for a cou­ple min­utes won­der­ing what a Mel­on­pool was and decided it would be best to inves­ti­gate the mat­ter by click­ing the link.

Upon enter­ing the site I noticed a blue back­ground with a white swirl and a hand­ful of car­toon char­ac­ters star­ring back at me. Imme­di­at­edly I read through the archives and was hooked from there on. I entered my email into the form and every Sun­day received the comic strip in my Inbox. Believe me, I couldn’t wait to see what was in store for May­berry Mel­on­pool and the gang. Which brings me to what the comic is about; pop cul­ture. You would think Steve Troop (the cre­ator of Mel­on­pool) would have gone with the cliché plot where aliens land on Earth and destroy every­thing in their path, includ­ing that lone flower. Rather, Troop decides to write the sto­ry­lines around the sub­ject of the aliens’ inter­est with Earth’s culture.

May­berry (the Cap­tain) is a Star Trek fan because in space they receive our television/satellite sig­nals many light years after the series has gone off the air. To the alien, he’s impressed by the char­ac­ters and ulti­mately gets to meet his heroes in a Time Travel plot that is immensely hard to explain with­out read­ing the archives. Which brings me to the key to this suc­cess­ful comic, the inter­ac­tions of its char­ac­ters and their curi­ousity of pop cul­ture. Troop even elab­o­rates on the fact that his comic was viewed by an exec­u­tive at NBC and coin­ci­den­tally the pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion show, Third Rock from the Sun, sprung into the lineup.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view Steve Troop in 1999 for a col­lege course I was tak­ing. The course, Intro­duc­tion to Mass Media, called for a paper that described a “media fig­ure” and their “suc­cess­ful ven­tures”. The twist to this paper was that you had to inter­view the media mogul (in per­son) and write a 5-page paper about the inter­view. I chose Steve Troop for the same rea­sons his strip is suc­cess­ful among its fans; for the money.

I recieved an A+ on the paper and was indeed richer, but not with the great green­back. The wealth came from what I found out about a young boy’s dream in San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia. To sim­ply draw car­toons. Indeed, I was richer with the notion that he is in fact liv­ing his dreams come true.

Sure, there might not be the suc­cess of news­pa­per syn­di­ca­tion (a goal Troop has envi­sioned for years) but the real suc­cess lies in the fans that sup­port the comic strip through its com­pi­la­tion books and the com­mu­nity within the Mel­on­pool mes­sage boards. At the moment, there are 5 books and con­tained within each book are sev­eral per­sonal nota­tions and reflec­tions from Troop while cre­at­ing each strip, some­thing he cre­ated while in col­lege, and other extras that you won’t see on the web site.

Do your­self a favor today and go read Mel­on­pool. Enjoy the 1,000+ strips con­tained within the archive and grow with the characters.

If you’d rather read the strips offline, buy a book.

Pat your­self on the back because you’ll be sup­port­ing the con­tin­u­a­tion of a won­der­ful comic strip. 

Books on Design

June 10, 04 //
3

Web Standards Solutions by Dan CederholmMy copy of Dan Cederholm’s Web Stan­dard Solu­tions is on its way accord­ing to Amazon.com and should (if all goes well) arrive in a cou­ple days. I ordered it yes­ter­day, after con­vinc­ing the com­pany I work for that it would make a worth­while addi­tion to my web devel­op­ment & graphic design library.

Cur­rently I’ve thumbed through and broke the spine on the fol­low­ing books in my collection:

I highly rec­om­mend these books as not only won­der­ful ref­er­ence guides, but well-written and con­cise resources that will ulti­mately spark your creativity. 

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 

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