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Creative Redemption

January 6, 10 //
1

There are times when a design con­cept of mine fails to boil over in awe­some­ness and at that point I throw a sheet over it, shove it in a cor­ner next to the mutated Chihuahua-Goat™ and ask myself why I even attempted it.

It hap­pens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It bog­gles the mind that a Design­ers Anony­mous group doesn’t exist for this very rea­son, but I digress.

This way of think­ing is ludi­crous because every­thing we cre­ate is vital to the design process, no mat­ter the context.

For exam­ple: That movie poster that you spent sev­eral hours on, the one that was even­tu­ally canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly con­torted at a spe­cific view­ing angle would prob­a­bly seem like a failed cre­ation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Hor­ri­bly man­gled facial crufties aside, you might end up recy­cling the type­face or that speck­led tex­ture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delight­ful cre­ations for future use and avoid curs­ing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I sup­posed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remem­ber the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

High-rise Evacuation Methods

January 25, 07 //
5

There was an A&E doc­u­men­tary on the World Trade Cen­ter the other night, discussing–as well as criticizing–the early plan­ning phases and con­struc­tion of the WTC.

It also focused some­what on the short­com­ings of the WTC, such as stair­wells hug­ging the core of the build­ing pro­vid­ing what they thought was extra sta­bil­ity, that led to so many civil­ian casu­al­ties dur­ing the 2001 attacks.

There was obvi­ous con­cern over the meth­ods used for high-rise build­ing evac­u­a­tion. In most cases stair­ways are used, pro­vided that they are in work­ing con­di­tion. The planes that struck the WTC build­ings destroyed a large por­tion of the stairs which in turn con­tributed to the lack of proper evacuation.

As I watch­ing this, I was think­ing about bet­ter ways for effi­cient and safe evac­u­a­tion dur­ing high-rise build­ing emer­gen­cies. One solu­tion (not nec­es­sary fail­safe) that occurred to me was an enclosed slide that essen­tially loops around the build­ing. The slide itself would be oiled so that when groups of indi­vid­u­als are prepar­ing to evac­u­ate, they descend in such a man­ner where clog­ging of the slide would be prevented.

Again, not a fail­safe method of course, but I believe one that doesn’t rely on the short­com­ings that occur with stair­ways. If you’ve ever used the stairs in a high-rise build­ing you know that this isn’t an effi­cient means of get­ting peo­ple out of the build­ing in a timely fash­ion, espe­cially dur­ing an emer­gency when peo­ple typ­i­cally lose the abil­ity to think sensibly.

Yet, when I was think­ing about this I real­ized that using a slide could also lead to over­sights in the process of evac­u­a­tion. It’s pos­si­ble that like the stairs in the WTC build­ing, a por­tion of the slide could also be destroyed. That said, it’s dif­fi­cult to try and come up with var­i­ous ways to effi­ciently trans­port peo­ple out of a build­ing and at the same time mak­ing sure the means of doing so are safe and expedient.

There are other meth­ods such as zip lines (think James Bond or the mil­i­tary), extend­able slides and chute sys­tems that could work but again, which of these would actu­ally work when the real thing occurs, as opposed to just test­ing them in labs.

I per­son­ally don’t think we’ve found a per­fect sys­tem yet, despite how much tech­nol­ogy has improved in the past 20 years, and I don’t feel like we ever will.

What should be stressed how­ever is that we need to have alter­nate ways of evac­u­at­ing peo­ple from struc­tures to pre­vent mas­sive casu­al­ties when an emer­gency occurs. 

How I came to tolerate MySpace

June 20, 06 //
11

For years I’ve held off open­ing up, or rather cre­at­ing a MySpace account:“kartooner on Myspace(View my pro­file on MySpace)”:http://www.myspace.com/kartooner purely for rea­sons to pre­vent exploit­ing myself or others.

How­ever, I came to the real­iza­tion that when you look past the neg­a­tive aspects and focus instead on the pos­i­tive out­come of recon­nect­ing with peo­ple that you might have lost touch with, well then it doesn’t seem so bad.

In fact, it’s safe to say that despite the count­less amount of good and bad press, which any good jour­nal­ist or sane per­son would tell you is just effort­less adver­tis­ing, there are a lot of inter­est­ing out­comes that occur when you set up your own space on the web.

To me, MySpace is a messy com­bi­na­tion of per­sonal jour­nal and media, mixed together with self expres­sion and some­times self reflec­tion. If one were to attempt to map Myspace it would prob­a­bly be nei­ther here nor there.

Frankly, it’s a phe­nom­e­non that would sound won­der­ful on paper or pitched to in front of a group of investors, but in it of itself it’s like a swap meet of indi­vid­u­als com­ing from var­i­ous social, eth­nic, reli­gious and cul­tural back­grounds on dis­play for the world to see, a messy one at that.

It’s also a poten­tially dan­ger­ous breed­ing ground for stalk­ers, but that light has already been shone many times by the media and it’s not worth revis­it­ing that haz­ard since it steers the pur­pose of this arti­cle in another direction.

Back on topic, it’s worth not­ing that within 3 days of acti­vat­ing an account on MySpace — as well as mak­ing it pretty thanks to Mike Davidson’s Hack­ing a More Taste­ful Myspace — I’ve recon­nected with peo­ple that I lost touch with 4 to 5 years ago and that alone is remark­able con­sid­er­ing I felt it’d be dif­fi­cult to do so otherwise.

The thought of con­tact­ing and recon­nect­ing with peo­ple from my past, the major­ity of them from high school, has always been in the back of my mind, but the con­ver­sa­tion starter, for exam­ple; “How I’d approach the per­son or begin the con­ver­sa­tion” always seemed a bit dif­fi­cult. Also, there never really seems like a good moment to do so and the notion that it might be awk­ward as such can make what would oth­er­wise seem appro­pri­ate and good willed turn into some­thing con­trived or put on.

Sad to say, but Myspace has allowed me to jump right in and test the waters. To show friends from my past that I really do care despite the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For that, I can for­give the site for being a mess from a func­tion­al­ity stand­point and instead remained focused on sift­ing through the vast resource of indi­vid­u­als and egnited friend­ships from yesteryear. 

Teachers, Wii and Spore

May 18, 06 //
8

Here are a few ran­dom thoughts that I’ve had through­out this week, that on their own could poten­tially be expanded, but for the time being will remain in crys­tal­lized form:

Ele­men­tary Schools and Teachers

ChalkboardEver since I accepted a posi­tion work­ing as a cleaner (jan­i­tor, cus­to­dian, slop mop guy) at an ele­men­tary school I’ve gained a new per­spec­tive and greater appre­ci­a­tion in regards to every­thing that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to work­ing at an ele­men­tary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actu­ally ran, see­ing as though my last encounter with a pee­wee edu­ca­tional fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the cur­tain and real­ize that teach­ers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bit­ter­sweet human ele­ment to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you real­ize why schools con­tin­u­osly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teach­ers them­selves, who in turn are modi­vated by their student’s achieve­ments, which fuels their inner pas­sion to edu­cate, look­ing past the spit­balls and dirty looks, know­ing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was think­ing how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a com­puter in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fin­ger­tips, said teacher can instan­ta­neously look up unlim­ited sub­ject mat­ter, print or project, and con­tribute end­less amounts of infor­ma­tion to the edu­ca­tion process.

It’s really fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depend­ing on if you were good or not, Ore­gon Trail with buf­falo shoot­ing action all at a gru­el­ing pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been think­ing about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed con­sole, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), see­ing as though the con­sole and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

How­ever, after think­ing about it some I’ve grown to actu­ally love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Espe­cially after see­ing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no deny­ing the fact that you’re no longer just play­ing, but par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your aver­age TV remote but rec­og­nizes 3D space and move­ment. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appear­ing out of thin air, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing and unde­ni­ably mouth water­ing about Will Wright’s newest sim cre­ation, Spore, that has the media and blo­gos­phere and maybe your neigh­bors in a gam­ing frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way peo­ple look at sim­u­la­tion games, it’s going to turn the gam­ing realm upside down. From the pre­views to demo footage and demon­stra­tions given by Wright him­self, it appears to be a mish mash of evo­lu­tion, cre­ation, old school gam­ing, clay mod­el­ing, strat­egy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Sim­c­ity and Populous. 

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 SXSW Experience

March 6, 06 //
7

SXSW StickyIn roughly 3 days I’ll be enroute to Austin, TX to take part in the SXSW (South by South­west) Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence. I’m bound to be a bit over­whelmed by the fes­tiv­i­ties and elbow-rubbing par­ties, but I won’t lie, I’m pretty excited to meet in per­son the numer­ous amounts of online bud­dies I’ve made and col­lab­o­rated with over the years.

To be hon­est, I’m clue­less in regards to the sem­i­nars and pre­sen­ta­tions tak­ing place due in part to the mess of infor­ma­tion on the SXSW site. If any­one has put together a “SXSW Guide for Dum­mies”, let me know, since I’ll be run­ning around try­ing to fig­ure out what seminars/presentations/discussions will be worth attending.

If all goes as planned, I’ll be hang­ing with my travel pals Dave Seah and Eric Shep­ard and will most likely doc­u­ment the entire expe­ri­ence here, over a series of 5 days with exclu­sive pho­tos and anecdotes-o-plenty.

Let me know if you’re going to be there since I’d like to meet and greet as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble so I have some­thing to write home about.

Austin here I come!

 

Vision

October 24, 05 //
7

Blue EyeThey say that one of the tell-tale signs that you’re get­ting older is when your eyes just aren’t work­ing like they used to. If you think about, we take our vision for granted and that’s because there’s rarely a moment when some­one will pon­der whether or not their eye­sight will ever fail them. Rather, we just are under the impres­sion that like our health, our eyes will never stray from being in good work­ing con­di­tion and that we’ll never have to resort to glasses or con­tacts, or any­thing that we’d need to depend on to flip through the pages of a book or refrain from trip­ping over a fire hydrant.

Ear­lier this morn­ing I had my first eye appoint­ment and when the nurse informed me that she would be admin­is­ter­ing eye­drops, I just nod­ded and tilted my head back. She then informed me that my eyes would become dialated and that every­thing would be extremely blurry up close. Again, I just nod­ded and was told to return to the wait­ing room to wait for the Doc­tor. A few min­utes later, my eyes became extra sen­si­tive to light and I noticed when I moved my palm close to my face that I couldn’t see any­thing except for a skin-toned blur. Sit­ting there, with poor vision due to the eye­drops, it made me think about var­i­ous con­cerns I’ve often thought about.

In recent years, with the advent of tech­nol­ogy, things are only get­ting smaller in size includ­ing the text we read on our com­puter screens. Unless one were to real­ize this ini­tially while devel­op­ing user inter­faces for those with slightly poorer vision, I believe things will only become worse.

Despite this con­cern, I have seen var­i­ous kiosks and web sites that use larger onscreen text, but some of these are only in effect because of a trend that I call “Big­gie Size”, wherein the designer has decided to use larger text because it’s the “in” thing to do, not nec­es­sar­ily because it might help those with poorer eyesight.

It’s cer­tainly some­thing to take into con­sid­er­a­tion, not only because it looks cool or earn you high fives from your peers but that it might actu­ally be more read­able for those strain­ing their eyes because of smaller text. Yet, where do we begin as design­ers as far as a base­line text size for onscreen read­ing? There’s been sev­eral debates on this topic, many of which never really draw a spe­cific con­clu­sion or answer to a per­fectly leg­i­ble text size for any reader. There’s good rea­son for this, mainly the fact that unless it’s a “one size fits all” t-shirt or base­ball cap, I don’t think there will ever be a golden answer to that question.

Tak­ing that into account, this is why var­i­ous web sites uti­lize em or per­cent­age text scal­ing instead of pixel per­fect (px) siz­ing, allow­ing the reader the abil­ity to increase or decrease the onscreen text. I had a dis­cus­sion the other day with my friend and fel­low 9ruler Peter Flaschner, who men­tioned that the font size on kar­tooner was too small for his tastes, so he sent me a screen­shot where he increased the font size to his liking.

I had no qualms with Peter doing this, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I sized every­thing accord­ing to a base­line font size of “small”. Every­thing else is scaled accord­ing to a spe­cific per­cent­age, includ­ing the body text (what you’re read­ing now) which is set at 95% of small. I could set the per­cent­age higher and I’ve con­sid­ered it, but I’m not sure if I’ll receive a com­plaint that the font size is too large. It’s at this point where I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to meet the needs of those who have good vision and those whose vision isn’t quite what it used to be. 

Adjustment

October 10, 05 //
5

Control ValveAdjust­ment is an unavoid­able, vital aspect to the sta­bil­ity of life, such as a con­trol valve that changes the water level of a river. In a sense, adjust­ment means rec­og­niz­ing, adapt­ing and chang­ing some­thing in any given cir­cum­stance so as to make it suit­able for one’s own benefit.

Such is the case with some­one who has to adjust accord­ing to a change in their work shift. When that time comes, rarely are we ever afforded the abil­ity to fully pre­pare for the change that occured. Instead, we have to tweak var­i­ous aspects of our rou­tines in accor­dance to what­ever will incur bal­ance in our lives. It’s never easy and most of the time it means step­ping out of our com­fort zone and under­stand­ing what needs to be done in order to sta­bi­lize one­self. For the indi­vid­ual who changes to a night shift, this means adjust­ing their sleep sched­ule to meet the demands and needs of their respec­tive position.

Another exam­ple of mak­ing an adjust­ment could be bud­get­ing one­self in order to pre­vent finan­cial chaos. One first has to rec­og­nize the issue at hand and then make the choice to change and con­se­quently adapt for the bet­ter­ment of the sit­u­a­tion. The out­come of mak­ing this adjust­ment might mean the dif­fer­ence between scrap­ping the bot­tom of the bar­rel or wad­ing above surface.

 

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. 

Snuggets

July 10, 05 //
13

As far as blog­ging is con­cerned, I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately. You could attribute it to the daily rit­ual of let­ting life’s respon­si­bil­i­ties take focus or another excuse could be that I really haven’t had much to say of as late.

Hon­estly, I could wag, point or wig­gle a fin­ger in the direc­tion of either excuse if it really came down to it, but instead I’ll just relin­quish any excuse and steer my atten­tion towards main­tain­ing a sense of sta­bil­ity in regards to the life­line of this site.

That said, I’d like to share with you a few snip­pets, which in some sense could also be nuggets of infor­ma­tion, so I’ll call them “snuggets”. If you’re like me and love using com­pletely made up words in every­day con­ver­sa­tion, then feel free to use that in future dis­cus­sions around the water cooler.

And now, I present this week’s worth of snuggets:

Blingo

As it says in the About sec­tion on the Blingo site: “Blingo is a search engine with a twist. Each search on Blingo is also a chance to win a prize.” It’s really that sim­ple. In fact, just moments ago I was ran­domly selected to win a free movie ticket and because Colin Devroe invited me ini­tially he’ll also receive the prize.

The Case of the Burnt Grilled Cheese Imprint

Word to the wise; when cook­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich at your inlaws remem­ber to check the pan to see if it’s non-stick. Last week I made the mis­take of prepar­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich and then cook­ing it on a reg­u­lar pan.

It didn’t help that the stove was gas burn­ing and that I had set the tem­per­a­ture on high. As soon as I slapped the bread into the pan, it stuck to the bot­tom of it like glue and left behind a burnt toast-shaped imprint.

After dous­ing the pan in vine­gar and an esti­mated 20 min­utes of furi­ous (elbow grease) scrub­bing it looked close to as good as new.

Eat­ing Bugs for Protein

I’ve often thought about and won­dered why cer­tain tribes eat bugs for pro­tein. Ask a tribe mem­ber and he or she will tell you it’s for nour­ish­ment, good health and vital­ity or, sim­ply, that it just tastes good.

I once ate a hand­ful of chocolate-covered ants and thought it was one of the most dis­gust­ing things I had ever eaten, taste and tex­ture wise. Ask your­self this ques­tion: Would you ever eat a bowl­ful of cock­roaches for $1,000,000 dol­lars? The money aspect is tempt­ing, but could you endure just how utterly dis­taste­ful that would be?

The Inven­tor of the Slow Cooker (a.k.a. Crockpot)

Who­ever invented the slow cooker, thank you, from the bot­tom of my “I really didn’t feel like spend­ing a great deal of time prepar­ing din­ner” heart. Who­ever you are, you’re right up there with the inven­tors of Silly Putty (NASA, I believe) and water-expanding, insta-grow dinosaurs.

If you’re ever in a bind for time; cut up some round steak, toss in a can of stewed toma­toes, sweet pep­pers, a drop or two of Red Hot and switch to ‘High’ and in 5–6 hours you’ll be enjoy­ing pep­per steak.

Choco­late Shell Ice Cream Topping

On a sim­il­iar note to the above snugget, thanks to whomever came up with the choco­late shell top­ping. If you’ve never tried this, it’s basi­cally the same choco­late solu­tion that you would get in a real ice cream shop, that hard­ened choco­late coat­ing on an ice cream cone. In this case, it’s for home use and makes a bowl of vanilla ice cream that much more tantalizing.

That’s it for this round of snuggets. If you’d like to add your own, please per­suse the com­ments because we all love tid­bits of what some would call use­less bits of infor­ma­tion, but what I like to call Snuggets.

 

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