Imitating A Scanner Darkly | Illustrator Techniques - [My del.icio.us]
The set of basic design skills is an area I've been playing catch up on, so it's always interesting for me to see how various techniques produce effects that interest me. This includes the rotoscoping tricks put in place with "A Scanner Darkly."

The article points out some obvious procedures that nevertheless eluded me. I had tried, before this, to cheat and use software that pulls out color areas and converts them to SVG paths.

Fresh on the heels of the Boston PD detonating LED displays of Err of ATHF, as well as me listening to Brewster Kahle's talk on information, I notice that the videos of the project, made by the "guerrilla" marketers who dropped these projects onto major cities, have been removed from YouTube "by the user."

Slashdot | Why You & Yahoo Should Like This Human Rights Law - [My del.icio.us] This is a pretty good article, not only for the human-rights issue, but for government regulation in general. I've blogged about this in the past. This is one of those frequently occurring cases where not only does an industry need regulation, in some ways, it may want it. Since any one company can't act ethically, because of its shareholder obligations, regulating the entire industry allows the "good" companies to do the right things, as well as making the others toe the line.

I listened to the talk given by Brewster Kahle, a personal hero of mine. I've long been a fan of his work at the Internet Archive. I've made a lot of use of the Open-Source movie area and the Prelinger Archive, two of the projects he mentions in the talk.

A theme he keeps coming back to is the Library of Alexandria. We're going through a period where we could have a tragedy on the scale of that great burning. Kahle covers the technical, legal, and moral requirements that we must fulfill to avoid this catastrophe.

Google Patents - [My del.icio.us] I've recently been leery of both Google and patents, but this search area is pretty great, especially if you're like me and love old mechanical drawings. Check out the mechanical man!

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech. I'm blogging in real time as I listen, so this is straight from my head to the blog.

A chair maker decided to use mesh that allowed the chair to breath and yet does not pinch, as well as a bunch of other cool innovations. (I had one of these at my previous job--they're great!)

Anyway, the chair has to be comfortable and look good. It was very comfortable--an 8 out of 10. Still people didn't like the way it looked--in fact they thought it was ugly. Market testing, for this aspect, was abysmal! Even designers weren't keen on it. People said it looked like lawn furniture!

Okay, this really tears it for me. No more Salon.com. And it's because of an article called "Why Johnny Can't Code".

With that kind of headline, that article should have been great for me. It is exactly the kind of area I'm investigating--how we fail at teaching code to novices.

Turns out, it's a three-page rant that we don't have command-line Basic anymore. The author makes a huge leap from this to saying that kids aren't exposed to the "nitty-gritty" anymore and, therefore, our civilization is doomed. Huh?

Part of my MFADT application portfolio was a series of animated penguin videos that I made using Blender, most of them in the fall of 2005. I'm a little obsessed with these birds, but I can't quite say why. They're just so damn funny.

Anyway, now they're all "you tubed."

First off, you can see my YouTube profile and subscribe (or not... hater). And, if you're a Parsons MFADT person, you should join the MFADT group.

Also, here are links to Inti and TrayJayG's pages. I'll add more once I get everybody's YouTube channel links.

Podcasts are pretty cool, though I haven't really found the killer app for me yet. Since I don't own an iPod, I don't really have that available to listen to the casts on. So, for the most part, I just have to listen to them on my computer. Not always what I want to do, to be honest, because I'm usually busy with other things.

For that reason, a podcast that does work for me is the audio commentary podcast for Battlestar Galacticca. It's like having the comment track on a DVD. Nice! And it's something I would use--since I'd just play it off the laptop as I'm watching the show, it doesn't distract me from what I'm doing. Instead, it adds to it.