2006-03-20

now this is a speaker line-up :

Jonathan Ive, Jeff Goodby, Claudia Kotchka, Isaac Mizrahi? If you are near Pasadena, go to this conference.

UPDATE: Jesus, somehow I missed the other bold faced names: Dan Neil, Stefan Sagmeister, Jimmy Wales, Dave Eggers. It’s like the guest list for the dinner party of my dreams.

Dammit. Perhaps Davey G. is right, I do need to be in L.A.

2006-03-15

stock photos, looking classy :


Thanks to Core77 for pointing me in the direction of these stock photos of the latest in technology circa the Bay of Pigs.

Having spent the last few weeks doing in this order: 1.) looking at stock photos of people with servers for an AT&T campaign and 2.) spending a weekend looking through my family's bountiful collection of photo albums including my grandfather at auto shows in the 1960s — its nice to see these two worlds come crashing together in the best way possible.

(The worst way possible would have been a bountiful collection of stock photos of auto parts. Or something.)

2006-03-09

comment spam, america is art edition :

Almost did it again. Got. To. Remember. To. Post. Comments. On. My. Blog. (Note to self.)

DCist writes about the America is Art project by “two graduate students from an art school in San Francisco”. Thinking perhaps it was my alma mater or the other equally well thought of school. I followed the link. Turns out it’s two graduate students at the Academy of Art University.

So what say me?

Let’s be clear. The Academy of Art is a for-profit insitution that is more than a little hacky. Its full of a lot of foreign kids who don’t understand the American system of higher education. And who saw “San Francisco” and “art” in the back of a magazine and thought “hey that would be cool”. It’s got as much cred as business school at Devry. Don’t expect to walk your way into that creative director job at a Fallon or Pentagram from their.

Just sayin’.

forget kids, this is a great idea for adult filmmakers :


I’ve always struggled with the virtual world of organizing information, especially when working with sound or digital video. My (admittedly inelegant) solutions have always, thusly, left something to be desired. I’ve taken to cutting up audio transcripts and moving them around. Attempted to use PowerPoint slides. And of course, writing scene descriptions on Post-Its or index cards.

All in the hopes of creating something more 3D. Something that I could hold in my hand and move around and not worry about waiting for my computer to save something. Or creating several different versions of a file all with different version numbers. Sketching works nice, but then you get involved with dealing with how detailed the sketches should be and other roadblocks.

The best named blog ever, we make money not art, has found a simpler solution from two Japanese media artists (of course).

It’s for kids. Allegedly. But since when does toy-and-cartoon-obsessed Japan worry about what is age-appropriate?

comment spam, moco county edition :

So instead of, you know, updating this site regularly, I’m always leaving comments out there at other people’s sites. Like, all the time.

Well, no more.

Today, starts a new “feature” wherein I take what would have been a comment somewhere else and leave it here. It’s not like I was going to engage in the lengthy discussions at Washington Monthly or DCist anyway.

In today’s Morning Roundup DCist links to a story about how Montgomery County (MoCo) is banning MySpace access from school.

In the Comments someone called “Reid” says this:

It's funny that MoCo is getting accused of invading someone's privacy for BLOCKING MySpace. That generation is growing up without a clue what privacy even means ("Like, OMG, check out how boring my social security number is..."). If anything MoCo is trying to teach them something about privacy.

Couldn't they ban it just on the good old fashion "ban any trend" trick they used to pull when I was a kid with flash in the pan trends like yo-yos or those snap bracelet things.


What say me? How about:

What if losing our fixation on privacy might be a good thing.

Right now there is a lot of money to be made in keeping things private and revealing the private things that people don’t want made public. I’m looking at you gossip rags and newspaper columns. And at you data security firms and political advocates that use ’right to privacy’ as nothing more than a fundraising tool. Scaring the base about everything from Universal Healthcare to the Right to Abortion. Perhaps, we spend a little bit too much effort and time on separating the personal and the public.

Just sayin’.

2006-03-08

and the bonus is he’s cute :


Nussbaum tipped me (and his readers, I am not as of yet, in his address book) to the fact that Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point, Blink fame) is blogging.

The bonus is he’s cute. In that geeky New Yorker way. (Jew ‘fro and all!)

Yum.

2006-03-06

whiter whites, brighter brights :

So Partner of 1974 has a thing for the phrase “bleached out” to mean, basically, bourgeois. Being the aryan one of the duo, this has previously bothered me. It seemed, well, a little prejudiced against us of the fairer skin. Like all us honkey’s were all bleached out mofo’s or something. (And yes, that is possibly the most bleached out string of words I could come up with. You should have heard me actually say it.)

Then this morning I saw this in the Post. And I began to understand why bleached out is the only phrase that will do.