Last night, I went to Atmosphere, this new club in North Beach. I wasn’t impressed with the club but their ATM machine has what appears to be an internet meme, more specifically an image macro of a hand holding a wad of cash with the phrase “GET CASH” in the distinct white impact font with a black border. Those familiar with the family of icanhascheezburger sites will find this funny. Otherwise, it’s pretty dumb.
After attempting to make a rather complicated pattern with the 0.1 version. I found myself copy-and-pasting hex values all over the place. It worked but it was tedious. It also made for extremely long URLs which have a finite character limit.
The new 0.2 version features a color pallet and separate inputs for each color chunk. This makes it easier to add chunks in the middle of an existing pattern. It also lets you change up the color scheme without having to muck with a gigantic string.
Up next: YUI color picker and saving.
Programmers are typically known for leaving interesting tricks, images or quotes in their work, known as Easter eggs, much like the ASCII art in the Vimeo source code.
I was buying labels at Staples today and came across the above Easter egg on the cover of a package of labels. The sample address reads:
Tyler Durden
420 Paper St.
Wilmington, DE 19886
Tyler Durden is the name of the main character in the movie, Fight Club (and subsequently the nickname of a pick up artist in The Game). And 420, is, well, pot. I don’t know if Wilmington, DE has any significance.
It turns out that print designers can have just as much fun making their otherwise mundane job more interesting with the prospect of knowing someone somewhere will get a kick out of this. See it for yourself on the Avery website.
What is it with mustaches? Different mustaches conjure different thoughts and judgments about the man who wears it. Since I’ve grown mine I’ve been told I look like a child molester and a cop. I’ve been told I look mean. My female roommate loathes it but some girls fancy it. There was even a study that proves girls like some sort of growth on a man’s face.
I grew it as joke, but it began to grow on me. Now I’m curious to see how it’s going to take shape. I learned you need to wax it if you want to tame it, so I ordered some Oregon Wild Hair Mustache Wax. The ends are just now long enough to attain a faint twirl.
Since I’ve grown my mustache, I’ve heard two anecdotes about mustaches from guys my age. One was a warning. He said, “Be careful. My dad grew a mustache in the 70’s and he’s had it ever since. My mom’s never seen him without it.” The other was a hypothesis. The guy who I was talking with hypothesized with his friends that not having a mustache is a form if contraception (since his dad and his friends’ dads have mustaches). In other words, if you have a mustache, you’re more likely to become a dad. Not too sure believe that one.
Melbourne-based, American ex-pat musician, Michael Beach, played his debut album, Blood Courses, in its entirety, to a crowd of friends and strangers at Grant and Green in San Francisco on Sunday night.
Michael Beach is the lead singer and guitarist of the Electric Jellyfish and this is his first solo effort. The Jellies are on their 2nd USA tour and I saw them at Hemlock in San Francisco and Luigi’s Pizza in Sacramento—both amazing shows. The band has really come into their own since their last tour.
Blood Courses is described as “a haunting exploration of life, death, beauty, and darkness that unfolds as much as the listener allows it.” The album cover is an unfinished painting by my friend Bridget O’Brien and the website was designed by yours truly.
The full album is available for listing at michaelbeach.org/listen or you can check out my favorite single below:
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PlaidMaker is an easy way to make images of different plaid patterns. Looking at my shirt, I got the notion that threads are like pixels. I tested my theory in Photoshop, but the process was tedious and manual, while the logic is basic. Here are some of my first patterns.
For 4 years, I’ve wanted to write a program where I could automatically create the images outside of Photoshop but I hadn’t the know-how or time up until now. In fact, this site uses the same effect for the header and sidebars.
I did it using the PHP GD library. The algorithm is quite simple: if x+y (coordinates) is odd then use the x color, else use the y color. It’s slightly more complicated to mirror the design. I’ll probably open source the code when I get it to my liking.
I plan on adding a saving function, a viewing gallery and a color picker in later versions.
Are you struggling to figure out how the economy got in such a sour state? How did your mortgage get packaged with others and sold on Wall Street as a CDO (collateralized debt obligation)? Portfolio made a nifty animated chart for all those visual learners that get confused by financial-like talk.
I read a couple of Gawker Media blogs and frequently see the weirdest ads running on their network of sites—weird in that they don’t look like advertisements. They look strange and out of place and in turn, intriguing. Clicking on the image, I’m taken to a page with more of the same imagery but with some context. It appears that Gawker fills their unsold pageviews with art from drawing, film, sculpture, digial art, painting, photography and more. Click on the ad and you’ll see the particular artist featured in the pageview. You can also see all artists.
Gawker also lets interested publishers display the rotating gallery of artwork on their own sites. I think it’s an excellent way to display art and better than selling your remnant inventory to bottom-feeding advertisers that aren’t going to pay much anyways. If you let everyone advertise on your site, how can you command a high CPM and maintain your site’s integrity?
Facebook has several apps that let you record and show the places you’ve been to around the world. The two most common, based on my observation, are Trip Advisors’, Citie’s I’ve Visited and Where I’ve Been.
If you’re looking for a travel map that you can put on any webpage, however, you can use Douwe Osinga’s Visited Countries tool. There’s a map for the globe and a separate one for all 50 United States or India.
As you can see, I’ve covered most of the United States on a road trip, but I haven’t been much outside the continent except for being born in Japan, and a 2 week visit to Europe.
Thumbing through one of my dad’s old books, I came across an old scrap of paper being used as a bookmark. It said:
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday, and you are still alright, aren’t you?
