T-Minus 15 Hours

So, the bags are packed and the dollars are about to be changed for a paltry few Euro. In the morning it’s off to Newark, and then a few hours later off to Barcelona. I’ll keep writing some things while there, and definitely staying up on the Flickr posting. I’m looking forward to crazy architecture, late nights, cafe culture, and a break from the ol’ US of A. I’m bringing my bike over as well, and am interested to jam around a new city via saddle (and navigate cobblestones on 25mm tires).

On to the news and links digest!

Plan To Spray Toxic Biological Chemicals Over San Francisco Announced Yes, apparently the EPA needs to eradicate the brown moth, and to do this theyre actually spraying toxic-to-human chemicals on San Francisco and surrounding areas. NOT an April Fool’s joke.

“The chemical to be sprayed is classified by the EPA as a ‘pesticide’ and the plan is to douse cities with this chemical designed to stick on everything for 90 days or longer.”

My old pal Craig is going to Liberia to renovate a war-torn house for orphans. Liberia is in Africa, for those of you who don’t know, and has had BRUTAL civil wars for years and years, that ended a couple years ago. Now there are lots of orphans, ruined buildings, and this beautiful country in need of repair. If you have some extra bucks, send some his way- some of the kids who will live there have grown up in Ugandan refugee camps, so this is a life-changing homecoming for some of them.

Adobe snuck out Photoshop Express. It’s photoshop but web-based. I haven’t tried it out yet for fear of spam emails, but the concept is cool. Whowouldathunkit?

Our tax money is back to work killing more people. ‘We’ launched a new offensive in Basra, involving airstrikes hitting peoples’ houses, and more innocent civilians dying. Sure, they are aiming for militants, but it’s like digging up an anthill- they get more pissed off and you don’t hurt anyone.

BigDog robot. This one is new (aka scary as hell) to me, and will turn into some sort of soldier robot in the future. The noise it makes is terrifying in itself. Imagine a herd of these things with robot riders all buzzing and whirring at you! It’s funded by DARPA; you can connect the dots from there.

Yugo Nakamura came out with another fancy graphical thing. This time a 120mb clock screensaver of numbers being dropped in water in slow motion. Nothing groundbreaking, but pleasant to look at if your processor can handle it. Download site

And finally, in the cartoons-in-real-life category, Arkitip posts a walking bike. Not much for power transfer but entertaining nonetheless. Thanks Daniel!

Winding Down…

Quick update; not much to post on the linkage front. I’ve got less than two weeks left before my trip overseas to Barcelona. The accommodations have been arranged, the plane tickets are in hand, and all I’ve got to do now is pack my bike up and make it to the airport.

I’ve been messing around with an app for practicing language with flash cards; it’s MySQL-based, using CodeIgniter for the CMS/admin and Flash for the frontend. It’s about 65% complete, so nothing to see yet, but it’s the first project I’ve actually written a functional spec/model for (big project at work this year, gotta practice up).

Jay’s “Forest City Rockers Motorcycle Club” Animation

Happy Thursday everyone. Happy Friday, Nihon! Today I bring to your screen a hot animation from our friend Jay Howell. It’s bizarre to see illustrated characters moving and doing things:

From The Archives - ‘Rescue Mission’

I’ve been clearing out old FTP space today, and found some gems. Below is an embed of a project I made in college. I went to school for all things computers + graphics, so this was for an animation course using Lightwave 3D on a Silicon Graphics machine. I kind of like it, but in the midst of how advanced CG has become over the years, it’s more or less a cute novelty. Little do you know, but I spent weeks working on it:

Also, for your enjoyment, I give to you the first version of my first domain, twoblocks.com. It probably dates back to ‘98 or ‘99. Aw, what the heck, here’s versions 2 and 3 as well. I particularly like the contact form pulldown on V3; “now I want to die” is one of the options for ‘opinion of site.’ The blog posts are intact, because it was all hard-coded back in those days!

Links Added

I got my links page up and running. Make sure to look at the del.ic.ious (I can never type that right!) link on the right sidebar. If I left you out, all apologies. Holler and I’ll link you up (IF you’re good enough!!).

New Mix From Justin?!

My good friend and contemporary Justin released Ravegression mix 10 yesterday. The public has been crying out for a new one since they promptly stopped production sometime last year. Sure enough, he delivers. It is a little slower than the usual ones, and the whispery nature of the first track reminded me of the Bing Bong Brothers video below, but overall its awesome and he should keep putting out the jams. It’s also nice to have all the hot new electronic music in digest form, so I feel up to date again. As a bonus, Justin also posted a guest mix from Rchrd , who is the BigStereo guy. I have yet to listen to it but I’ve seen a lot of bloggy chatter about his site and night in SF, so it’s perhaps more dancey. We’ll see. Without further ado, the Bing Bong Brothers (iPhone users try this link).

3 Things For Thursday

It’s Thursday in the USA. I have to think differently about this concept now that I’ll be in Spain in a month. It’s about a nine hour time difference from San Francisco, which’ll give me a vampire-hours work schedule. My brain functions better after about 2pm anyway, so it works for me. Anyway, here are a few things to keep you from getting your work done:

Garfield Minus Garfield
Craig sent me this link, which I really like. It’s a sort of metaphysical exercise, where someone erased all instances of Garfield from Garfield comic strips, thus making an entirely different statement. I grew up reading a ton of comics and comic books (Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, Groo, Wolverine, to note a few), so this is extra nice.

3Deluxe
File this one under ‘we love Group94 a little too much.’ I do actually love Group94, but this site, which I initially thought was cool (if a little throw-backy) is too much like Group94’s aesthetic to merit it’s own praise. With that being said, I’m not sure why I’m posting it. Probably because it’s a use of grids, Flash, and an example of pixel fonts being used across the board. I had mentioned the VaryWell site earlier which had too much mix-n-match, so this example kind of counters that one. Two typefaces, not five. Keep it simple.

Vitamin Article: Streamline Your Forms With Widgets
And, in the learn something new every day category, here’s an article from Vitamin about fancying up your html forms. I really hate the word widget, but it’s a handy article. Vitamin is a sort of portal-style resource for articles on all sorts of web interests (but not Flash). They’re aligned with the whole 2.0/VC/Rails contingent, but have a good staff of experienced folks writing things.

iPhone Compatible!

Hi all. In addition to being redesigned, Swyphs is now iphone compatible. Bookmarkable, formatted, iconned, everything. Let me know what you think.

EDIT: Somehow the stylesheet is erased today. I’ll get it back in working order ASAP.

2ND EDIT: I fixed (read: rewrote) it.