dcinput

I haven’t really been in the mood to write this past week. No idea why.

Though I haven’t been producing any words, I’ve been playing around with digital cameras, taking a daily self portrait. The battery on the camera I’m using went dead on Sunday. We’ve got carpenters and decorators in the flat currently so everything is in boxes and under protective sheets.

This unfortunately meant that I couldn’t finish this weeks photogamer challenge, though the one photo I did upload to the Flickr group has had quite a lot of attention.

I’ll be at the MiniBar this coming Friday. Last month was a lot of fun so if you are going drop me a mail - dcinput at gmail dot com.

My latest self portait was inspired by Bre Pettis’ photobooth experiments…

See my other photos here.

I need to fill some space so that the photo on the right fits in nicely without doing something wierd with the posts below. It’s late and I’m not feeling very inspired so I’m filling it with a Hugh MacLeod quote that I like a lot:

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”

I thought I’d somehow escaped the flu bug that has been sweeping the globe, and without the flu jab that many workplaces now kindly ask their employees to take. No such luck. I’m told this year it comes in two waves, so it would seem the worste may still be to come.

What I’ve found interesting this year is that since I listen to many podcasts and read blogs of regular people all around the world, for the first time I was able to get some sort of image of how this particular flu has spread. Next year, no doubt some clever sod will come up with a google maps mashup with Twitter showing how these things spread.

I’ve signed up for a Twitter account, not too sure how it is useful yet, but I managed to get my full name as my account, which doesn’t happen very often with a name like mine: marksmith.
What am I doing right now? I am a sneazing, sniffling, hot lemsip cup holding waste of space. I can’t wait for my dentist apointment in the morning.

Digital projects online

I’ve joined the 365days group on Flickr. The idea is you take a self portrait digital photo of yourself everyday for a year. Quite a tall order, especially since I don’t really own a decent digital camera, but I figure there’s no time like the present so I guess I’ll just have to borrow one for a little bit. Here are my first two.

There are currently 3184 people around the world participating, they have so far shared 70 573 self portaits.

The photogamer activities yesterday have given me new enthusiasm to learn how to use a digital camera properly. There is a lot to learn and the best way by far is to do little projects. I’m hoping to use some digital manipulation tools also. I wonder is there a similar thing to photogamer for video?

Anthropology in the digital age

John Batelle interviews Michael Welsch assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology and who made this video explaining his take on what the web is. Here is what I said about it when I first saw it. Very interesting perspective.

Happy Chinese New Year everybody! Welcome to the year of the pig.

I was out last night for a fantastic Chinese meal to celebrate with friends. Razor clams, lobster noodles, sucking pork and the weirdest thing I ate was jelly fish. Strange texture jelly fish, kind of soft and crispy at the same time.

Bre Petis has invited me to participate in photogamer today so I’m off around town to take pictures. Should be fun. Where the hell am I going to find a small dog?

Update: I managed to get all the pictures I required to complete the challenge - see each picture individual page for notes I made.

The new Guiness stop animation advert is really well done.

The Beat Box Fame Game. Superb video.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on the Four Eyed Monsters: “The promotional model is one that many future independent film makers will likely study closely”.

An interesting IT Conversations podcast with Doug Kaye and Jeff Bezos about how Amazon Web Services can be used to create a massively scalable solution for digital audio and video manipulation. Outsource your infrastucture.

Amazon offers it’s own queueing service but I’m wondering whether it would be possible to setup a render farm on EC2 and S3 controled by a specialist render queue manager such as Rush. A pay as you go render farm, yes please.

Update: Greg Ercolano from Rush emailed me to suggest RenderRocket which is a virtual render farm. Very interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Dave Winer: “There once was a time when we entertained each other. If you wanted music on a Saturday night you’d have to perform it yourself or listen to a neighbor. Before there was broadcast radio, music was personal. It will be personal again, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because the joy of creating is something we should all share.”

I somehow missed this episode, but here is Ze Frank speaking about waves. Ass slappin awesome.

Mark Cuban on the future of personal computing.

Happy Valentine’s day to all the ladies!

How great is this stop animation? Really great.

Dave Gray: “Every company has a culture, but it can take time to learn, and the stated culturecan often differ significantly from what people actually experience”. Check out Dave’s culture map. I’m a big fan of good diagrams.

My next phone will be the Nokia N95 which comes out this month in the UK. How could I possibly not get it…it’s got video podcatcher.

Online Video Index: I wonder how many of these will last till the end of the year. Great resource.

Business Week: “Facebook—aimed at college students and a pioneer in opening up its APIs—will move its developer program out of beta testing. The company won’t say exactly when it will make its software generally available, but says it will be soon. Rivals such as News Corp.’s MySpace.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, and Google’s orkut are expected to follow suit and open their code to third-party developers this year as well—promising to kick off a spurt of innovation in social networking”.

I’ve just spent an hour writting a great post and just before I was about to post it my XP machine, for no reason at all, just totally hung. The damn thing hasn’t needed a reboot for about a month and when does it decide to act up? Just when I was feeling ok that I stayed back at work late on a Friday to write a post, that’s when.

So in the interest of me getting home quickly some nice Friday links with a little explanation…

Big Love…

Hugh MacLeod has been busy traveling around the UK doing a special Valentine’s day promotion for Stormhoek wine. He’s got a video camera and an editor with him and releasing small shorts as he travels around. I met Hugh a few weeks ago and he’s an awesome guy. If you are only going to read one thing of his read his piece on How to be Creative.

What is the web? Why is it so cool?

It’s weird that when you are so deeply involved in something for a number of years, something you think is great and wonderful, but it’s so big and complex that you don’t really understand entirely why its so cool…you just kind of do.

Then someone makes a video clip like that which takes all the loose ends that have been swishing around in your head all this time and pulls them together, and everything just becomes clear and lucid again.

I love the web and I love moving images.

Another magic video

I got a similar feeling when Toby Harris first showed me this video edit of the first Avit VJ Festival back in 2002. This was when I first started to understand the power of the web. It might take a while to download but its worth waiting for.

Toby (*Spark) is currently involved in some really incredible projects. Watch this space.

The Fake Steve Jobs: “I’m a middleman. That’s it. I’m like the guy who runs the record store down the block from you. If the record labels want to ship their records in cement blocks dipped in smallpox, what do I care? As long as the kids want to buy them”. The more things disintermediate, the more they re-intermediate, it would seem.

Ze Frank on procrastination.

Ali McClymont makes awesome London Snowman.

Yahoo Pipes…

I’ve been trying to play around with Yahoo Pipes. This web application that runs in your browser allows you to pull in RSS feeds from around the web and mash them up together in interesting ways. Techcrunch description here.

The GUI looks very nice. What I found interesting is how it seems to be based around similar node and flow metaphors used in many vfx 2D apps like Shake, Fusion and some 3D apps like Houdini. The aim is to allow non-programmers to be able to harness the power of the web.

Whether this will work or not, only time will tell. The apps mentioned above have certainly allowed many non-progrmmers into the world of vfx but this medium is inherantly visual, and since most people have a pair of eyes, there’s an inate understanding. My instinct is that mashing up RSS feeds full of different sorts of non-visual data is going to be way more cerebral and less immediately fun.

The other problem is that since it’s all web based, the Yahoo servers have to take the workload and so far they seem to be going down all the time. In principle though I like the idea. Lets see what happens.

I’m heading over to Cardiff shortly where I’ll be meeting several of my uncles for a weekend of rugby. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Ireland - Wales international match. I’ve never been to Cardiff before and also never been to such a big sports event so I’m pretty excited

Light blogging for the next few days.