See my earlier chart
Archive for the 'Work' Category Page 2 of 2
This isn’t me looking for pity. I know that most peoples’ lives are 80% bullshit not of their own doing, but as a person who should by all accounts be in control of his own destiny I thought this would be a clear demonstration of where I mislaid my priorities.
Some Haiku I wrote during this afternoon’s meeting to describe what I do at work:
I fix L.S.D.
work on Reader Management
and sleep through meetings.
work on Reader Management
and sleep through meetings.
“Where are the listings
on laweekly.com?!”
That’s my handiwork!
Come in after 10:00
rewrite that thing with no spec
then leave around 5:00
Listmaster’s a mess
Reader Management is too –
Look how things have changed!
I had a great time in Toronto at this year’s Mobifest. Toronto’s a wonderful city and I would definitely go back. Sorry it took me roughly three weeks to say that. I met some great people, made some connections and got to see some fun videos and animation, but more than that, I learned one important thing: that guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn was a huge asshole.
I enjoyed the Mobifest show itself (up until the awards part anyway) and I could see in each short what made it stand out to the judges. And it’s true, you do learn a bit about what works and what doesn’t from watching your video with an audience… like sometimes you can be too clever for your own good. I’m not saying that to sound arrogant, I mean that trying too hard to reinvent a tired story, or abstracting something to the point of obscurity, or just having too many things going on at once, you may just trip over your own feet. From that, here are a few things I learned about producing mobile content:
- Be iconic. Have a solid, easily-recognizable style, color palette, design.
- Don’t rely too heavily on audio; cellphones aren’t known for their sound quality. They’re known for having tiny, tinny speakers.
- You’re on a small screen, so don’t rely on a lot of subtle detail. A whole joke can be lost by a compression artifact or dropped frame.
- Don’t rush every joke — there’s this thing called ‘pacing’; you don’t have to write like your viewers have ADD.
- That guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn can go suck a dick.
Continue reading ‘Toronto karaoke DJs: the worst people in the world?’
And I only sleep when I’m awake. It’s Friday and I had a dream that was more vivid and engaging than anything that has happened to me during this dull, gray week. I only retained this insight for the brief moment after I woke up, before my mind switched off in preparation for going about my rote, insipid tasks. I’m waiting for the tipping point wherein I fully recede into the dream world and leave this grim, featureless shadoworld behind.
So if you see me and I don’t see you back, I’m not being rude, I’m dreaming.
(Also, I’ve been taking in a lot of PKD and shrooms lately …but this is probably incidental.)
Like a billion other suckers, I made a commercial to help advertise the most ubiquitous condiment on earth.
Hmm… looking at it now, I have a feeling this entry may not even get in. But please, watch and enjoy. And rate it 5 stars as often as you can. Thanks, fifteen readers!
Also, here’s me enlightening Todd about the highly complex process of video production:
Todd: It would take a computer programmer to explain it.
TimToon: Okay, let’s say X is your education, and Y is your skill. Let’s both assign them a value of NULL.
Todd: I’m with ya so far.
TimToon: Set up a while loop incrementing them until either one equals Success or you hit 32, then exit.
Todd: Wow, I’m gonna kill you.
And he’d be right to! Can’t wait for this exchange to show up on bash.org!
Much has been made of Apple’s lack of support for Flash on the iPhone, with Apple passing on it in favor of open standards, using AJAX, canvas and the HTML 5 spec to achieve the same slick interfaces that have until now only been seen within Adobe’s Flash player.
Apple has famously proclaimed that the web on the iPhone isn’t the mobile internet; not the “watered down internet” — and yet, it’s not quite “the” internet either.
On Apple’s iTunes page, you get a very cool interactive slider listing all of the company’s hot iTunes-related products, all presented using CSS and Ajax. All done in the browser, all done using open technology. Yeah, holy shit is right.
Now take a look at the same page on the iPhone. It’s similar, but it ain’t the same.
Since Javascript can detect which browser you’re using, Apple seems to be slightly modifying its web interface to account for the iPhone. But how many web designers are going to get caught up in Apple’s iPhone-led redesign of the web, only to find out that their spiffy new interfaces won’t work on the very device they’re redesigning their websites around?
An internet built on open standards, pioneered by Apple would be pretty spectacular, but Apple is going to have to work out these ‘gotchas’ first. Otherwise, I feel this open initiative will go the way of many of Apple’s previous efforts: Cocoa (the other one, but that’s a whole other article), OpenDoc, interactive QuickTime movies, the Pippin game console and other promising technology that Apple left to rot on the vine.
I for one will support Apple’s initiative because I like open standards and I like the idea that when publishing my videos I can “encode once, run anywhere” — on the internet, iTunes, the iPod or an iPhone… pretty much anything starting with a lower-case i.
And in a perfect world, I wouldn’t be the only one. But I don’t see Jobs’s idea of the standards-based open internet catching on. For better or worse, the web is a heterogeneous place, so any kind of consistency is rare indeed. And for all his shrewd maneuvering, Jobs still has a very pie-in-the-sky idea about human nature. Would you expect anything else from an aging hippie? He should already be able to tell that consumers don’t always choose the best products, and quite understandably, people will make choices that immediately benefit themselves.
It made sense for YouTube to re-convert all their videos into the open H.264 codec to get an exclusive spot on Apple’s hottest new product, but would every Tom, Dick and Harry go out of their way to re-encode their entire collection of failed motorcycle stunts, backyard wresting clips and lip-syncing videos, just in support of open standards? My guess is no.
It would be great if we lived in a world where everyone drove a Prius, roommates would wash their dishes, and everything on the internet was open and free for anybody with a good idea, but as a poet once said, “We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive.”
It’ll take some very real incentives for Apple to lure web developers away from closed, propriety systems and into an open and free internet, not just because it’s the right thing to do. If I were to offer my two cents, it would be to make the tools for realizing your vision more available, and make them easier to use. Make it easy for people using your software to get results. (I think you used to have an OS that did this back in the mid-’80s.)
Finally, for those of you at home who want to see the web the way the iPhone does, just modify your browser’s user-agent to this string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
…just resist the temptation to touch the screen.
Just a quick bit of pimping myself; I wrote an article for LA Weekly’s Best Of issue. I thought I’d link to it, just so LA Weekly can get a few extra cents of ad revenue. It’s a gripping 312 words!
Some comic shops are more like museums. A curator decides which artists to stock, there are some very expensive pictures hanging from the walls… and I’m afraid to touch anything. When I mentioned this to the clerk at Burbank’s stylish House of Secrets, she told me to, by all means, touch.
Nothing to add, but here’s a good article from the last 2005 issue of OC Weekly, guaranteed to get Pete upset:
Don’t Gloat Yet - A bad year for Bush is bad for all of us by James Washburn
This is what I did for six months, and all I got to show for it was carpal tunnel.
I scanned 10,000 pieces of sheet music for www.metzlerviolins.com.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I also built their online store, first using FileMaker (why!?!) and again using PHP. So totally worth it. Yay.
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