the-inbetween.com

Processing

I hadn't touched processing in over a year, but now that the public beta is available I figured I should check it out again. Perhaps this is post-fitc inspiration. Or maybe it's just something to do on a computer that is vastly different -- though only slightly lighter on the brain-cells -- to what I am doing at work all the time.

So I wanted to do graphs. Or charts. Or other such visualization type thingers. I had an idea for a piece of information design that I wanted to implement, but as my time is short all I managed to do was import data and a crude test. But now that I have the data integrated, I can do something interesting with it. Hopefully.

The data, by the way, is console hardware sales for this generation (sans Dreamcast, as I can't find the numbers for that) up to and including December 2004 (don't have all the data for this year). If anyone has this data, on a per month basis, that would be super. It's probably no surprise that I would use this data, but I figure that these hardware sales numbers are thrown around so often that they've been abstracted to meaningless. When it's convenient, that million is for consoles sold... when not, it's consoles shipped or whatever other bullshit spin the manufacturers can put on it. I haven't seen too many graphical displays of the cold, hard console sales numbers, so why not this data?.

More later, I guess. Hopefully interactive.

The Misbegotten Media

This weekend was a much needed break from the work computer... so, naturally, I spent a lot of it in front of my home computer. The only difference is that here I did not have to think about making the computer do stuff, instead I just consumed media. Lots of media. I have never watched so much on my computer as I had done this weekend.

It feels odd, turning your desk into an entertainment centre. The experience isn't the same, especially when I have no speakers and a mere 17 inch screen, but for solo viewing the practicallity can't be beat. All you need is a good connection and lots of storage space, and you're set.

It's not that I don't like TV -- I do -- it's just that with all the hundreds of channels, there is remarkably very little with watching. It's a full-time job digging out the gems from the trash heap. I don't have time for this. When I want, the internet does a good enough job of it for me. And that is the key for me, "when I want."

It's as though the medium of television is now (for the tech-savvy, at least) nothing more than a syndicated feed supplying all the torrent sites. The torrent sites are the aggregators of the public TVCasts.

So I used the weekend to catch up on things I missed, and to, *ahem*, "preview" things I very well might miss in the future. Since I've been rather wordless lately -- or maybe maundering -- I'll let pictures do the talking, and idle thumbs' thumbs can do the commentary. (I've been posting a hell of a lot of images lately, maybe it's a phase).

Good thing I don't live in the states, cause what I have done might be confused with manslaughter.

Macrobe

If you have ever worked in anything design oriented or authored client-side content for the web, you have no doubt used Adobe or Macromedia products. As one such user, the news of the Macromedia acquisition came as a surprise to me, an unwanted surprise. This new entity now has a virtual monopoly for the kinds of tools it creates (the only competitors to any of their offerings that I can think of are Quark and Final Cut). Competition is now gone.

Macromedia: We Make Internet Web Pages

MORE...

Mario and Luigi

I don't know where the following image is from specifically, but it very well could be from this place. wow.

It reminds me of the following, which I also first saw at a specifc non-specific site.

Hell, if we're going to go the Mario pop-art route, then I might as well throw this into the mix (from the i am 8-bit exhibit).

And this (note: not actually Mario related)

FITC Day Three

Yes, there was a day three. I've just been slow getting to it. Also, swamped.

Since day three fell on a work day (Monday) and I had work to do, I couldn't attend the full day. But I did manage to catch the final two presentations by the two biggest draws (well, not counting Carson) of the whole thing: Josh Davis and Yugo Nakamura.

I expected Josh's presentation to be about drawings being randomly placed on the board, and that's what it was about. Only difference was that this time it was for Tool. With Yugo, I expected him showing his work with the help of a translator... and that's what he did. Certainly, my expectations were met, but the fact that Yugo was speaking at an English conference -- a rare occurence, I hear -- was good enough for me.

The one surprise from the show, however, was the relevation that he did Amaztype. I saw it before, briefly, but had no idea. He also showed a Japanese flickr-like site that, technically and design wise, blows the hell out of flickr. However, it was even more flash based and had no social or tagging elements on it, so in the end... let's call it a draw. However, it was mentioned that he is working on a public version that should have open APIs and will, hopefully, be available in English. Could be interesting.

All in all, it was a good event and probably the best yet (of the four years). There are many glowing reviews , and next year looks to top them all.*

* Bias alert: I've personally known the organizer for years, so of course I'm going to say that.

FITC Day Two

Day two wasn't as busy a day as day one because 1) I slept in and didn't arrive until after lunch; 2) caught three presentations and only three presentations; 3) went home right after the the last presentation was done. There were a couple of events after the show, again, but I was tired and went home to crash. There was a possibility that I would head back out again, but... I didn't feel like it.

At least I had a working camera with me this day, so I took more shots this afternoon than I did all year. I think I'm going to up my output now that the weather is getting nice and now that my camera has, seemingly, fixed itself.

Today's presentations consisted of Robert Hodgin's RE:Processing, James Patterson's Feedback Loops, and David Carson's Design Grafik After The End of Print.

Obviously, Carson was the big draw of the day.

All three presentations were quite good, but the one thing that surprised me is that I somehow expected David Carson to be a better speaker than he was.

I have uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr.

FITC Days One

Once again, on Saturday, I headed off to my annual pilgrimmage to FITC (formerly Flash in the Can). Of the four years it has been around, I've only missed one, the second year -- a year when I was an even lazier bastard. But I was there this year.

Unfortunately, my photographic evidence of the first day consists of the following shot, and only the following shot. As soon as that was flashed to the flash card, the battery died and the camera was DOA for the rest of the day. It was later discovered that the charger wasn't plugged in properly. I made sure that this mistake would not be repeated for day two.

On day one, I caught Marcos Wescamp's Expression Through Information Visualization, moock's Multiuser Concepts and Code (which had an interesting side-presentation from a partner of his about the elevator status visualizations for dentsu), Karsten Januszewski's Introduction of Microsoft's "Avalon" (a technology, despite having potential, I'm not sold on. The web needs another proprietary format like I need a hole in my head.), and various other bits and pieces. The highlight, though, was Ben Fry's and Casey Reas's Computational Information Design. Really interesting presentation, actually covering process and the whys of their work rather than just showcasing it (as some people tend to do). More so than any other presentation it made me want to have a go at it and dust off my old processing code.

Following the presentations, and after some wandering around, came bridge. This was a social event... so I can't say that I was too font of that. There was some music and video stuff for a while, a crapload of people, some more boring video stuff from weworkforthem. Basically, things I just would have left home early for were it not for the finale of bitshifter, with live visualizations from flight404. Damn. Good. Show. It was worth tolerating three hours of the show for it.

I mean, chiptunes are cool enough on their own, listened through headphones. Well, I think so. But live? So much better. You can't help but be entranced by bitshifter's roxorzing out and his constant gameboy switching and flicking. It's too bad that my camera was dead, for my (shitty) cellphone pic just doesn't do the scene any justice.

Rocking out 8-bit style, boyeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

keyhole voyeurism, from kilometres above

When Google announced its new satellite imaging feature for its Google Maps application, I didn't give it much thought. I've seen a few Keyhole-based satellite imagery sites before and they were always US only affairs. The northern border divided the imaged south from the vaccuous non-imaged void that was Canada.

Today, just following random google map links others had posted, I realized that Google Maps does indeed support Canadian satellite imagery.

It's considerably less complete for Canada than it is for the states, but most major metropolitans are fairly well represented. There are strange gaps, like a good chunk of Toronto's west-end, but most of the greater Toronto area is there.

There are about four small clouds over the entire Toronto image. It's no surprise that I live I live right behind one of them. This seems appropriate, but I'm not sure why or how. Here's where I work, not too far north from the Skydome and CN Tower.

You can tell that the image is quite old by the number of condos in front of the Skydome. The google shot shows four (just about to be completed) buildings along Front Street. There's like ten of them now, mostly all complete. This was a partial view almost exactly one year ago to the day. The crazy assed OCAD building isn't there either.

MORE...

A Game I'd Like to See

A 16-bit styled non-combat RPG where you travel the town searching for pool halls and players to beat. "Battles" would consist of playing pool against opponents; with special moves and everything. There'd be no direct path to take in the game, but your actions would build a reputation and different story-lines would open as a result. You could take the route of good or evil (hustler), or you could go take on some poolhall junkies in the bad side of town or some pros in a big-league tournament in the posh side of town. An open-ended pool-based RPG..

Actually, I'd like to see any old school styled RPG, with rich characters and a well designed world, done without any combat. Yes, there's Harvest Moon -- but I'd like it to be more competitive and less about raising cows.

Catch-ups

This weekend has been the catch-up weekend. Today alone, I caught up with various online writings and news, got some neglected cleaning done, watched a pair of movies that I bought weeks ago but never even opened, reorganized my gaming set-up, got some badly needed groceries taken care of (no longer do I have fridge consisting of a jar of mayo, some old mustard, two onions, and some beer), rejigged n0wak.com, updated some minor things here and, somehow, even managed to replay some good ole Gradius V.

Now that the gaming setup is cleaned up a bit, I can show it (posted on Flickr with notes).

I tagged it with GamingSetup but, sadly, I am the first to do so. I browsed through other similar tags, but I couldn't find any geektastic setups. Which is unfortunate as I find those interesting in a voyeuristic/geek sort of way.

What needs to be said is "I hate those shelves". They've been with me since I was in grade-school. Seriously. I want to get rid of them. I will get rid of them. It's just that on the furniture/decor priority list, "new shelving" is far below "counter table" (next week), "stools for said table", "new couch", "something to make the walls less boring", "another DVD tower", and possibly "new bed". The need for some of these things is quite evident in the larger scale living room semi-panorama. Kinda bland, I know, but I'm slowly getting there. Give me another six months.

I don't know where that black line on the left (in the living room shot) came from. Even with the Photoshop-like UI tweaks (WinXP port down in the comments), GIMP is still a mess to use.

Hey! My delicious inbox is back.

Thankfully, I missed out on all the lame April 1st absurdity on the web on account of being *gasp* away from the computer and *double-gasp* out in meatspace. It was in this "real world" that I attended my first ever Toronto Rock lacrosse game and a (close to first ever) comedy show (for free, thanks to the connected comedy maven that is Jenn -- I thanked you already but I'm going to do it publically as well). Two social outings in two days? That might just be a record for me.