It’s a blog!

Wow, it seems like I’ve posted a lot on here this month. I and used to think blogs were just for nerds…

Logos:

Michael Johnson pointed out the other day that I had made a comment in his blog shortly before creating Big Smelly Robot:

If that were the case, eventually we’ll all be taken over by big smelly robots.

I admit, this was the conception of Big Smelly Robot, on his blog. Kind of dirty, isn’t it. Save it, Mike. It’ll be worth money some day.

In 3-D:

For the third fourth time now, I’ve had to moderate a comment from some spammer trying to post on a recent post, Transparency on the Internet.

And, I quote:

What follows is a long list of links that don’t even work. Of course, I’m just marking the comment as spam each time who- or whatever sends it, but it’s really, really annoying. I’ve heard some meathead proposals that the government start charging for sending email to help combat spam, but that violates the spirit of the internet, and is also irrelevant to this situation. Essentially, this is like some marketeer trying to place an advert in my own home, against my will. But what else can I do other than moderate incoming posts? It’s a sad world.

In my research, I found infosthetics.com. It’s got some pretty cool shit. Check out this video about Bush. Even if you like Bush, check it out. It’s slick, even though it’s totally got that Adam vibe.

It’s an animated game. The scene changes from day to night based on when it’s played. The villian’s dialogue is based off of news headlines, and the number of bad guys is based off of number of words found.

Here’s a sketch:

Tell me if you get this, so I can know if I need to kill this before I run off too far.

Too vague, maybe?

I came across this page today. It’s set up as a petition to God. I’m assuming the petition was set up as a joke, but it’s funny to read some people’s comments. It’s either christians that are offended by the idea of a petition against God, athiest bashing the christians for believing in God, or people who seem to understand that it is a joke. It brings up a lot of the intolerance and misunderstanding that lies just below the surface of polite society.

I broke this post up because I have two very distinct points. The other about design, the current about interactive, or rather Quark “interactive”.

Another “great” feature of Quark is its ability to produce swfs (Flash Player 9). They propounded “No coding needed.” Not only was coding not needed, it wasn’t even allowed. He first asked for a show of hands for how many people in the room were coders. He then asked how many were designers.

Shit. I forgot. Designers can’t code, and coders can’t design. Silly me.  I do both, though neither very well, and I learned to “code” html long before I considered design. So, I’m sort of an in-between.

While he did say that if you are a coder, than this isn’t for you, Quark’s interactive capabilities were in stark contrast with my previously mentioned philosophy on interactive.

Interactive, in Quark, means taking a print piece and turning it into a swf, which is exactly what I go out of my way not to do in Flash. Animation, in Quark, was simply moving lines and objects across a screen with absolutely no regards for physics or variant motion. Essentially, like Leah said, it’s like making a powerpoint presentation.

Okay, I’ll bite. Here you go, programmer. Here’s my Quark file. What? Why are you laughing so hard and rolling around on the floor?

Is it just me or is it this same logic that got Quark in trouble in the first place? Sticking feathers in your ass does not make you a chicken.

All in all, if you’re hard core into print, there were some kinda cool features, and, I am against monopolies. So, I say give it a spin. I know I won’t.

Earlier today, the good people from Quark came and gave a presentation, which turned out to be nothing more than a sales pitch in which attendance was manditory.

I’ll preface this next statement with this; I’ve had to sit through my fair share of business classes, enough to receive a mention on my degree from the University of North Texas, and also to know that I don’t like business and the way business people treat other living, breathing human beings. With that said, I felt insulted by the tone of the presentation.

A sales call is a very formalized process. I don’t feel it’s effective to the t-shirt and jeans crowd, to people that think for a living. There was a lot of down talking from a person that appeared to know just as much, or even less than I did about technology.

However, not everyone in the room was as up on technology as the rest of us. So, I do feel that there was a little lost in translation. For example, one of the new features in Quark is better transparency flattening.

I’ve always been “that guy,” the guy you come to with questions about technology. The biggest thing I see from other, reguarding desktop publishing, is a lack of understanding of the relationship between a 72 dpi composite on a screen, and a 300 dpi print out. The most common question is “Why do my pictures look all pixely?” The answer is usually because you are in a low composite screen mode, which helps the computer run faster. (The other is because you didn’t link the file correctly.)  Point being: what you see on a screen isn’t neccessarly how it will print.

So, when they talked about how Quark handles transparency, that actually is a pretty big thing. Transparency is an easy thing to fuck up in print.

I posted up the final round of pics from the lomo cameras I used on my birthday party. It’s taken me long enough to get them developed, but I’m just now emerging from my lazy cocoon.

//

Last night, I got smackbook to work on my lappy, but I ran into few issues. A) I wasn’t sure how to get it to run for the future without following about three steps, 2) it only went in one direction, contrary to the video shown, and III) it was a little too sensitive, and changed pretty much whenever I picked it up to move it. And also, there’s something slightly unsettling about striking a Mac. I mean, I’d gladly take an axe to my old Dell.