Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Disaster is a relative term

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I’m sure you’ve seen this blog by now. As someone who primarily works in Photoshop, I find humor in seeing big budgets wasted on poor talent. But sometimes, this blog pisses me off. The point of Photoshop is to alter photos. I mean, it fucking says it in the name. Often on this site, I see things with no obvious flaw, in fact, actual great Photoshop jobs meant to bend reality, being ridiculed for doing so.

Give me more of the phantom hands floating in space, or the reflections that don’t match. I want to see the careless mistakes, not questionable art direction choices. If your blog is called Photoshop Disasters, please only show Photoshop disasters. What would MTV be without all the fine music videos they show all day long?

BTW: Do you think they intentionally used the 3 letter Photoshop file extension (psd) for their mast-head, or was it a happy accident?

Polaroid Down.

Monday, February 11th, 2008

From time to time, I like to make extremely radical predictions. I predicted BluRay would win out over HD-DVD, and that appears to be happening (though I also said BluRay would give PS3 the edge over XBox 360, which was completely off). I never made these predictions on my blog, because they came before. Perhaps I will be more bold in the future.

This, however, is less of a bold prediction: Polaroid will be dropping instant film, commonly referred to as “Polaroid”. With digital cameras becoming cheaper and more capable of high quality everyday, it was only a matter of time before the instant variety would fall, and it won’t be long before film is all together obsolete.

It’s not a matter of technology for technology’s sake, it’s a way to communicate that offers more value to the customer. Instead of $2 for a roll of film and $6 to develop, and wait until you take it in, and another hour while they develop, and God knows if pimple face actually knows what the hell he is doing, you now take a picture, instantly see if it looks good, upload to the web for everyone to see (or those you consider family or friends) or print it out on your own (though I’m not convinced that part is up to par yet).

And HDTV will allegedly be standard as of next year, though that’s been tied up for some time, and telecoms might make another push to delay. The point is, technology changes, and it serves the interest of the masses. Today, we can go on the internets and see what’s happening in the Middle East, directly from those experiencing it, without the “liberal” bias of the media censoring things. We may miss the fun of shaking that Polaroid until the image becomes recognizable as a human face, and, of course, more people have lost their jobs to robots, but when the world starts changing, you have to embrace it, and make yourself more relevant. Otherwise, you become Carrot Top.

It’s the freakiest show.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

It’s official. There is life on Mars. This inconclusive visual evidence absolutely proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt //

There’s a lot of wild theories out there. Some say it’s Sasquatch (a.k.a. Big Foot), some say it’s the virgin (cough) Mary, but I think it’s obvious what it is: Elvis came back from the dead as a reverse vampire and has allied with the saucer people to destroy the meal of dinner from a secret base on an uninhabitable planet.

Update // It’s a rock.

Maximum Altitude

Friday, January 18th, 2008

I saw this on the MacBook Air speces page:

Does that mean the notebook is going to explode if you take it on a plane?

Aliens from outer space

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

I love the way this article ends:

The facility was closed in 1997, after nearly 40 years of operation, and demolished by developers to make room for a golf course and a bunch of houses.

A brilliant message

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

I just recieved this message, and something seems a bit counter-intuitive:

Should you not receive this e-mail message, you can request that it be
re-sent by accessing the cancellation tool at https://cancel.1and1.com.

Cleaning

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

I’ve stayed up all night organizing my computer. I feel like I’ve got a lot done, though I’ve not change anything in any sort of physically noticeable way.

iPhone debut

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

Here’s a video by Jorge and Larry while in line for the new iPhone.

AE CS3 + jUploadr

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Tonight over at Guillotine Post, a couple of Adobe reps went over some of the new features in Adobe After Effects CS3. I have to say, they did a lot better job of explaining the product in a way that I care about than a certain rival company that I’m not allowed to talk about. Looking at some of the new features gave me chills. I like production, though I’m more into interactive. I just want to do it all.

//

The other night, I was talking about how I wished there was a way to pre-edit photos (changing orientation, mainly) before uploading to Flickr. Well, that very night, I found jUploadr. It’s got a great batch edit feature so you can edit multiple pics before you upload them. I would recommend giving it a spin.

//

Oh yeah: Moustache Away.

yU+co, and more fun

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Garson Yu is a schoolmate of Kyle Cooper from Yale. His firm is yU+co. They’ve got some pretty cool motion stuff, and a freaky looking website.

Other links I picked up in L.A.:

C4D Cafe is a great resource for people who are into Cinema 4-d. I’ll be tackling that when I get some time.

tutorialized is a massive collection of tutorials for all sorts of programs, even PowerPoint. Wait, what?