If you were forced to eliminate one of these musicians from your life forever, whom would you KEEP? Queen or David Bowie?
Please +1 your vote in one of the first two comments of the original post.
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Category: Art
There are only a few people from my elementary school that I’m still in touch with. One of those people is Eric Bates.
I was friends with him all throughout elementary and high school. In particular, I remember playing around on 3D Studio and a very early version of Photoshop with him in Bobby Salmaso’s drafting class. We were also known to play a networked game of Doom during many lunch hours. He had some pretty advanced 3D modelling skills, even in those days, and I have always been a bit jealous of his talent.
Outside of school we worked on a project together to recreate a map of our high school on Duke Nukem 3D. His attention to detail and the way he constructed complex warping methods around the map to give the illusion of a multi-floored building blew me away. I think he liked my ample use of glass and the way one could simulate an experience of shooting out the windows next to the cafeteria. There was something cathartic about seeing all that shattered glass spray out on the floor.*
Eric and I are still in touch — though not very much now that he lives in Japan Australia. He’s still animating and his latest piece, Sayonara was just featured on Cartoon Brew. Here it is:
Sayonara from Eric Bates on Vimeo.
Here’s his description:
A short story about two unlikely friends saying goodbye. A young man named Charles just lost his home. He spends one last day with his best friend, a sea turtle, before moving on.
This graduation project was made while at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. It brings together a lot of the research I had done over the three years I spent in Kyoto, and is based abstractly on my own experiences living in Japan. Most of the concepts relate somehow to my experiences, friends, foods, things I saw, and things I felt over this time; in particular the idea of saying goodbye to close friends.
He’s also created a making of video. Fantastic work, Eric. We always knew you were destined for greatness.
*It turns out, simulating shooting up a school in no way makes one actually want to shoot up a school — but if this had been a few years later, we probably would have been too worried about what others thought to make the map.
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Sam Roberts
Last night some friends and I went to see Sam Robert’s concert here in Lethbridge.
Here is a short sample of the concert (shot on an iPhone by a friend of mine, Michael Warf)
It was a great concert. We all had a super good time.
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The Rural Alberta Advantage
I’ve only been to one Rural Alberta Advantage concert but I have to say, I love that band. They’ve got this great music video for their new song, ‘Stamp’, which I think you’ll enjoy:
(via)
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Aggressively Happy Music
Mefi user Rory Marinich asks the community for suggestions of “aggressively happy music”.
The kind of music that punches happiness into you no matter how much you don’t want it to be there. The sort that explodes into spiky neon flowers.
My first thought was this gem by ELO (made famous to me from the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack): Mr. Blue Sky
The list is full of songs that will demand you cheer up immediately.
During my “Music of Quebec” workshop at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres in the Explore program, together with almost 100 students, we created this “lipdub” music video. Students from the Summer 2010 session of the workshop participated in the video singing along to the song “J’taime comme un fou” [I love you like a fool] by Robert Charlebois.
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Flickr’s New Layout
When I heard about Flickr’s new layout changes, I was excited to see what improvements they were making. (For scale, the images below are 500px wide — that is the actual width of the photo in the old view.)
The old view:
The new view:
Things I dislike about the new Flickr preview.
- They removed the helpful url links when viewing “all sizes”.
They no longer have a “browse” link to take you to the flickr stream page where that photo appearsLooks like they fixed this, the photostream link now takes you to a specific page.- The map on the side is way to prominent. Seriously, is the map more important than the other photos?
- They removed speed options, viewing of descriptions, and ability to see what’s coming up in their new lightbox mode (instead of slideshow – I don’t love flash, but I liked the slideshow feature.).
- They turned the quick links above a photo into pull down menus. One more click to get what you want is never preferable.
- The spacing between photos on the photostream view is too wide. Just because some people have large monitors, doesn’t mean that the photos should look unbalanced to fill up the space.
- Titles need to go above photos, not below them.
- “Click here to add a title” no longer disappears, but sits there cluttering untitled images. (At least for my own photos when I’m logged in.)
- The column width for comments is now wider making comments harder to read.
- The commenter’s icon is smaller and doesn’t look as nice. Ironic considering they could have used the icon to fill up the space so that the text column wouldn’t need to be quite as wide.
Things I like:
- I like the new 640px default size, though things load a bit slower.
I admit, when viewing the small images above, I like the look of the new version because the bigger photo is nicer. However, all the other concerns make me feel like this one positive is not worth all the other negatives.
In my opinion, Flickr should hire the type of people that started the company: people passionate about photography and user interfaces.
My “pro” account is expiring next week. I am thinking about migrating my photos to Picasa before then. That doesn’t leave me much time.
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Earth Day Photos
In honour of earth day, the Boston Globe has a great collection of photos well worth checking out: Earth Day 2010 Photos.
The most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth created to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device—NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
OK Go’s new video, “This Too Will Pass” is centred around a rube goldberg machine and even if you’ve watched the entire 30 minute movie, “The Way Things Go” (wikipedia) and feel like you’re rube goldberged out, this is still totally worth watching.
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – YouTube
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Homemade digital clock
Yesterday I made a clock using an arduino kit that I purchased for my “Creative Electronics for Beginners” class. It only counts from 0 to 9 and then repeats, but I love the satisfaction I get when I see it working.
I made a clock! on Flickr.
I did happen to bump one of the LEDs just before I started taping, and discovered afterward that I had shorted one of the lights from the current. It just needed to be nudged slightly, but in the video it appears to be burnt out.
The code after the jump.