The Difference Between Cats and Dogs
A dog will be your friend even when it seems like nobody else will.
A cat will be your friend only when it seems like nobody else will.
24 July 2008
Free rating card artwork
I was annoyed that I couldn’t find any high-quality artwork for this movie / film / trailer / preview / rating card / green screen image anywhere online, so I recreated it (then I cleaned up the spacing and alignment a little).
If I were a screenwriter, I’d make a poster of this and hang it on my wall for inspiration.
Download the full version in glorious 1920 × 1080 PNG format.
Comments [2]
22 May 2008
Yeah. “Beautiful.” Sure.
The temperature has been in the High ’90s this week. This morning on the elevator ride up, Mr. Friendly Stranger wanted to talk to me, and he said, “It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, just like yesterday.”
So, one of the following has to be true. Either
a) I am at least ten degrees more sensitive to heat than everybody around me, because miserable weather starts at around 82°, or
b) everybody who lives in Dallas willingly is at least a little bit stupid.
Of course, the elevator is no place to have a disagreement with someone, especially someone who is just trying to be friendly, so I smiled and answered, “Let’s hope so.”
(I should say, since I didn’t before, that I am very proud of Texas for having a Spring that lasted through all of April. That was fantastic.)
Comments [1]
21 May 2008
At $9.95 per domain, failure doesn't cost that much
This might be seen as somewhat embarrassing, but I thought it would be interesting to recap some of the domains I’ve registered over the years:
NJFilm.com
This was my very first domain, registered in 1997. It was supposed to be a community hang-out, idea-sharing site for independent filmmakers in New Jersey. It failed utterly, except for the parts where I got to practicing building Web pages.
ActuallyHappened.com
I think this is before I knew about Fray. I wanted a place for people to contribute true and unbelievable stories. It got zero submissions. Oh, well.
LifeAfterMTV.com
This was a meta-blog that aggregated (manually, of course) the blogs of people who were previously on MTV’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules”. It was extremely snarky, and pretty well received. I think the highlight was getting a link from somewhere in Yahoo!‘s entertainment division. I got bored with the topic after about a year.
AdGrinder.com
AdCritic.com was so great, and I wanted a place to store fan-made parodies of advertisements, which I had a few ideas for. Nobody really had any interest in contributing. I’m still proud of the header graphic.
Webgeek 0lympics
It was supposed to be an annual one-day competition with lots of various events that all related to Web design-y stuff. Besides getting together a great list of celebrity judges, almost nobody participated. I think some of that might be because in order to enter, you were supposed to send a trackback ping to a specific weblog entry. Nobody understood Trackbacks then, just as nobody understands them now. The other reason it didn’t work is probably because it was a dumb idea. But I had to try.
theynow.com
My first – and so far best – experiment with podcasting. Despite the infrequency of updates, I have more than a thousand listeners and the support of the rock band that I’m podcasting about. I’ve gotten to interview people like Jonathan Coulton and Common Rotation, and other high-profile podcasters have contributed to the show. I should really pay more attention to it.
coderwisdom.com
This was a total impulse buy, and did little more than translate inspirational quotes into various programming languages. It’s one of those things that you think is really funny and other people mostly don’t. Oh, well.
LunchCorp.com
Also soon to fade into archive-land, it’s a clearinghouse for ideas I’ve had that I wanted other people to pursue. In retrospect, I probably should have just kept them on re-run.
StopBeingBroken.com
I am having a great time making this (really, really) short show. Looking at it from the outside, I can see why someone might now know what to make of it. It’s not a news show, and it’s not strictly entertainment. Individual episodes get watched (as of this writing) about 300 times each, so I’m considering it a success. And every time I make a new show, I learn (or re-learn) something about lighting, camera placement, editing, etc., which feels really good.
DeepHub.com
Nobody was writing about the new age of entertainment distribution, so we have to. I think it’s fascinating, even if I’m not doing a lot of it myself.
There are a few sites that never got off the ground, like The Frightened Chef (don’t have a studio), Robot News Now (don’t want to do the news), The Songwriters Studio (don’t ask), and The Show Music Show (don’t want to pay licensing fees).
I’ve tried a lot of things over the past ten years. Most of it went badly, but each failure was worth every penny. I think the only regret I have is that I didn’t find someone to take over LifeAfterMTV.com. I must’ve tried, though. That sounds like something I would do.
12 May 2008
Cobra Commander `08
“Attack of the Show” is probably the most creative show that you aren’t watching.
Comments [2]
12 May 2008
Personal Information Waltz
I really like making videos for spoken-word songs. Here’s the latest:
Warning: there is a single “bad” word used.
4 May 2008
Announcing Deep Hub
I’m spinning off another interest of mine into its own web site:
Deep Hub is a weblog about creative people — authors, musicians, filmmakers — and how they get their works into the hands of the public without traditional distributors or labels.
If you have news along these lines, please let me know.
Comments [2]
23 April 2008
My "No Gravatar Yet" Icon
I really like Gravatars. They’re an evolution of the buddy icon that you see just about everywhere, especially on social networking sites. These, however, are tied to your e-mail address, and they automatically show up in weblog comments when you use that e-mail address (example).
It’s up to the weblog owner whether to install a Gravatar-enabler on his or her site before the icons show up (though I believe WordPress 2.5 comes with this functionality by default), and it’s up to the commenter to have an account with Gravatar in order for the right icon to appear. One neat thing is that you can have multiple addresses with separate avatars in your Gravatar profile. But on the flipside, you can be displaying Gravatars, and get a comment from someone who hasn’t set one up.
There are a couple of ways you can go. You can tell your weblog not to show any icon for someone without a Gravatar, and rearrange the layout accordingly. This is an elegant solution, with one major downfall: someone without a Gravatar will see the comments of people who do have one, and wonder how they got their picture to show up. That’s what happened to me for a long time.
Alternately, you can let people know how to get their picture to appear by using a default Gravatar when none exists (same example).
Space is limited, so I used the phrase “No Gravatar Yet”. I chose these words carefully because I wanted to explain why a boring gray box was appearing, and include a very searchable word for how to fix it. I fiddled with the font and the sizing for quite a while before I landed on something that worked at a small size:
So I’m officially giving it away for free. Copy, download and use at will, if you find it useful.
Comments [1]
22 April 2008
