Posted
March 31st, 2007 at
12:37 AM and filed under
Web,
Site Stuff.
Well, I made some minor changes to the site tonight. I added a logo-like thing next to the title, tidied up some alignments, and added a footer — just some simple things to make the design a little more pleasing.
Also, after toying around with the idea of it for a while, I’ve decided to sign up for the new tumblelog service everyone’s been talking about, Tumblr. I may start posting sidenote-type entries found here in the past to the new site, but I mainly have other intentions — those of the tumblelog acting as an aggregator for content of mine scattered around the web with different services. This is possible thanks to Tumblr’s great feed aggregation function, and I’ve set it up so that it syndicates my blog posts, Flickr photos, saved Del.icio.us links, and Diggs to the site.
This way, instead of visiting several different sites, you can now simply visit yum.henryetc.com. The name? I thought to myself, mmm, lots o’ tasty content, yum. Thus the site was born.
Enjoy.
Though I’m not a fan of the popular buzzword web framework, Ruby On Rails, I noticed something the other day: there seems to be a correlation between design beauty and use of Rails. Every app or site I’ve stumbled upon that uses the framework has a great, often minimal design that is quite pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it’s the fact that the people who design these sites have similar tastes in methodologies when it comes to programming languages: sweet, clean, and simple.
Those are just my two cents, but still don’t believe me? Check out some of these sites based on Rails:
Then again, it could just be the influence of “Web 2.0″ design concepts that make all these sites look great, but largely similar in terms of design elements (yes, Web 2.0 gets quotes from me). Stupid Web 2.0.
Posted
March 25th, 2007 at
4:27 PM and filed under
Reviews,
Movies.
I just watched the biographic Man on the Moon, which portrays the life and times of the zany comedian who wasn’t a comedian, Andy Kaufman. For those not familiar with him, he was an eccentric performance artist active in the 70s and early 80s, characterized by his unpredictability when it came to distinguishing the boundary between his life and his work. In fact, he himself didn’t see his work as that of a comic, he thought himself to be a “song and dance man”. Often his acts consisted of that exactly — It was only somewhat later in his career that these strange acts began to be seen as comedy, though, still, only by the audience.
What made Kaufman such a quirky person is that life for him almost entirely meant being in character. Much of what he did in life was in jest, but only for him. Invoking uncertainty and confusion in people when it came to his acts and, really, publicity stunts, was almost a way of life for Kaufman, from assuming different characters to assuming entirely different personalities.
I have seen a number of videos of the actual Andy Kaufman, and Jim Carrey, who portrays him in Man on the Moon, does a dead-on recreation of him in his mannerisms, the inflections in his speech, even his body language. This, combined with spot-on, near exact recreations of events in this captivating man’s life, made this movie really enjoyable for me.
I remember seeing a prototype of this about two years back, and a few days ago I again stumbled upon something called Monome. It’s a really interesting experiment in design and interaction by way of a silver slab of shiny metal with 64 buttons on its face. What you do with them, however, is where things get interesting. Primarily, it’s been used as an interface for MIDI software applications, with each button acting as a trigger for a sound byte; this allows for some unbelievable live performances, with the actual construction of the song being a performance in and of itself. Several examples of this can be seen in the videos on the site.
The real beauty of Monome, however, is that it gives tactility to what is usually cumbersome software. Say, for instance, you want to create a song with several looping instruments. To do this, you need only select buttons on the grid which correspond with sound files on your computer. As seen below, a sweeping bar of illumination literally passes over the buttons you selected in chronological order, playing its assigned sound, and voilà, a song.
The best thing is that this is just one out of a near endless amount of ways you can interact with Monome. More or less, the only limitation to its flexibility in how the buttons interact with your computer and how you interact with the buttons, is your imagination (and some software, too).
Sometimes it takes something really simple in design to allow room for extensibility, in this case via ingenuity and creativity on the users’ end. Monome is a shining example of this.
Posted
March 14th, 2007 at
1:00 PM and filed under
Offbeat,
Humor.
Ah, ’tis my favorite day of the year. What day is it, exactly, my birthday? No. My half birthday, even? Of course not, it’s Pi Day! Today’s date — 3/14, or alternately, 3.14 — just so happens to be the first three digits of one delicious mathematical constant. Accordingly, I have prepared some celebration ideas.
Idea One: Bake a pie!
Bonus points if you bring it to your school or workplace.
Idea Two: Show your dedication
How do I presume you do this? By watching this a few dozen times and calling an assembly to show off your newly memorized mathematical prose.
Idea Three: Spread the gospel
That’s right. Get out there, show the non-believers the power of Pi. Bonus points for using Pi to determine a circle’s area in front of a live audience.
Whatever you do, embrace your geek-hood and show some love for Pi today.
Posted
March 8th, 2007 at
12:55 AM and filed under
Sidenotes.
I wish all browsers could render CSS 3 text drop shadow. I added this little effect to the header, “Henry’s blog,” and I think it looks pretty cool.
Posted
March 3rd, 2007 at
5:36 PM and filed under
Web,
Music.
A note to fellow fans of the rockin’ band Wilco: tonight, at 11:00 PM EST, there will be a live streaming of the band’s entire new album called Sky Blue Sky, set to be released May 15th!
I’m extremely excited for this, not only because Wilco’s one of my favorite bands, and this will be their newest album in almost two years, but also because Wilco realizes the power of the internet for distribution and garnering hype — something the rest of the music industry largely doesn’t. It’s groundbreaking for a band themselves to put a pre-release copy of an album on the net, and my hat’s off to Wilco.
It had been quite awhile since I’d last been on vacation, and after returning from one last evening, I realized that being away from my computer for a mere four days had a far larger impact than I’d ever imagined.
When I came back home, it wasn’t even the 30 emails (only 5 of which weren’t spam) waiting for me in my inbox, or the 200 odd-some unread articles in my RSS reader. No. You see, when I first booted up my computer, it even felt strange to use a mouse, or drag a window about. It was as if I’d never used a computer before.
Now, this didn’t last too long, but what did was all the catching up I had to do — the missed messages from my friends on AIM, trying to find out the happenings in #randomshapes on IRC, making a feeble attempt to read 20 pages worth of Digg content. Believe me, the list goes on.
When I think about it, the fact that, if I had been home, I would have consumed all of this content is honestly a bit sad. It made me realize that I spend a truly huge chunk of my time basking in the glow of my monitor.
Maybe I should go on vacation more often!
