KODA

I just discovered Positive Negative… and wow. What a gorgeous photoblog.

I just love how each post tells a story. How each image is just large enough for me to get sucked in. How the site design is simple and clean enough to drive the experience forward. How instead of keeping a schedule, the artist posts when he has something real to share. How it makes me want to go to NYC…

This guy must truly take his camera everywhere. Beautiful, and very inspiring.

Yes! After so much work, Ton and all of the guys in the Orange Project have finally released their baby to the world.

This is incredible. Not only is Elephants Dream a high quality Creative Commons licensed short film (in HD 1920 and Surround Sound!), but it was made completely using Blender and other open source tools. And from the images, and their progress reports over the past year, it looks absolutely gorgeous.

My understanding is that the goal of the Orange Project was not simply to create an “Open Movie,” but to embody a symbiotic relationship between Blender development and real animation project. This has been a huge boon for the open source art community. Over the past year, they have created and documented some amazing new features and improvements to the Blender project, ones that will last far beyond the scope of their production. Which is not to say that their artistic creation won’t last for a long time to come.

I’ve been working tonight on getting a little Blogroll going here in the sidebar. I’ve tried to put together a preliminary list of people and places that came to mind. If you’re not on there, and would like to be, leave a comment and I will gladly add you. On the other hand, if you’re on there and would like to be off, the same applies. I’m not asking for reciprocity - just looking to point to the sites and writings of some good friends.

I doubt these’ll be getting much traffic in the near future, but it’s more of a respect & recognition thing than anything else. You never know, though.

Soon I hope to get a Linkblog going here, though details right now are very sketchy. I was kind of looking for an independent PHP app to put up, since I’m trying to experiment with a variety of systems… though it doesn’t look like there are any specialized apps very widly used. At least, from what I’ve seen so far, google’s results are filled with linkblogs, rather than linkblog software. I know many seem to take the Wordpress route, though I’m reluctant to install another instance or create a category hack here for something that (in my mind) should have it’s own separate space… perhaps I will find something after some more searching over the next few days.

Writing CSS (CSS2) never ceases to amaze me. Whether it’s tweaking this blog, trying to re-theme a php app, or simply experimenting in the Web Developer Extension, I am always struck by how difficult and confusing it is to try to implement very simple design patterns.

Be it centering objects, making layouts use the maximum amount of space, or simply trying to use floats properly, I am always amazed by how seemingly obvious code does not work the way I should think it does. It seems rather silly to me that such a language would be designed such that web designers must resort to specialized recipes to deal with seemingly simple and common page layout designs. While powerful, CSS seems to become more and more a search for hacks and snippets to make many designs possible. Browser support is also an elusive and secretive gem; unless explicitly stated, what works in one browser will probably at some point fail mysteriously in another.

Announce’d.

It’s looking like a busy week to come, so I may not be writing a lot over the days to come. My intention is to keep up daily postings, though if I get backlogged with homework, things may have to go on hold for a few days while I get back into the loop of things.

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.

Google: Morbidly Lazy

Go to any computer running Firefox, click on the url bar, and type in “morbidly lazy”…

I have nothing else to say about this.