Ploafmaster General

Yesterday's All Songs Considered (I'm a day behind since I listen to the podcast) had Radiohead's Thom Yorke as guest DJ. It was excellent not only for the peek at what music influences one of my favorite band's front man, but the casual ad hoc interview was entertaining, too.

I think one of my favorite parts was when host Bob Boilen recognized a sample from Frank Zappa's music in track from Madvillian.

You know, the website looks pretty crappy - but Mike Butkus' (yes, that's his REAL NAME) pages of camera/meter/etc. manuals is astounding in its breadth. I'm sure this will provide an invaluable resource to anyone with a soft spot for old-school photography equipment. This guy is truly providing a service.

Because Val and I are having a shamcy dinner in Paris next month, we agreed in advance to save some coin and forgo our tradition of eating at a real classy restaurant on Valentine's Day. Instead, I'm cooking a nice dinner at home this Saturday night. Valerie still wanted to go out tonight, however, so we were deliberating about where to chow down. Val wanted to eat somewhere cheap-to-moderately priced, and still fairly casual.

Her choice explains why my wife is one of the most awesome people in the world. Valerie decided we should go to Buzz and Ned's tonight to feast on smoked meat.

I love you baby :-)

You be the judge...I'm still not sure yet.

http://l.yimg.com/cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop.swf

Blue Times from Hyun De Grande on Vimeo.

This video was part of the 2007 48 Hour Film Project, a worldwide touring contest in which teams of filmmakers spend a weekend making short films. Blue Times was the 2007 winner for Best Cinematography and Best Musical Score when the project visited Ghent, Belgium.

Intriguing...especially considering my small collection of old Nikkor lenses. If this guy's comment is true, it could be totally worth the bump to a D200 over a D80, because then I'd have a 135mm and a 45mm Tessar-style at my disposal on a modern body.

The Brits may fear that they are sleepwalking their way to a surveillance state, but as Americans continue to forget what they learned in U.S. Government and drift off to sleep about what really happens in Washington, we may not be far behind.

It seems the Senate has passed a bill allowing amnesty for phone companies complicit with NSA spying operations. The bill also, apparently, expands the federal governments spying abilities within our borders. News sources often cite the Democrat's fear of appearing "soft on terror" - but who are they afraid of seeing them that way? Most Republicans already see them that way, so what's the harm in striking down a bill that eats away at personal freedoms and government/corporate accountability?

It felt good to watch a move I could easily rate five of five.

Helvetica is a documentary of the highest order in that it could draw you in even if you had no interest in typography. The film opens with a bombardment of examples illustrating (ahem) the typeface's ubiquity. We see logos, signage, brochures, print media, and a host of other familiar uses of the venerable Helvetica. The movie continues with interviews of prominent (and some legendary) graphic and type designers loosely narrating the history and evolution of Helvetica's use, often sharing pride, wonder, and occasionally disdain. Join the fascinatingly informative content with an excellent score (primarily by El Ten Eleven) and wonderfully framed shots and you have a fine film indeed.

I plan to buy this. Check it out if you haven't already.

Mugs, try not to laugh too hard at that post title...

It appears that as of some time this morning, the network control freaks at my company cut off access to Twitter. Now when I attempt to visit the page I get the ominous restricted access notice. I'm sure sending the infrequent 140 character message through a web page was putting a real drain on productivity and security.

UPDATE:
It's worth noting some sites that are still NOT blocked: YouTube, Apple's Movie Trailer page, Flickr, just to name a few. Boggles me mind, it does.

John Gruber posted about Pixish, a new website which looks to match up publishers with creative needs and designers/artists with creative solutions.

From the creator's blog entry, we find that publishers post creative requirements and indicate some reward (money? supplies?). Powazek thinks this is encouraging for artists who "...need a way to get [their] work out there. Pixish is [their] chance to get published." He sounds even more hopeful for the publishers:

On Pixish, you can post an Assignment that asks for exactly the kind of imagery you need. The Pixish creative community can then submit their work, and review each other's submissions. Then all you have to do is pick the winners and send the rewards.

For beginning artists, this DOES sound like a great way to get your work out there. But this sounds even more like the publishers winning and lots of artists doing lots of work for nothing. I don't blame Powazek too much - his profile sounds like he has a publishing background (I should research that more to be certain). But how many web designers or architects or graphic designers or print makers do work for free, and let the clients choose what they want from that?

This sounds a lot more like a TV show that my wife occasionally watches: Designer's Challenge on HGTV. This show involves three different Interior Designers (real ones, too - not wannabe decorators) each providing a design concept to a homeowner who then chooses which one they like best. THEN they hire the designer. My wife is a professional interior designer and while she enjoys seeing the different designs on this show, she hates the format because it's completely unreal. No designer is going to spend hours in AutoCAD and Photoshop coming up with a free design concept for somebody who MIGHT be a client.

So I'm curious - how many artists and designers are going to spend valuable work time on projects that MIGHT bring a reward? I'm not an industry expert so I can't say, but I'm sure curious to see how this works out.

This Honda commercial is awesome, featuring music from The Life Aquatic and a voice-over by Garrison Keillor:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YrSpfgFhZs&rel=1&border=1&w=425&h=373]
(via swissmiss)

Vimeo recently (I think) added channels to their site which seems to function somewhat like super-tagging (did I just make that up?).

I think I could watch the Demo Reels channel for hours...

Valerie's latest Netflix choice was Marie Antoinette, and being a fan of Sophia Coppola's last joint, Lost in Translation, I wanted to give this a try.

I honestly don't have much to say about this film. It was beautifully filmed, and some of the acting was nice, but I felt that the entirety of the roughly two hours it ran was an animated slide show rather than a story. There was little to move the action along beyond history's time line. Let's hope Coppola's next effort (if there is one) does a little better.

3/5

So the latest buzz seems to be this Yahoo! LIVE video service. Yes, I have my own page. More interesting, though, is the ability to easily embed the video feed anywhere you want.

Like this:

http://live.yahoo.com/swf/player/ploafmaster

This could have interesting implications - free and easy live video conferencing/broadcast to anyone. Considering the news that Yahoo! will likely reject Microsoft's offer (yes!!!), this may have a good chance to mature a bit.

I've been rocking out to Pandora Radio after work for the past few weeks. Mugs introduced me to this brilliant musical service a short while ago, and I think I'm hooked. Essentially you create a personalized radio station (or more than one if you wish) by selecting songs/bands that you like. The site then begins playing reasonably high quality streams of sons which are musically related to your choices. You can improve the fit by your response to songs, such as a simple thumbs up or down, skipping, or selecting more specific choices from a pop-up list.

All of this is based on the Music Genome Project which set out to analyze specific musical qualities of individual songs and artists and find correlations. I think the results are pretty impressive so far considering the number of sweet new music I've discovered already, as well as the raft of songs that I enjoy but have already heard. Other than Netflix, this is one of the best adaptive recommendation systems I've ever used.

Functionally, the site is fantastic as well. It's not the prettiest or most innovative designs, but the music loads quickly and animations are snappy and useful. It's one of the faster Flash-based sites I've used, too.

So pardon me while I continue listening...

Pardon me, but Vladimir Putin is a douche bag.

Anybody who reads my site with any regularity knows that I'm no staunch patriot. I see cracks in my own nation's facade, to put it mildly. Putin, today, intimated that the world is gripped by a new arms race. That may well be so, but for Russia's leader to first claim that it's "...not [Russia's] fault, because [they] did not start it" and follow it up with, "Russia would always respond to the challenges of a new arms race by developing more hi-tech weaponry" - well, that's just stupid.

"Mommy, I didn't start the fight. I just called him a jerk after he called me stupid. That's not my fault."

A Brief Message has a post up this week that I feel quite strongly about. Programs like "No Child Left Behind" increase my desire to be more involved in my own children's education when the time comes. It seems there will be so much left out for the sake of a check list that only caring and involved parents (and the occasional extraordinary educator) will be capable of producing students of cultured and varied learning.

Hostess still makes their tasty fruit pies, but I was nostalgia-stricken for the now unavailable (at least around here) pudding pies when I came across this cheesy old commercial:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qza8TeOvGQw&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

My personal favorite were the chocolate variety, but since they were covered in that layer of industrial grade chocolate frosting, the vanilla pies were tasty, too.

I have seven new pictures up on Flickr. They're all taken with my glorious 1967 Nikon F, and that oh-so-hot 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens. Any quality to the pictures is strictly a product of the setup, and no photographic skill on my part :-)

Anyway, I had these developed and put straight to CD at Richmond Camera, a process which worked quite well in my opinion. The shot above is my favorite of the bunch, and the seven I uploaded are the only frames to make the cut out of three rolls I shot. I'm both extremely picky and still extremely hit-or-miss (though less so with my composition these days), which is why my entire roll of slide film sits idly on my desk.

Oh, and a funny side note (funny to me, at least): Though I've had a Pro account, I've only now crossed the 200 picture threshold with this batch of uploads. I did, however, cross three sets some time ago.

Let me know what you think - good or ill!

Few publications can make me smile quite like The Onion, and their piece about the Patriots losing the Super Bowl could almost be confused for a serious piece :-)

Speaking of Mark Ronson, I discovered that his music is actually pretty cool. There's a healthy reliance on horns and Motown-esque rhythms, and I can't help but go nuts over this incredible cover with Phantom Planet
of Radiohead's The Bends-era "Just":

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eEcLntc2sk&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Nima Nourizadeh is a director working largely in the UK, and seems to have made a few pretty cool music videos. Peep this awesome little example for the song "Over and Over" by Hot Chip:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHB9F8tvGVM&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Then we have this one for Mark Ronson's song "Oh My God" with an animated Lilly Allen getting all Jessica Rabbit:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2lQcapSnXo&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Finally, the video for Chromeo's "Bonafide Lovin'" is a tribute to Dire Straits' "Money Is For Nothin'" video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xew85L1xyC8&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

In what sounds like the most ill-conceived automotive idea in a long time, Volkswagen is planning to sell a mini-van in the United States called the Routan. I used to think VW should sell a mini-van here, because a) mini-vans have done well in the US, and b) VW has a lot of pull with my generation, who I thought would go for a VW over a Dodge Caravan.

Except this van actually IS a Dodge Caravan. Well, at least it's built by Chrysler on the same platform as the caravan, according to Autoblog. And these days it seems like people are choosing "crossover" vehicles instead of minivans, so why add another model to a suffering market segment?

Maybe VW should focus on improving the reliability of its vehicles before adding what appears to be a doomed experiment to their lineup.

NPR had a fascinating piece on Morning Edition today; the benefits of a family sitting down to a meal were analyzed, and there were some interesting conclusions linking...surprise!...healthy family interaction to positive child development.

I'm not a strict traditionalist, but I feel like I have experienced a bit of this myself. When I'm fortunate enough to have kids of my own, I plan on having family dinner every night. The conversation will be varied because I'm nothing if not a windbag. The conversation will be interesting, because in addition to being a windbag, I'm an eccentric wacko :-)

My headphones finally are failing me.
The wire inside the plastic sheath is frayed
causing a mad'ning drop of all that's said
and sung. I chose the 'phones on rules, all three
of which are practical. Less than twenty
dollars but feeling still as if well-made,
and I'd prefer it if they only weighed
a few ounces, and good sound quality.

Can anyone suggest replacements good
enough to meet all my criteria?
I can't use ear buds because I still need
to hear the knocking of team mates who would
visit my cubicle. I just want a
decent set to wear around my head.