All together now: Budget meetings are fun fun fun!

This is a cheap laugh but worth 1.2 seconds of your time: http://ping.fm/DzXAF

Actually this site made me really laugh this morning: http://ping.fm/xqUxv

This cheered me up this morning: http://ping.fm/jkJju

working from home this morning, with the kids, god help me :)

Google wants me to sign a petition about freeing the airwaves, I comply, now you should too: http://ping.fm/DT6AA

working on a competitive analysis doc that will help decide the future of the GCG site.

The (optically) illusive graphic arts: http://ping.fm/FWBF0

Sometimes I just want to will a design to work, I find that staring at the screen does no good.

Are all budget meetings this fun?

This is just an incredible display, I so want one: http://ping.fm/lJqbl

I am finding a bunch of Kodak co-workers who have opened up a twitter account and never updated. Get cracking!

How long does it take Twitter to delete an account?(not mine of course ;)

Some fun on a Friday...

While I am not personally a passionate fan of typography I understand that many designers(both online and print) are fanatical about it. The font can make or break a creative even in very subtle ways. This video should appeal to all those graphics people who have debated endlessly over the benefits of using a certain font, or not using it.

Actually this is funny even if you are not a designer at all. Enjoy.

In a creative slump, try Mutapic

If you are anything like me(and I hope that you are ;) you know what its like to be in a total creative funk. Its the times that you could not think of a bright idea if your life depended on it. Your mind is a total blank and you need something that can help spin the gears in your head a bit faster.

I recently found a site called Mutapic that is an online image generator that lets you choose from a wide variety of icons, combine them in numerous ways, and create something entirely unique. A gentle warning before you go to the site, clear some time on your calender. This is one of those sites that if you are a geek like me, you waste a ton of time on.

Lets take a look at some exciting stuff that Mutapic and I created:

I imagine if I were to ever open my own restaurant and had to create Men's and Ladies bathroom signs, this is the way I would go. Combining the well known symbol for "Ladies Only" and a icon for a toilet, I have achieved communication nirvana. When someone sees this they will a)know the room is for ladies, b)it contains a floating toilet and c)is likely to induce seizures.










Not quite sure how the icon of "boy with pen through head" got into the rotation. Would you be that happy with a pen through your head?
















At this point I decided to choose 32 random icons and select every possible effect and push generate and hold my breath. I think I actually heard the internet hum while it was creating this masterpiece. It almost seems like a window into another dimension. It makes me question reality. Am I looking at the cracked window into the void or is it looking at me?

Great tool for a "virtual" tour

SO you are on vacation and you are furiously snapping away picture after picture of all the fantastic building and scenery. You get every angle, wide view, close up, with flash, without flash, and because you are an artist you get down on the ground and get that unique shot you are sure no one else has ever thought of.

Then you download all these wonderful shots and queue the slide show and soon discover that for all that effort you basically have a few usable shots that together would make a great tour of your subject. But how to get a bunch of 2D photos together in a seemless way to offer up an exciting 3D view of that quaint farmhouse by the lake with the picket fence and lone stallion standing in front?

Behold OpenPhotoVR.org. It's a new site that lets you experiment with a bunch of pictures taken of the same subject at different angles and distances. You can then weave them together to form an(almost) 3D tour of that subject. You can read more details here.

My subject was Kodak worldwide headquarters right here in Rochester, NY. I took a few photos at different angles and distances and then uploaded them to the site. Now I thought, how hard can it be to designate my angles and next pictures? Turns out its tricker than I thought. Compaired to the already done tours, mine feels lacking. What do you think?

Reaction to Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media.

I remember when the concept of a blog first started. A co-worker of mine had one along with 2 other female friends. They posted about various life events(think Sex and the City without the sex or Mr. Big) and I read it and was bored out of my mind. I showed it to my wife and her reaction was why would someone want to broadcast their life like that?

We are at an interesting crossroads when it comes to "social media." There are generations behind us(I am 33) that think nothing of having their entire life's online. That level of transparency is still an alien concept to most people. What happens when these generations make up more of the majority of the population?

Oh and including writing this post, I spend about 2 hours a day with social media

This will change the way you view images online.

Its not often that I come across something that has a bunch of breathless reviews about it that I can actually agree with but I have recently. Its an add on for FireFox or IE called PicLens and it can change the way you view pictures on websites.

Normally you are at the whim of the designer of a particular website when it comes to seeing the images posted there. Sometimes thats a good thing and often times its a bad one. After installing PicLens, go to a site like Flickr and mouse over an image. You will see a little play button, click it and the window will change into a gallery view like this:
















This particular screenshot is a search for the term "Kodak" on deviantArt.com. At this point you could click on an image to get a larger view, or move the entire gallery to the left or right to see more images. Its a beautiful way to explore an RSS feed of images and I find myself wasting precious time using it. There are other sites you can search on like Google Images and PhotoBucket.

Have you seen any other plug ins for either FireFox or IE that you find useful?

How to find the "buzziest" images online

Since the beginning of the internet (around 342 B.C.), images have been passed around from person to person like a bad YouTube video. These images usually got sent via e-mail from one person's distribution list to another. These were the days before sites like digg and del.icio.us that provide "social bookmarking" for the masses.

With these types of sites, it's much easier to find out what pictures are out there creating a buzz (and you would likely find sitting in your inbox from your annoying uncle who just got online last Tuesday).

The best site I found that will aggregate only the pics from the top social bookmarking and sharing site is Picurls. This site takes the top pics as voted by users from various sites like Digg, Reddit, Wired etc and presents thumbnails of them as well as links to the original. One of the best features of the site is the special RSS feeds they provide so that you can just isolate the images from the other content that's posted there.

This site is like holding up a mirror to society and having society say "Does this make me look fat?"

There are things like this that make you just wonder how that even came to be. Or this that makes me think there are people with way too much time on their hands.

And to think before we had the internet we had to either photocopy an interesting image (which rendered it dark and un-interesting) or *shudder* actually talk to someone in person and describe it.

This made me want to look through my extensive collection of photos for something "buzzy." I came upon something interesting on a recent trip to the Buffalo Botanical Gardens in Buffalo, NY. They had an exhibit of garden railroads and here is a pretty typical scene from the trip:

How cute, a train! And look it goes through the indoor gardens! Well then I zoomed in on one of the stations on this particular railroad.
















Now take a look at this scene of Americana. Looks innocent enough? Makes you want to start humming "Small Town" by Melloncamp right?











Well here is a closeup. What exactly are those ladies doing? What makes it even more disturbing is the obviously uncomfortable old woman sitting between them. She is probably thinking "gosh where did I go wrong with the twins to push them into this life of moral decay and sexual debauchery and where the hell is the 4:15?"






If you like the idea of finding conversation starting images don't forget to check out the Kodak Picture of the Day. I am pretty sure those ladies of the garden railroad will not make an appearance there.

Post a comment with your favorite sites for finding images.

A List of Fun Photo Sites

It's always nice when a talented group of programmers decides out of the goodness of their hearts(or maybe the rush of caffeine) to create wonderful free sites that provide hours of photo fun. It's amazing to think that some of the things these sites do for free in seconds, people used to pay for and wait whole minutes to get(you remember "software" right?).

Here are just some of the sites I've come across that let you do things to photos and make the world a better place:

ReflectionMaker.com - "A little tool for all your reflection needs!" is the tagline for this site which allows you to upload any image(or point to an online one) and define the reflection size and background color.

Here I used a photo of myself that was taken while I was watching a Golden Girls marathon. With that reflection at the bottom of my picture I have now created a cool image to update my Facebook profile image, which guarantees all my "friends" will yawn in excitement at my coolness.















Photo2Text.com - With this site you have the opportunity to upload a photo and have it seamlessly turned into ASCII text. Thats right your image will be turned into something only a true geek could love. For those of you who are not computer nerds, ASCII stand for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and your can read all about it here.

So still using the above picture(which may have been taken while I took a brake from writing my book about a man with a phobia of post nasal drip), I ran it through the site and here was the result:

I had to post a screen shot of the "image" that was generated since its a pretty big file and we want you to actually come back to this website after reading these posts and not flee in terror.

The site also lets you choose different character sets, adjust brightness levels, and if you don't want to use letters and numbers there are shades of grey. Now if someone could tell me why one would want to do all this that would be helpful.




Picnik.com - This is a site that is pretty amazing, since its offering some handy photo editing tools all in the browser so there is nothing to download. There are various things that you can use to just touch up a photo like red eye removal, color adjustments, etc. There are also fun things like adding frames, little images and of course text. Even with all these wonderful options the following is what I came up with:

If you need an explanation look here. Or don't and take it at face value that I need to step away from the computer and walk outside.











Dumpr.net - Last but not least is the oddly named Dumpr.net. When I said this name out loud I thought it was relationship advice, but actually its a collection of interesting photo tools in one place. Some of these are pretty bazaar. Take this one for example:

The source picture was the same one as above(I was modeling for my "before" picture for a botox infomercial).

I'm not quite sure what I would use this for, I mean who doesn't want to see their facial features morphed into a nightmarish circular flesh-ball? I think I will make an ornament for this years tree so the kids are guaranteed to stay away from it, as would everyone else.











Here, using the Easter Egg function, I turn into something disturbing. Almost like Vince Vaughn, but not the cool slick version from Swingers, more like this version.















There are plenty of other sites out there to create masterpieces like the above. Tell me about your favorites so I can go in and misuse them.