Archive for January 7th, 2006
Coudal Partners are among the small number of sites that take the blog paradigm and present it in a well-designed, interesting, and fun way. It is an excellent piece of marketing for their firm- it's not just full of blog regurgitation, but heavily mixed with content they have created. I love the pseudo-newspaper look - my favorite page is the 'under construction' page for
Photoshop Tennis emblazoned with huge letterforms declaring 'Noy Yet'. They also feature quite a number of videos that they have produced, anything from comedic shorts (
Copy Goes Here) to
Western State (documentaries about non-traditional artists). All very intriguing stuff - perhaps one day my open-minded, jack-of-all-trades mindset for all things design, photography, music, writing and video will culminate in a firm like Coudal.
January 7th, 2006
A link to this Flickr set of
ST Format scans via Boing Boing really brought back some fun memories of my early geek days. It all started with the Commodore 64, many hours of copying basic code out of books, writing text games, and figuring out sprites. I remember playing Red Alert for what seemed like hours. Looking back now, it's amazing what a crude game it was, yet it was captivating at the time, despite the load time from the cassette tape drive. I would play around with my friends' Spectrum ZX or Amiga and get jealous at the graphics.
Then it was onto the Atari ST - 3.5" floppies, GEM, desktop publishing software, and the beginning of my software piracy vice. Select the software you want our of this black and white copied booklet with a few pounds (UK) and you'd get a couple floppies in the mail. Hello Pompey Pirates and Medway, Dungeon Master & Elite, modems and MIDI. It was so great! (Didn't even know what piracy was at that age!) The craziest Atari ST upgrade was when me and my brother, not even teenagers yet, tromped around London alone together to pickup our STFM that had been disassembled, installed into a tower case with a whopping 40mb hard drive. Let the games begin!
One of my all time favorites was a game called Captive, a Dungeon Master style game set on the future where you controlled 4 droids and had all sorts of crazy weapons and enemies and had to fight your droids through bases on different planets. Really. You had to be there. I've recently played the game on an emulator and it stills holds the same addictive, adrenaline pumping, superball throwing and monster dodging appeal.
atari.st online
atari explorer
January 7th, 2006
I can't help but watch CSI, cringing the whole time at the stupid production values and cheesey fake CSI-reality. At least they stopped making inkjet printers make dot matrix sounds - I mean, not to mention the obvious fakeness, but when they are so busy showing off their fancy high tech lab gadgets, why would they want to date their printer back to the 80s? Anyway, I was pseudo-enjoying an episode and wondered what funky csi-sci-geek words they use most frequently. So, being a freak, I spent entirely too long today aggregating the season 1 scripts, stripping them to bare text, parsing and other PITA unix stuff, and finally came us with this -
the CSI Season 1 word analysis. It would be nice to drop the info into some neat
flash-based viz tool - but that'll have to be some other time.
RANK--WORD---------FREQ
100---EVIDENCE------158
110---CRIME---------136
124---BLOOD---------121
158---BODY-----------93
216---PRINTS---------64
377---CSI------------32
220---DNA------------62
586---FIBERS---------19
631---FINGERPRINTS---17
725---TRACE----------15
1752--EPITHELIALS-----5
NOT USED : allele (bet that's a spelling bee stumper!)
January 7th, 2006
i wrote about the digital guitar in an earlier post, but I didn't really think of how such a gizmo could allow the paradigm of playing the guitar to shift. Check out the
Gizmodo report from CES where they describe how you can configure different strings to have separate fx, pan to different outs, and other crazy mind-warping stuff. Yes, that is an ethernet cable poking out the side. Not cheap at roughly $4K.
January 7th, 2006
It was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that Intel will ditch it's 37 year old logo with the offset 'e', and rebrand the company with a new look. Well, it was about time, but that doesn't mean the new version is any better - in fact it looks like any other generic tech startup logo... Can't anyone make a logo without a damn oval around it? What is that?
January 7th, 2006
Today, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported that
Kodak will be making logo history by abandoning it's world famous boxy K logo. While the new logo retains the colors of the dated one, it sorely lacks in concept, typography and brand building. While this might be a death blow to other large companies, this might be a move indicating the desperation that Kodak has reached with the decline of the company's profits and brand popularity. My take - the 'custom' typeface is really hideous, and the logo doesn't speak visually to what the company does. Good luck out there logo! Be grateful you aren't a Verizon or a
January 7th, 2006
Coudal Partners are among the small number of sites that take the blog paradigm and present it in a well-designed, interesting, and fun way. It is an excellent piece of marketing for their firm- it's not just full of blog regurgitation, but heavily mixed with content they have created. I love the pseudo-newspaper look - my favorite page is the 'under construction' page for Photoshop Tennis emblazoned with huge letterforms declaring 'Noy Yet'. They also feature quite a number of videos that they have produced, anything from comedic shorts (Copy Goes Here) to Western State (documentaries about non-traditional artists). All very intriguing stuff - perhaps one day my open-minded, jack-of-all-trades mindset for all things design, photography, music, writing and video will culminate in a firm like Coudal.
