David O’Reilly is a terrifically talented animator/designer — I’ve been a huge fan since his Venetian Snares music video. He has gained notoriety recently thanks to the rise of a certain effect others have started using in their music videos (to prop up songs that hardly deserve it [unlike this one, which is awesome.])
So: David has just released Please Say Something, a ten minute piece originally released as a series of shorts (he has left the seams showing in this final edit.) It is very, very good. You should watch it large, not in a crappy embedded window (which also shits up the colors.)
A modest proposal from Volcano Monitors in response to Bobby Jindal’s incredulity at their inclusion in the stimulus package:
The best solution for the problem is not to try and keep people working, but to let the people who still have money keep it. Then it will be easier for the starving and homeless people to know who to rob. Then the poor can be shot in self-defense, quickly eliminating the problem entirely with a bare minimum of economic depression and loss of life.
Them volcanoes are hardly a problem, though, yah? Other than that one time in Indonesia when one of them popped, generating the loudest sound in recorded history, 100-foot-high tsunamis (which hurled some boats 50 miles inland), blood red skies in Norway (7,000 miles away), and a shockwave that rounded the earth at least 7 times (measured on equipment in use 125 years ago.)
Nah, there’s no sense in getting prepared, especially since we hardly see naturaldisastersanymore.
Catching up on a massive backlog of DVDs. It’s striking that, as 50-something nerds from Ohio, Jerry and Mark still out-BladeRunnerJapanNanotech the apes from Polysics.
This one goes out to my buddy Stewart, who suffers from a perfectly-rational-I’m-sure fear of the bridge at the end of the clip:
As is typical of friendship with Stewart, you almost immediately start noticing eerie coincidences. Such as: noticing for the first time that the SWF container that Flickr uses to embed video files is called… stewart.swf (no relation.)
It’s heartening to read the first chapter of the first Palm webOS development manual. The foundational UI principles laid out on page 9: “maintain a sense of place”, “avoid preferences and settings where possible”, “don’t use modal controls”… bode well for our rosy handheld future. Palm gear — which certainly didn’t used to be flashy — has always been my favorite platform for just getting stuff done. The To-Do list on PalmOS was fast, uncomplicated, and it was deep enough for 95% of what I needed. The generically-named* Tasks app on Windows Mobile, on its face, looked almost identical, but always seemed to be getting in my way.
Also heartening is that Flash will finally come to all smartphones except… yeah, the iPhone. How long will Steve Jobs’ walled garden hold up? Remember what happened last time everyone else built compatible/interoperable hardware except Apple? It was called the PC revolution of the Eighties. Since Apple is maintaining its old strategy (successfully) in new markets, I suppose they’ll be fine as long as they keep leaping into new segments: computers to MP3 players to cellphones to media centers to..?
Palm announcements at MWC this week did not include the expected Vodaphone partnership, although people did notice Vodaphone SIMs inside the Pre demo units. Some are speculating the silence was due to ongoing contractual wrangling between Palm and Vodaphone; I would guess it’s to guard Sprint’s aura of exclusivity until after the [rumored, debunked, rumored again] March 15th launch. I can’t be the only person in America more than happy to pay an import premium in order to avoid committing to Sprint’s sinking ship.
* I’d like to propose a ban on all super-generic program names. WinMo Tasks, Apple Mail: you are giving the Google grey hairs when I try to troubleshoot your “issues”. Please die.
MySpace always looked like an abomination, but… what the hell? This looks bad even for an in-development site. There are at least three design motifs at war here.
Dark blue and black text on a dark grey background. Very good, Timmy! Next week we will learn our times tables!
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