This was the weather forecast of Havana, Cuba. I have never seen "smoke" as a forecast.
Residents (and neighbors) watch as Firefighters from around the state work tirelessly to save homes and prevent further flare ups on the front lines of the Tea Fire. 1,800-2,000 acres and an estimated 100 homes were lost in less than 24hrs.
I love watching trailers in HD and recently watched the new teaser trailer for "Angels & Demons", the prequel to Dan Browns "The DaVinci Code" starring Tom Hanks. As I watched the trailer, I like to look for things or scenes that may give clues, this as a result of the 1-18-08 Cloverfield movie, who did an amazing job creating a viral marketing campaign as fans flocked to figure out the premise of the movie from it's mysterious trailer. Various clues within the trailer were analyzed and blogged about, and even the 1-18-08 site produced some interesting clues.
Eventually the site's viralness faded and the campaign went stale months before the release. The new "Angels & Demons" trailer attempts to rekindle a viral campaign marketing with some text that appears in the title "Illuminati" as it appears in the scene (see above). At first I thought it was a watermark of sorts to protect the trailer from copyright issues, however on close inspection, I saw the words "altars of science" appear within each of the letters. So, I did a search and found this site: www.altarsofscience.com/, which shows some sort of cam view of an odd device, almost like a static strobe that you'd purchase at Sharper Image. There is also some countdown clock of days:hours:mins:seconds.
This lead me to do a search on the domain, and it was immediately given away, Sony Pictures. So there you have it, viral campaign solved. Or is it?
UPDATE: A reader posted some comments on more clues "hidden" in the AltarsofScience.com website. Click here to read more.
This post marks the 1000th post I've done since I first started blogging back in 2004. My first blog was for the "Geek chic", and since then it's gone from geek gadgets to style to culture to digital film to style to lifestyle to culture and on and on and on. Today Blog001 is simply my personal site with all of the above mixed in. So when today I realized that my next post would be my 1000th, I froze in disbelief as to what I'd write, and I have been thinking about it a lot.
I finally settled on just another simple post on something cool that I'd share with you all as I normally would. So today, for no particular reason, I'm dedicating this 1000th post to Commuter Portraits.
I ride the train 4 days a week, and I as you can tell from my various photos here and here and here, I'm fascinated by it. I've always wanted to do a photo project on commuter travel, but always felt it would be a bad idea simply because early in the morning, who wants their picture taken? And at the end of a long day, people just want to be left alone. Then I happen to come across Paul's site: Commuter Portraits. In his words "I ride the Utah Transit Authority TRAX train to work every day. And every day I watch characters get on and off the train. While they are all unique, what they have in common is just how interesting they all seem. So I decided to start taking pictures of them and asking them a little about themselves. This site is the result of that work."
It's inspired me to do the same, and I will begin working on creating a multimedia piece of the people I ride the train with. Thanks Paul!
I happen to be traveling from Denver the night of the election. When I got to the Denver airport, McCain was leading 8 to Obama's 3 with most eastern polls closing in 16 mins. I took a seat at a bar, ordered a vodka tonic, and watched. Minutes later, the bar erupted in cheers, claps, even grunts and the occasional shaking of the head. CNN had just announced Obama with over 100 electoral votes and McCain with a measly...well lets just say it was less than 50.
I took images of people from various locations between Denver and San Francisco airport. You can view them here.
Cast your ballots today!
When people ask what kind of music I listen to, I usually answer with: "background music". That is, music that doesn't have a lot of words that I can listen to almost anywhere, anytime, doing anything. My library of music consists mostly of electronica from the likes of Tycho, St. Germain, Thievery, Espresso Del Lago and others. My tastes tend to shift slightly within the genre of electronica, from chill to lounge or lounge to triphop or some other obscure form of the music that simply resides in the background of my head as I do whatever it is I do when I listen.
My tastes recently have shifted towards the Jazz-like as I tell myself that this is the type of music one listens to when it rains or it's cold and cloudy. This all started when I listened to Tommy Guerrero play at Barrel House. Although his music falls in the funk jazz genre, I still enjoyed the percussion, keyboards and funk style guitar, and of course electronica had it's own style of jazz which I found in the album called: Mushroom Jazz 6, a compilation released in 2008 by American DJ and Producer Mark Farina. Farina Combines elements of downtempo, hip hop, jazz and r&b, beatmatching and mixing songs together in the style of house music.
The albums 19 tracks fall closely within their spectrum of sound that you don't get with other compilations, where music tends to swing from style to style. MJ6's artists provide you with that background music that makes you want to listen as walk the streets of your city, seeing the everyday life and vibe of the street.
It was just over two years ago that Yahoo! re-designed it's home page, one of my favorites thus far. Today, I logged onto my computer and thought I was being hijacked....virtually. The image you see on the left is the new Yahoo! homepage, only visible to those under a "bucket test", a pool of Yahoo! users who are lucky to see such things. At first I was confused, I didn't know where to click, or what to look at. It was the virtual equivalent of coming home and having your house completely re-arranged, rooms swapped, etc. after it had remained intact for many, many years.
The most noticeable feature is a "preview panel" area. That is the left navigation bar (yes, the one that's black) which allows you to quickly access your Yahoo! services such as Mail and weather. The panel slides across the page, thus overlaping the center news module. You have to click to activate the panel, then click again to close it. Two clicks!
I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the design.
The mixing of design components is confusing and the layout is compact. Too compact. The two center modules are for news, but one is marked "Today" and the other "News", with the old tabs gone for Entertainment and Sports and replaced with links instead.
The most disappointing is not only the preview panel, but the Featured Services in the upper right corner module. The bottom row of three are links for Dell, eBay & Old Navy. Is this the new "advertorial"? The links take you to those advertisers' pages, so how are they "featured services". It's misleading.
If I had to give the homepage a grade, it would be a C-. Yahoo! is known for design and simplicity, making it easy for anyone to get what they want, or making robust for people to get everything they need. This new homepage fails dramatically.
The current page:
The homepage circa 2006:
Recently, my .99 cent Store story appeared as a "Story of the Week" on JPG magazine. It was a photo essay about my recent visit to this store in Ventura with my parents. To have it appear as a story of the week was a huge surprise and motivated me to spend more time on the subject of retail interiors.
I was informed by a fellow JPG member of Andreas Gursky, a German photographer that often selects panoramic views of systems and multiplicity, one of these said images depicts a view of aisles in a retail store. Although retail interiors isn't the focus of his work, the image reflects a "world as ordered chaos."
I haven't been asked as to why retail interiors have interested me so much, but if I were asked, I would have to stop and think. Maybe it's the interior lighting, or the colors of the product packages. To me there is a uniqueness about each one I've photographed, from the layout to the products they sell and that is what I want my images to convey. Check out my Retail Interior photos here.
WellMedicated, design resource site created by Andrew Lindstrom a freelance web designer based in Vancouver, BC, Canada who has been designing websites as a hobby for many years has posted "50 Inspiring Ads" which I found to be fun. Like this Levi's ad here, notice their posed, and look between the mans legs, in the background. Subtle ain't it?
[source]
Ok...ok...deep breaths. In. Out. For all your GH junkies out there, check out this new real-lifelike guitar from Logitech. The premiere edition of the Logitech Wireless Guitar
Controller is the first in Logitech’s planned line of premium
peripherals for the world’s best-selling music-based video game
franchise. It uses the authentic materials you’d expect to see on
a real rock guitar. In addition to the metal frets and metal tuning peg
handles, the rosewood fingerboard and wood neck, Logitech’s design
offers the one-piece contoured shape preferred by many of the world’s
leading rock guitarists. To match the wood neck, the Wireless Guitar
Controller features a crimson body.
Pricing and Availability
The Logitech Wireless Guitar Controller, Premiere Edition is expected
to be available in the U.S. in December for a suggested retail price of
$249.99 (U.S.).
I use Flickr Groups as a learning tool and knowledge resource. Recently I replied to a Flickr member's post asking for clarification on Canon's G10 camera here. I noticed some additional activity on the post and saw that two others had replied: Adorama and B & H, members who were presenting those retailers. Both were using Flickr to not only reply as "experts" but also as subtle reminders as a potential buying resource since the user was trying to make a decision on a fairly new product that was just released. Although I was surprised to see this, I'm even more perplexed that I hadn't seen more of this in other groups I belong to such as the Nikon groups etc. These are the retail versions of "community managers", they scour on-line communities and help users out in hopes that those users will order from them in future purchases.
