I hope Santa treats everyone nicely this year. Here is a link to the Hanft e-card. I swore I would never be the kind of person who made a video of my cat, but that’s kind of what happened. See for yourself here.
The human body is an astonishingly flexible thing. Grade school taught us to categorize our senses into five categories, but the boundaries between them is much fuzzier than most of us realize. I find myself fascinated by stories where senses are heightened are used for other purposes. Here are a few links to some fascinating stories of sensory manipulation that came onto my radar recently…
1. After a few minutes of “training” your ears can translate speach that has been distorted beyond recognition. While other people here noise you will be able to hear words. (Via Kottke)
3. What would happen if a camera was used to turn visual information into sound? Answer: strangely interesting. (Via Retrothing)
The end of the year means lots of “best of 08″ lists. I wanted to get my music list up a little early this year in case you need some ideas for stocking stuffers for the music lover on your list. You can’t go wrong with these albums. (All links take you to Amazon, by the way.)
Top Ten Albums of 2008
1. The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron and Wine
2. Orakular Spectacular, by MGMT
3. Lose Big, By Eef Barzelay
4. In Ghost Colours, by Cut Copy
5. Fleet Foxes, by Fleet Foxes
6. Silent Movie, by Quiet Village
7. Fate, by Dr. Dog
8. Carried to Dust, by Calexico
9. Dead Calm Horizon, by Ketch Harbour Wolves
10. Modern Guilt, by Beck
Older music, but new to me in 2008
This year I was introduced to some great older music. Here are the bands that just recently appeared on my radar:
Avalanches
Grin
Incredible String Band
Fairport Convention
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Heatmiser
Nada Surf
New Music From Great Bands
Some of my favorite artists released new music this year. These didn’t make my top ten list, but they are good albums from my favorite bands.
1. Way to Normal, by Ben Folds
2. Distortion, by Magnetic Fields
3. Acid Tongue, by Jenny Lewis
4. Ode to J. Smith, By Travis
5. Attack and Release, by The Black Keys
6. A Mad and Faithful Telling, by Devotchka
Best of the Past
If you are interested in my “Best Of” lists from other years, check out these links:
Best of 2007
Best of 2006
Best of 2005
Best of 2004
Just a seasonal reminder that today marks day one of Taco Johnukkah! In case you forgot, the season of tacos is the eight business days before Christmas. Stop by your local Taco Johns and see if they give you a funny look when you ask for the Johnukkah special.
(If you are scratching your head in confusion right now it’s because this is a very inside joke. Somehow we started this tradition at our office a couple years ago and for some reason it has stuck. Seriously though if you haven’t had the cini-sopapilla bites you should give yourself a little treat. Yummy.)
Few people know that ping pong was an important part of Bruce Lees training routine. Bruce had the opinion that traditional martial arts techniques were too rigid and formalistic to be practical in scenarios of chaotic street fighting. That’s why the paddle speed, improvisation and timing involved in ping pong appealed to him so much. Lee would eventually formalize his ideas of “Practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency” into the martial arts system known as Foo Led Yu. Here is some recently uncovered footage of Bruce playing ping pong with nunchucks:
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Ok, so this is really just an advertisement for a Nokia phone, but isn’t it fun? What a great viral video! By the way, the Foo Led Yu thing, I came up with that myself. TM.
People are always asking me, “Adrian, what does your basement look like?” Ok, nobody has actually asked me that, and nobody has probably even wondered that, but just for fun took a couple pictures of my basement studio/office/gameroom. And thanks to Flickr, these are labeled with captions that just might bore you to tears. Click on the photos below to get all the fascinating details…
Oh, and for what it’s worth, these were taken with my new Panasonic Lumix LX3 camera at the 24mm side of an amazing Leica lens. So far I am really loving this amazing little camera.
First of all, thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday and thought of me this week. I have great friends and family, and I am touched by your kindness. Thank you!
So, I turned 30 this week and I would be lying if I told you that it isn’t a little traumatic. I know it’s not that old, but it is a milestone, and it has caused me to take inventory of my life and measure myself against the goals I have for myself. What am I proud of? What do I regret? Who do I love? How did I get here? What’s next? I suppose this is normal, and I feel good about my life and who I am.
With all the soul searching I didn’t have any big moment of clarity and there wasn’t any big revelation. And maybe that’s the lesson. Life is just one endless search to figure out who you are. The arbitrary importance that we put on certain ages (10, 13, 16, 21, 30, 40, 50, etc) are meaningless points on timeline. The important thing is that you do the best you can and take time every once in a while to reflect on what it means to be you.
I read a story a while back about the death of the author who wrote “100 Things to Do Before You Die.” He died at 47, but he lived his life to the fullest. This and other similar stories have made me want to write a list of things that I want to do in my lifetime. Some are relatively easy and others would be amazing achievements. The important thing is having goals and dreams. I plan on updating it as I go, but here is the first draft:
Write a novel
Learn to play the guitar, write a song, and record an album
Write a check for $1,000,000
Write a screenplay
Direct a motion picture
Build and mass-produce a camera that I design
Jump out of an airplane
Be debt free
Design my house
Save someone’s life
Own a Warhol painting
Shake hands with the President
Have an exhibit of my photography
Publish a book of my photography
Teach a college class
Have my name or work mentioned in Wired
Run a marathon
If you are in a similar reflective mood, I encourage you to make your own list. It feels good to have dreams and ambitions even if you die before they are all checked off. So now that I am 30, it feels pretty good. Life keeps getting better and I can’t wait to see what my 30′s bring me!
I hate that the days are so short now, but the good thing about daylight saving time is that it makes it easier to make timelapse videos of the sunset from out the window of the office where I work. Here is what today’s evening clouds looked like:
I don’t know why YouTube messed up the first second or so of the clip, but you can at least get the idea. I am hoping to post some more of these in the next couple months.
I have redesigned this site several times over the last four years and I always thought it was a bit of a shame that the designs had to disappear from the internet after the new design is applied. So it has been in the back of my mind for a while to convert my old designs into WordPress themes that anyone can freely use. That turned out to be a bit more work than I had anticipated, but I have been making steady progress and it looks like I will have three themes available for download later this month.
The tentative names for my three themes are going to be Minima White, Zen Parchment, and Blue Wood. The themes will be hosted on Cath3dral, and I am hoping to use this as an opportunity to expand Cath3dral into an actual site, instead of the place holder that is currently there.
One of the unique things about my themes will be the integration of Font Burner. This will give users access to any of the 1000 fonts available through Font Burner without having to mess with sIFR at all. My Font Burner plugin was actually the result of the work I have been doing on my themes. It started out as just the control panel that gave the WordPress admin the ability to customize the fonts used in my themes, and grew into an actual plugin.
So stay tuned, and contact me if you are interested in testing my themes before they are publicly released.
I am proud to announce my second WordPress plugin. (Yes, I know this is only a couple days after releasing my first plugin, but I told you I had a surge of inspiration lately, didn’t I?) This one is called “iPhone Control Panel” and it gives WordPress users an admin panel where they can control how iPhones and iPod Touches “see” their website. You can choose an icon that will be used when users add a bookmark to their home screen. You can create custom css that only affects touch devices. You can control the viewport, and you can even redirect iPhones and iPod touches to a different url. Click the thumbnail on the right to see the plugin’s control panel. Here is a little more info on what you can control with the plugin:
The bookmark icon dropdown menu above lets you choose the icon that appears on a users home screen when they bookmark your site. When you click “save changes” you will be able to preview your new icon on the phone in the Plugin screen. If you want to us a custom icon of your own design, simply replace one of the six images in the “icon” folder of this plugin.
You can enter custom css that will only be seen by iPhone and iPod Touches. Keep in mind that the phone will also see your other stylesheets, so you need to redefine your styles here in order to “overwrite” them.
Think of the viewport as the size of the window that is seen on the iPhone’s screen. The width of the screen of the touch devices is 320 pixels when held vertically and 480 pixels when held horizontally. The optimum viewport for your site will vary so experiment with it until you get it right.
If you would like to redirect iPhone and iPod Touch devices to another url, enter it in the “redirect” box. Other browsers are not affected by this redirect, just touch devices. This will add a redirect code to every page of your site, so use it carefully. Leaving this box blank and no redirect will occur.
Installation Instructions
Installing iPhone Control Panel is very easy and does not require any template modification. Just follow these steps:
1. Upload the folder ‘/iPhone_Control_Panelr/’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Click on “settings” and you should see a iPhone Control Panel link. Click this and follow the directions to customize your iPhone settings.
The plugin is a free download and is available through WordPress plugin directory.
Version 0.6 was a major rebuild, and some people may be interested in accessing the previous version.
