murder 3000

a quick post to talk about the new link in the sidebar over there. the one for iconbuffet.

i have been a member of the free delivery service for as long as i can remember the “service” being put into action. the fine chefs over at ib have since come up with a new system and site to accompany. it looks really great. works cleaner. uses ajax. seems more community-centered. free delivery is a fun little ditty that i highly recommend to anyone who is into free icons, so please join the program. it’s absolutely free. the icons are fresh and can be used just about anywhere for any reason. and if you join through my blog here, i get points for the referral. what those points do, i have no idea.

will write a better, more complete entry about everything that has happened in the last week later.

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post title:
“murder in mairyland park” – sarah brightman (fly)
“storm 3000” – leftfield (leftism)

sxsw – day 04

some kick-assery panels today. i can tell, however, that the conference is winding down. they’re starting to lose their luster.

i did end the day with likely one of the best experiences from the event: getting strangled by douglas sarine. that’s right. a ninja. but not just any ninja. the ninja. he so looks forward to killing all of us soon, i had no choice but to oblige. who knows how many attendees were saved by my merciful act of sacrifice. or frisbees. pictures to come. i need a flickr account.

tomorrow is, of course, the last day for me. this means that it’s also the last chance to snag some of those swanky uhad buttons. and who got one today? why these lucky folks (again, in no particular order):
lance willett
andy clarke
dorian ramirez (film chum of james kersey)
chris mills
mark lentzner
glenda sims
mason wendell
douglas sarine
nick vahalik
sara taksier
naomi greenfield
brian sullivan
spencer nutting
dave maestri (plural for maestro)
john romanski

maybe i passed out more, and i really feel dumb if i lost a business card or forgot to right it down. also, if for some reason your actually checking this blog, see your name and don’t see a link – email me and i’ll update it.

elsewhere: the poor mouse and bug were home, feeling under the weather. if i don’t get better sleep soon, i might suffer the same fate. thanks for being the super mom, mouse!

sxsw – day 03

just a real quick post for now. gave out a good collection of buttons today (in no particular order):
jay west (was actually last night while in line – staff photographer for sxsw)
dave amos
maximo stephani
emily pepperman
dan cederholm
john marstall
brian brasher
cameron adams
paul mckey
stuart constantine
brian fitzgerald
ian lloyd
patrick lauke

on a side note, i had a really great talk with brian and john about iconbuffet and just what are the best sources for buttons. we agree that buttonbiz.com has the best diy kit/device as well as cafepress likely being the best price route for one-offs. i look forward to firewheel design and/or iconbuffet buttons soon.

ze frank at the 10th annual web awards tonight was incredible. the internet is losing a quality, daily (well, semi as of late) vlog.

sxsw pics - day 02

none of these pictures are posting worth a damn. at all. so... uhm... just imagine the pictures with my ever so helpful descriptions of them.


me. zeldman. motorola startac.

the masterful, kevin cornell.

flat hicks. i forget why he couldn’t show, but damn if this wasn’t the funniest thing to see on stage during a panel (which was jason santa maria’s and rob weychert’s panel on inspiration -- note: cameron moll had the flu, so it was just the two on stage).

the mouse and bug join me for lunch at katz’s.

me. ze frank. i look like an idiot, but ze’s head is really that big. yours would be too, if you had all that funny crammed up in there.

sxsw - day 02

day 2 here at south-by. much better. incredibly better. the panels are really working for me here. first one at 10am: writing, better. great tips, advice, general knowledge on what one can do to just write better. i really felt like i got something from this panel.

next up: after the brief. another really informative panel. there is a lot i need to do to improve getting inspiration. some great tips here.

then it was a good long lunch with the mouse and the bug. it was awesome. katz's had some really great food today (not that their food is horrible on other days, just was really good today - maybe it was the company). the poor bug might be coming down with something, but the mouse is the best woman for the task of taking care of her. i'm having a great time, but i sho'miss 'em.

after lunch it was back to panels: mark boulton and khoi vinh talking about grids. i struggle with grids. grids are hard for me to figure out. i think i got it figured out - at least enough to actually work with them to figure them out. just another great panel. no ill-will towards friday's panels, but there was clearly a reason they were on the registration day.

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uhad is spreading the peace with every passing hour. the buttons are really serving well in meeting new people. not to say i wouldn't have tried to shake the hands of these people without some bribery, but a little token of gratitude is a great ice breaker. so, here's a list of the lucky winners of a uhad button so far, today:
kevin cornell (aka: bearskinrug)
shaun inman
jeffrey zeldman
greg storey
derrick featherstone
ethan marcotte
jeff croft
jason santa maria
dan rubin
rob weychert
josh williams
mark boulton

don't worry, i gotz lotz. just try to find me. it is really great to put faces to a lot of these websites that i visit so frequently. makes me want to get off me arse and finish mine.

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just met sean maggard. walked right up to, quite randomly, and started a conversation. it was great. i'm a nobody, so having anyone just come up to me out of the blue to just talk was really cool. thanks, sean! a button to you!

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went to the frog design hosted opening party. incredibly boring. the music was ok, and despite the free booze, i opted for water (was actually thirsty). then it was over to the buzzfeed/ze frank shin-dig. after a ridiculously long time, ze finally took the mic and comedy gold poured out of his mouth. of course, airlines are always a good source of hilarity for ze. and all i had was a button to give in thanks. pics to come.

while in line for the ze thing, i met three guys from dc (the capitol, not the comic books) who do stuff for the army. chris clarke, eamonn bourke and daniel drinkard (kick-ass last name, drinkard). good conversation all around. my house would be like 500k in dc. buttons were, of course, served fresh. on the way back to the parking garage, i ran into marc katz (of katz's deli & bar - 6th and rio grande). gave him a button. kewl guy, katz.

sxsw - day 01

friday is day one for the interactive festival portion of sxsw. so far, it's kinda boring. maybe because the actual "party" doesn't get started until tomorrow (all the panels that have the important people start saturday). i mean, this is just the sign-in/registration day, after all, right?

so, i made some buttons (it's my thing) to pass out at the event. mostly to yh!ers and those whom are part of sites that i visit on a daily basis (a post made over two years ago, my dailies have grown). if you happen to see me (knowing what i look like), say hi and you get a sweet uhad button. and speaking of; i've already given out 4: jim coudal and 3 folks that gave me a lift back from the carver library (daniel, nicole, sandy -- thanks!!).

with a internet accessible computer about every 5 feet, i should be able to post regularly on the panels.

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as you may or may not have noticed, the title is not the "usual" song title combo. well, duh. i'm not on my computer with my itunes library.

space angel

iconfactory is one of the kewlest icon sites around, pwning just about anyone on mac interface design. they have icons, desktops and even software available for your consumption. i was overjoyed to finally get a copy of iconbuilder and i dare say i haven't disliked a software package coming from their ingenius workers. enter frenzic – the first game from iconfactory and artis software.

“a frenetic journey that will heighten your reflexes and get your pulse pounding. Minutes to learn and months to master, Frenzic is an all new puzzle-based game for Mac OS X.”

ladies and gents – this game is addictive. this game is visually awesome (just look at the icon). this is a game born and bred for os x and it shows. and starting at $14.95 (with some hella-kewl features at $24.95), my wallet is likely to open.

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“space shanty” :: leftfield
“angel” :: sarah mcLachlan

herculean angel

wow... 4 stories i haven’t posted the links to. man, i suck at blogging. used to, i would blog every day. sometimes twice a day. just to throw something new up. either i’ve become very boring or blogging isn’t as exciting as the multitude of other websites i visit in a day. like the daily monster.

Monster 70
Monster 71
Monster 72
Monster 73

uhm, that’s it for tonight. i’m going with i’m boring. i have to get up early in the morning to do some video work.

ps: noticed ‘story’ is getting a tag workout over in the cloud there… blah. will see what i can do about posting some actual design stuff next time.

pss: ‘herculean’ by the good, the bad and the queen. 2.5 stars.
‘angel’ by massive attack. 4 stars.
sweet crap, i love the title to this post and the content totally failed to deliver. what a waste.

battle soul

what does that title mean? well, i decided to play a little experiment. at the beginning of generating this post, i selected to randomly shuffle through a personal smart playlist in itunes (songs with 3+ stars, limited to 60 minutes and no song played within the last 3 days). the first song to play was "battle without honor or humility" by tomoyasu hotei (of kill bill fame). using the first word in the song’s title gave me the first word for this post’s title. when i finish making this post (and just before posting it), the last word in the title of the song playing at the time will comprise the second word. ya… that sounds ridiculously complex. i don’t even know how that popped into my head as something to do.

i actively participate in too many forums/websites. yayhooray!, virb, twitter, to mention but an extreme few. many have some heavy design reason for my belonging there. each serve to distract me without fail. i have no idea how to stop. i’ve forgotten more websites than most will ever visit in their lifetime. speaking of which, thewebmachine.com is no more, it seems. sad day. was a nice tutorial resource. the mouse joined twitter, too. sorry for the distraction.

i always seem to sneak under the wire on monster stories. of course, being that mr. bucher is in california, and me in texas, posting at 1:50am cst has me beating his daily deadline - mwahahahaha - ’cept that one day, damn. so, ya, monsters 68 & 69. enjoy!

ps: the song playing just before posting? "birdhouse in your soul" by they might be giants.

quick stop

monster 67

super typo

monster 66 gets a tale.

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on feb. 6, 2005, i made a post titled super bowel. the ‘e’ in bowl was intentionally added to describe my thoughts on the year’s commercial offerings (being that the super bowl is supposed to be the king of commercials). i thought i was being clever. as it turns out, at least once a week, i have someone do a search on the super bowel. however, they mean bowl. they misspell bowl. one of the (if not the) largest, yearly sporting events this country puts on and there are people who don’t know how to spell bowl when doing searches related to it. now, i could attribute these errant searches to the fact that the letter ‘e’ is right next to the letter ‘w’, so i will give the fat-fingered of the world the benefit of the doubt. but i don’t think that is the situation for the majority of the searches.

so, if you searched the following terms/strings:
where will the Super Bowel air this year
super bowel pepsi
super bowel winner by year

you might have better luck with taking that ‘e’ out. i will edit that previous post with a front-end disclaimer to make people aware.

tardy tales

failed to post monster 64’s story yesterday, but posted it today along with monster 65’s.

back to work.

two-fer

monster 62’s story went up late last night with monster 63’s just being posted (imagine this post isn’t some 45 minutes into the 20th).

i am seriously considering what it would take to get me to design ranch this year. my wife says i should go. stefan bucher even has a presentation and workshop this year. my first “boss” might even be there — he did create the thing, afterall.

twitterific seems odd. in many ways, it feels more convenient than twitter’s own site, yet i only get the top most poster’s comment in the display (leaving the others requiring a physical click to view, which then renders the updater from not displaying the latest comments) and for the last two days, it has consistently failed to receive/access twitter’s “feed”. if the flash badge that resides on this blog had an entry field (like twitterific’s), i would just use that. for that matter, if twitter’s public page would auto-update on its own, i wouldn’t even need twitterific.

festival attendance

just found out i am gonna be able to attend sxsw interactive this year. i have lived in austin for quite some time and have never made it. well, this year is my year. finally get to see all them faces to the blogs i read/post to.

cold literature

austin is frozen. been so for the last two and a half days. might get better tomorrow afternoon. last night, our power went off at around 11:45 pm. normally, this isn’t a bad thing, actually it is quite exciting and can be very fun. however, this time, i happened to be in the middle of playing ffxi with a party (that included my brother-in-law) and was thusly disconnected. moreover, i had yet to post monster 60’s story. luckily, the power came on just long enough for me to make the post using my wife's laptop.

also: posted monster 61’s tale just now.

.fm listing

my last.fm deal down on the right doesn't look good. looks too simple, a little stupid even. the customize tool for it sucks. really sucks. i don't want to waste time figuring it out to make a decent track listing image. but i have to change it. it's killing me.

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have been messing with the plug-ins on the right sidebar. last.fm tool is better. twitter tool is too tall - doesn't look i can change that, already tried. none of the invites i sent for twitter seemed to work. would like to use and modify the party tool they offer, makes more sense than the self-tool.

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fixed

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for the last 41 days, i have been following the daily monster series being posted by stefan g. bucher. i am not sure when the first comments to these monsters were actual stories about them – creatively birthed by mr. bucher's readers – but i decided to contribute my own, starting with monster 31. since then, i have written stories for 26 monsters (27, if you count the kaltookens separately). some are long. some are short. please feel free to post your own stories. in the meantime, monster 59 gets to the root of the problem.

uh… ya

this blog is looking a tad better than my website. why?

chonsom is having a grand opening, which is different from their soft-opening from last year. nice menu.

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it’s apparently national delurking week. no one posts here. feel free to keep lurking.

New Switch

i switched to the new blogger.

we’ll see how this shakes out.

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a couple of changes right off the start. i write dates as follows: 110|7. this is today’s date. january (1) 10th (10), 2007 (7). so the list of posts are listed first via year (which unfortunately slaps a needless zero in the tens place) and then the drill down shows the months via number.

i changed the color of the "template" to better reflect sitetamashii.com.

a “---” represents an addition and/or edit to a post already made live.

i am still playing.

BeSPeCkeled Adium

It has been a long time since I posted last. Almost forgetting I have a blog seemed like a possibility there. Though I haven't blogged in months, I will not torture you with a small novel.

Onto that novel…
Item 1: The game DarkGalaxy is a joke and, by far, the worst browser-based, turn-style game out there today. Keeping it short: Poor game mechanics and horrible "customer service" make this game deplorable. The creator both plays and cheats. Well, he may not be actually cheating, which would mean he is just dumber than a post. Both options aren't exactly kudos.

Item 2: I am returning to FFXI to be a Puppetmaster. What a fun time for FFXI. Starting April 18th.

Item 3: I downloaded Adium two days ago. I tried this All-In-One IM client some 5 years ago and it just didn't do it for me. Today, however, it does it for everyone! This program is phenomenal and I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to streamline their IM needs. There are even talks of incorporating IRC (via Colloquy, I think) which would just blow my socks clean off and across the ocean to slap some unwitting European in the face.

If Adium wasn't bad ass enough alone, it certainly kicks ass (ala Chuck Norris style) because of all the Xtras. Want a custom set of status icons? Download it or better yet, make them yourself! There are literally thousands of these Xtras to choose from. I found GiR to my liking as my Dock Icon, initially. Then I thought to myself, “How hard could it be to make my own?” Answer: Not at all. So I took the time and created my own Dock Icon for Adium. I bring you SPeCks DI! So far, I am averaging around 5 downloads an hour of this dock icon set. I will likely work up some other characters for a DI set and will also make a menubar set and status icons for the contact list. What I really would like to tackle is a set of emoticons for SPeCks. That would be killer!

All of the above means, of course, that I have introduced a form of “credible threat” for myself regarding the comic. As everyone who downloads/views the DI (or any other Xtra I might create) would be introduced to SPeCks and would likely click to the website to view the comic. So, I guess this means I need to actually start back on that...

In Review

Last week was a bust with regard to the SPeCks item of the week and also my attempt at picking up the comic again. I got the summary and script done and then was absolutely hammered at work (on top of being hired full-time!). I think the plan is sound, it just needs less stuff going on for me to complete it. I was also preparing for the weekend with the ADDY show and Carnaval.

My logo garnered a bronze ADDY, amongst six other agencies who also got bronze in the category. The "a"s are really quite different from my previous win (2001). They are no longer made of lead and they resemble a condensed Helvetica "a" rather than the wide version. I am not sure the process to make these new "a"s, but they are heavy. The old ones were moderate in weight, they were just bigger. These new ones seem like they have extra gravity applied to their diminutive frames. And solid as granite these bad boys. Oh, and did I mention shiny? I can see my reflection in this thing. It's awesome!

Carnaval was an absolute blast. We had never gone before and were offered tickets by a good friend who also happened to be the crafter of our costumes. The costumes looked spectacular and my wife looked spectacular in costume. I think it might have been hyped up a bit, but it was still quite an experience.

Add to all that, my new addiction. Most know that I play FFXI. Certainly not as religiously as when it first came out, but I still find 2-3 hours a week to sit down and partake in my new sedentary lifestyle of fishing on the game. It's much easier and I can pick up the game at any time and am not on a set time limit. Anyway, I have found my choice in video-games leaning to the non-action packed variety. Enter DarkGalaxy. This is a turn-based, browser game set in the cold reaches of an unknown universe. Turn-based games are those that follow the "something happens once an hour" guidelines. And with a queue enabled in this game, you can set up to -not- play for 12 hours. So, the game is currently at Turn 210 (that's right – 210 hours have passed) and I am doing fairly well.

I am working on a plan to push out two SPeCks products this week as well as going ahead and scripting the next page whilst finishing up production on last week's page for the comic. I am hoping for release of last week's page by the end of this week with Monday seeing this week's page (which would be on schedule). Will this all happen? Stay tuned…