I hate the way some old media blogs do really contrived stuff like:
"A new laptop was released today that allows you to use Bluetooth while paddling yourself.
Discuss what you think about it."
As if this ever gets spontaneous vital exchanges rolling!
Meaning of 'Jumping the Kordestani': the first non-tech hire of a Silicon Valley startup.
Named after Google's first non-tech hire, Omid Kordestani, hired in 1999 to manage sales.
Not an uncool chap, by the way.
OK, though a fascinating study in the valley bright, we shall dawdle a fleck then aim our telescopes at the steep summits and the mad stratus clouds.
The Google Secretary-Artist Post received an unexpectedly powerful reaction via email and thread commentary, so we were kinda compelled to do a simple study to see if this is a trend or a flash in the pan style rarity.
Check out the results of our little survey: Download Google_creativity_profile_1
Otherwise, enjoy the first day of the new year!
You can have a resume 2 yards long, and be masterful at bending C++, Ajax, XML and CSS to your whim, be unique with a unique life story, have massive projects under your belt, and have startups that have taken flight into the ether
Or, you can be an MIT grad, with no real world experience whatsoever, just brilliance.
Those are the 2007 MIT undergraduate hires, right out of college, listed in the chart above. Some of us don't realize how much consultants and finance groups rely on math majors from elite universities to crunch numbers for them. They account for a good number of the hires listed.
Technology companies, like Google, Intel, Vecna, Oracle, and IBM, are also well represented, accounting for 43 hires, all with at or near six-figure starting salaries, as well as signing bonuses and incentives, and compensation packages, driving up the total realized much higher.
Not bad.
Again: Genius rules all!
Welcome!
An interesting twist on the old aphorism, 'there's no accounting for genius'.
A reliable source has informed us that an artist on the brink of Miro-level recognition takes dictations, formats correspondence, makes photocopies, and generally toils away in the lower echelons of the haunted, hallowed Googleplex halls by day, without a care for Web 3.0 and C++, but with much care for charcoal sketches and cracked compositions. It seems that the mindlessness of administrative and receptionist work allows her creative faculties to fully focus on abstract scapes and expressive portraits.
Brancusi
This is not a unique brilliance-inversion. It has happened many times throughout history. To note a few:
In fact, it is nearly statistically certain that the greatest creative minds that ever set foot in the Googleplex will be outsiders, visitors, payroll clerks, food servers, and rejected job applicants.
Sure, the rank-and-file intelligent minds will all be Google engineers and programmers, buttressing the continuing web revolution in an incremental fashion, but no Faulkners, Renoirs or Turings from thence will spring. 'Tis a mathematical certainty.
Sorry to be the ones to reveal this, Googlers.
The Google 'Idea Board'
So playful and imaginative. Matisse should take heed.
We feel kind of spiteful, but we cannot help but be mildly amused at how the news will break while the Googlers are playing Nerf soccer and vintage video games in the happy, fun rooms, or lounging in the spas and jacuzzis, feeling playful yet creative, brilliant yet whimsical, innovatively peerless, and then it will leak out that this hard working, scorned clerk has risen like the Kraken to artistic prominence, leaving every Googler in the dust in terms of pure creativity.
Someone has to knock the Googleplex down a few notches. Recognition of a lack of pure genius among its 'elite' is a perfect way to accomplish this. And for that, we have the splendid juxtaposition of a rising visual artist and a bunch of overly complacent, deluded-about-their-genius, techies.
A hater couldn't ask for a better scenario than the one that's about to unfold.
Klee
Our source? A Google employee whom we are acquainted with who befriended this artist at a nearby Burger King and learned of her accomplishments and that she was on the brink of fame. If you work at Google, you may already know her.
More of that caprice
More Google dalliance, or, should we say, Googliance.
Although presently a respected name in many artistic circles, she has somehow managed to keep it a secret that she works at Google, fearing it would negatively affect her artistic aspirations, but she also realizes that if an upcoming installation receives enough press coverage, allowing her to reach that critical mass, she is prepared to reveal herself to her employer. By the way, local San Francisco art blogger, The Laughing Squid, is aware of her, but has no idea about her day job.
Leger
Kutscherauer
Once we get the ok, we will post a mini gallery of her paintings.
Are we catty bitches or what?
And, to wrap things up:
We are certainly not frustrated techies.
We never worked for a large IT company, nor applied for work at one.
We is just roiling the kettle!
We checked it out as it was happening. It reminded us of a MySpace page with an embedded streaming object at the header in place of the MySpace player.
It was pretty cool: 3 streams to choose from, MySpace-like comments, a Friends section, etc.
Not bad. If the service will be released to users, we will know soon.
My lack of in-ness with YouTube channel offerings kept me from really appreciating the event. I am probably familar with less than a dozen YouTube-grown music, comedy, news, performance channels, and didn't recognize many of the featured performers.
Google has massive server farms, growing in capacity daily, and they are looking for new ways to harness their power instead of just adding to the gmail file storage limit. IMHO, this would be one of the best ways to utilize it, though apparently, providing live streaming is difficult, bandwidth-expensive, and tough to monetize, as is touched upon here, excerpted below:
Live streaming is very expensive and hard to monetize. A Google source told us in August that YouTube execs figure that if just 10% of YouTube's users adopted live streaming, bandwidth costs would go up 20% to 25%.
That's because live-streaming clips tend to last much longer than the short video clips typical of YouTube. They also require data to pass both ways.
It's also hard to make money off live-streaming. Advertisers don't want to put their brands against live content created by uncontrollable YouTube users.
Always in motion is the future, and the streams travel fast, so this could quickly change.
Roswell on Yahoo, Loch Ness on MySpace, NORAD on Facebook and, now, Quarantine (the 2008 film) on Web 2.0's darling microblogging site, Twitter:
Twitter: Contain The Truth
Only 135 followers as of today?!
That is shameful. Let's amp that up to 1000 by EOW.
Is Twitter still vibrant and viable? Not sure. Haven't been there in a while, but the site should still get some props. Now that I'm thinking of it, maybe it's grown huge since I left, which would be really cool.
Onto the official widget:
The widget: trailers for the game and film as well as sweepstakes entry forms and info.
Onto the official site:
Official Site: Contain The Truth
The hub from which all widgets, trailers, downloads and games may be accessed.
Sweepstakes? Sounds real old school, but prizes are digital camcorders, DVD packs, and video game systems.
Galleries? The photobucket kind. Movie stills.
Promotions? Yes, the aforementioned lotteries and sweepstakes.
Onto the game:
The Game: Quarantine Game
Yes, it's the same website, but it's in Flash, so just head to lower right quadrant and click on Play The Game. It's a pretty cool first person shooter with a mildly interesting mystery to unravel.
Onto the trailer:
The official trailer.
Onto the synopsis:
Cool synopsis with grainy, fuzzy font.
Concluding data:
Race to get the glass, take the walk of no shame, and struggle to reveal the contained truth, but, whatever you do, don't use the product name in the website title!
RIYL: Doom, 28 Days Later, REC, Cloverfield, Night Of The Living Dead, Blair Witch Project, Halo, 30 Days Of Night, overly contrived viral marketing, glossy Flash websites, glittering 21st century horror films.
Which is more 'serious', the bleeding edge Flash site [Belgium Village, BioShock, BBH, Get The Glass, Hancock] or the envelope-pushing, ajax-ridden, xml-tormented Web 2.0 startup [Pipes, Wufoo, Twitter, Pageflakes, CokeTag]?
Which has a more sacrosanct space reserved in the gray urban scape of the tech-psychic realm?
Is the future Flash or Web 2.0?
Strange happenings occasionally flit and quirk about the desktop space when saving a Notepad document. Even typing on an open document, at certain intervals-proportions-locations, causes the disappearance of text and the freezing of the lower section of the visible panel, which unfreezes only to reveal more abnormalities.
How can this simple program be so bugged?
How long will it take before Microsoft can make even a basic text editor without it being laden with wacky random glitches? Notepad has been around since 1985.
Sorry, Microsoft!
We love you!
We love your web browser, operating system, video game console, Bill Gates, MS Word, Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker, and the crazy, bleeding edge research projects you undertake to drive technology into uncharted quadrants of the Hectarogalactode.
But, please, I know it is just a text editor, and that is why it is neglected: you have much bigger vegan fish to fry. However, some of us truly rely on Notepad to jot down ideas, reminders and life-organizing information, so it kind of frustrates us when it underperforms.
Application: MS Notepad
Conclusion: Neglected
As a lifelong devotee of art, music, and literature, some find it strange that the thought of Lincoln Center, SoHo, and dramatic black and white photo shoots, fills me with nausea, dark brooding cityscapes excepted.
They must be bypassed. Keats' Grecian Urn will dock with the Nanobot Mothership when a Flash-speckled, moon-flecked firmament shrieks at each star-tablet.
Pope's light militia of the lower sky will synergize with Augmented Reality.
Screencapture is from FlashFridge.com.
What is all this ado about social networking, user-generated content, and wikis? McCann Worldgroup may have caught onto something far deeper and more fundamental than any fad, or maybe they are just reaching for arbitrary novelty in their analyses to generate their own hype.
The space-time continuum will tell.
OK, that non-clever prose paradigm of overusing quasi-scientific jargon on our part is ending right here.
The real cliche: only time will tell!
This ad has been out for a while, but we just caught it today. It speaks manuals in a multimedia alchemy of succinct tea titles and deadpan delivery.
Teas:
Quite clever. Quite useful. Watch.
This game is so cool that I have played it enough times to notice silly little occasional glitches. The Flash loads fast, but not flash-fast enough to avert this harmless glitch.
Spot it?
They used Venti Peppermint Mocha as their analogical example instead of Iced Venti Soy Chai, but these upstarts have such a delightful web presence that they are fully pardoned and my astral legions are still flitting about the pixellated halls of their Flash-substrate home.
Check out Communicator World.
four realms to find them all
four realms to amuse them
four realms to integrate
and in cyberspace, refuse them
We have seen many recent examples of this type of sprouty, fidgety, dappled, impulse power, 3D Flash illustration and animation, most notably the Adobe Creative License My Space Cherry Coke site, a kind of more animated version of the My Space Cherry Coke site.
But, after a brief moment of contemplation, we have concluded that this site outshines with sheer overwhelming volume of rainbows, yellow submarines, and sesame street splashes to the point that 80 gigabyte media players (the sites branding raison d'etre) barely hold their own.
Site: Zune Journey.
'Gothic' and 'web noire' are probably not tags or keywords used by the developers of this creepy-cool, interactive music video site, but, in its subtle artistry, it is more gothic and noire than any more overt example.
Anyway, I have a new respect for The Arcade Fire now.
Artist: The Arcade Fire
Site: The Arcade Fire presents though I guess you could call it by its anagrammed URL, beonlineb, as well.
Song: Neon Bible
Director and ActionScript Developer: Vincent Morisset
The FlashDen has templates that do absolutely nothing, but which are soooo nice to look at. This is why we browse.
Straight from the CityScape designer, majd_abdul: "Simple CityScape animation, for use in 'under construction' pages. All vector, contained within a single MovieClip, Animated simple tweens. Logo is easy to replace."
With graphic novels, comic books, glittering websites, and pixelated films, GGI'd to the max, forming torrential currents that inform cinematic and visual culture, the underwater streams, moonlit trends, and tertiary darkness of vampires, continue to inspire and drive the murky, turbid brooks coursing through back alleys and gargoyle-tormented parapets.
The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and the so-called Dark Knight, would be wise to avoid the skulking bloodsuckers, for all three, and their cliquish brethren, would be severely outmatched by Nosferatu, and his brethren. Plainly put, superheroes are not primordial enough to battle folk legends and mythological beasts.
For instance, The Hulk would not stand a chance against Ajax. Supposed stats notwithstanding, the primordial power is not there. Smaug would have no chance against a serpent plucked from a medieval bestiary. And, perhaps the most fitting past-present match-up, Dungeons and Dragons Tiamat would be feckless against ancient Tiamat.
These age old concoctions and constructs are too vast, too shrill, and too fearsome for any chromatic pop culture hero or villain.
Our newest category, Vampires, will contain random and non-systematic commentary and review of bleeding edge vampiric presence in film, graphic novel, video game, artwork, poetry, novel, tale, and, if so inspired, even board game and puzzle.
Check out Breaking Dawn: Book Four in the Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer and upcoming HBO series True Blood.
This site's banner is quite the curvilinear flowery delight, though we do not agree whether it effectively promotes treatments for cellulite and skin improvement. It is like an amped-up template from an old print program was arbitrarily selected and used as the branding for a new eCommerce site, with little consideration given to consistency and relevance.
But, it is a pleasant site to browse, and we always appreciate that here: no alarms and no surprises.
Launched: July 28th
Name: Cuil. I believe the name is supposed to be pronounced 'kwill' or 'quill'.
Factoids and Initial Impressions: Founded by ex-Googlers Anna Patterson and Tom Costello. The search results page looks sort of like a typical eCommerce products page, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Explore By Category widget is definitely useful:
Life Extentionists was included as a category related to Antiaging, and the very first name listed was da mann, Aubrey de Grey. So, this search engine is, thus far, at least minimally cool.
And the search result URLs are a bit more streamlined:
Cuil: http://www.cuil.com/search?q=antiaging
Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=antiaging&btnG=Google+Search
But, for some reason, the results page seems a bit claustrophobic. Google's results page is so vast and ranging. Perhaps it's as simple as font size. It appears that the intention of the developers was to create a search engine similar in aesthetic and functionality to early Google, with very few distractions, but employing Ajax and all the latest in web-tech. Sort of retro-futuristic.
Thus far, I have not added it to my Firefox browser toolbar. Going to kick it around the cybersphere a little longer and see if the underlying search and indexing algorithms excel when the terms become more convoluted and complex than 'antiaging', as they surely will in the course of a month's cyber meanderings.
Wow. Quick note: I searched John Keats and no results were returned. That is bad news. But, the site is pretty, so we will try it a little longer and see if the quirks are de-quirked.
Happy, transcendent little emotes and opines on creativity, opportunity, and curiosity.
From Singapore, Jonathan Yuen.
Shaggy and The Eremite share the chromatic treats with Scooby and the lithe spelunker.
Screenshot is from Scooby Doo Berry Bones Demo at Freedom + Partners digital design studio.
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious"- Albert Einstein
Screenshot is from Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
The eremite pursues the Flashmo Bots, screeching and flailing about. The bots have lost their will and now cower in a grassy corner of the crawling, endless metropolis. The air flutters, the sky flickers, and the midtown park is full of the bat's wings.
Yet always during the endless nights, the berserk recluse hears quicksilver ponds boiling over by the keep. While he flits through the sinuous alleys or the wailing canals, he hears them in his quivering whorls.
iPhone 3G, Darth Vader, Wieden-Kennedy, iced venti soy chai, Godzilla, Engadget, Coheed & Cambria, AOL, and The Hulk: we have not forgotten you!
Screenshot is from The Aeon Flux Film Website.
Vincent Price's successor in transformation.
The cardboard-extended feet suggest great leaping power. The tense, tightened cardboard-spring body suggests additional potential for this being to hurl itself into the air, over the gossamer garden, and down the hillside.
Artist: Lucy McRae and Bart Hess aka LucyandBart
Title: Spring
A gothic urban scape, where the underworld interposes itself upon the tumbling clouds, where the nether realms spin the garish mist, where ruffians and ghasts share the same drag racing strips.
It is time for the eremite once more to rise from the grotto and wander the mazy lanes and avenues. The denizens of the caves, the ether, and the concrete grid need a berserk leader to unify the guilds and the loose sinuous associations.
Screenshot is from the introductory movie to The Coke Zero Game.
Proprietary, splendid, and perhaps even more omnipresent:
Screenshot is from the banner of the Flashforward2008 conference.
There is likely a documentary or two coming up that will piggy back on the success of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. When well done, combining dazzling effects with studious knowledge, these programs complement the films tremendously.
And, following in the footsteps of The History Channel and The Discovery Channel, we offer a few interesting factoids about the real life emperor on which the Dragon Emperor is based, Qin Shi Huang, taken straight from the Wikipedia article on the subject:
Photo is from The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor website gallery.
Play Sudoku, 3 Cups, and Silk Road Race, at moviefone's Dragon Emperor's Challenge, a contest and game webpage promoting the upcoming movie, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Both the official movie site and the moviefone page are Flash-pretty and fun to navigate. Additionally, the film trailer hints at a light action movie with new heights of CGI excitement.
Screenshot is from the game, Silk Road Race, an extremely basic racing and obstacle-avoidance game.
The Canonical List of Free Print-and-Play Games at boardgamegeek.com
Donald Seagraves did all the work, and we have not tried even one of these game yet, but we definitely believe and trust a friend who insists that this list will make it possible to never have to visit Toys R Us or Wal-Mart, a comic book store, or anywhere else for that matter, for cool boardgames again. We are sold on this prospect and are currently browsing the lists from this meta-list for the best sounding ones.
Happy gaming.
The photo is of counters from Demonlord, The Epic Game of Sorcery and Conquest.
There seems to be no end to the line of cool games, gadgets, music, and, of course, beverages, being churned out by the Coca Cola Happiness Factory. And, additionally, Coca Cola is not like McDonalds or Thanksgiving: childhood dreamstates that lose their innocence after their murderous nature is realized.
Coca Cola is ringed by a mass media halo. Guiltless indulgence. Joy.
There is really no other ways to describe these beasts from Angelo Bod's bestiary.
Every so often, I search keywords such as 'antiaging' and 'gadget' to stay informed and to make sure I am not missing anything interesting. Well, if this gizmo does what is claimed, then it is an important step forward in antiaging gadgetry.
Straight from the product description: "It is utilised regular for 45 seconds on the wound decent and promises to turn digit ordinal of wrinkles in meet 28 days."
Totally rad.
agencynet.com web development employment opportunities
I have been coming across job listings all the time while browsing for a web developer. I should probably post them here for those interested. This is the first of many.
They appear to be seeking developers skilled with Flash, JavaScript, ASP.NET and CSS.
I am supposed to be focused on browsing Flash developers, but agencynet had the nerve to place an enticing word search on their Capabilities page. Now, I am fully aware of their eBranding, microsite-development, and advergame abilities, but I have just wasted several minutes solving their puzzle, which is a fine example of interactive eBranding, by the way.
And, apparently they know talent when they see it, since they said that I should consider working there. Quite delightful, but, at this moment, I am much more interested in finding a skilled Flash development team than becoming a part of one.
Fractals, Cellular Automata, and Fibonacci Numbers:
The trivium is complete.
The instant 'in' for aspiring geek scholars is laid bare.
The pond surges. The heath bends against the plasma vortex. The hermit shrieks.
Levitated.net's Invader Fractal would have been a useful tool for early video game design, and, in a MOMA Digital Installation-kind-of-way, is a quirky game-like experience in and of itself, although I dread that critics from The New Yorker would expound more on what statement about viruses, xenophobic anxiety, and the asymmetry of modern society, the artist was trying to express than about the sheer fun imparted to gamers.
The underlying game engine is actually a 'region of space filled recursively with 15 bit combinatoric objects affectionately called Invaders', which is another way of saying that Hercules is fighting the Hydra.
This kangaroo, Mrs. Roo, has her own cyber pop-up book and more in this fully immersive 3D scape. In the page above, she provides her own bag for groceries, thus reducing and reusing.
She is quite the charmer.
Our splendid Flash site will have a geography similar in tone to a gothic-naturalist scape and similar in underpinnings to myspace.com/cherrycoke:
You will be able to traverse the scape, from end to end, by mousing left and right, and you may also click on contraptions for insight and wisdom, and on focal elements to see yours truly in the dewy grass or leaning against the step stone bridge, serenely reflecting upon the landscape's sharp features.
Each region will reflect aspects of a lifestyle that may be recovered if Cockaygne 2008 is fully adopted for an unbroken year: RPGs, alternative music, embracing unnatural preservation, cooing a maiden, and donning a Pearl while clattering away on an iMac.
Dappled lilies and japanese bridges may drip from canvas to Flash-scape.
Painting is Old Sarum by John Constable.
This site generates the same giddy-positivistic resonation as Gizmodo and io9. And, anyone who browses and thinks it rant and madness should read biographies on Newton, Van Gogh, Lewis Carroll, and Mary Lamb, and then delve into a cryptogram, followed by a difficult sudoku puzzle, then an old-school GRE logic games section, and then write a sonnet.
This should effectively eliminate any false posturing of the sort that can hinder progress, enlightenment and understanding. Embrace Technology Review, New Scientist, Engadget, and, now, halfbakery, and realize that the threshold between them is permeable and uncertain.
Anything else, and the savants will slip by unnoticed to everyone's detriment.
Illustration is a T-Shirt decal, designed by Jutta Degener, available on a webpage on www.panix.com
Ancient Spaces exhibit at the University of British Columbia website
My beloved awakens after dreaming of an ancient, subterranean shrine and starts looking up totemic images online. Not to pretend to have been an ancient warrior at the dawn of civilization, nor to attempt to bond, in the most shallow, distasteful fashion, with indigenous peoples, but rather to simply reawaken the dream within her via the stylized evolutionary hierarchies and symbols of strength and protection that are totems.
This led us to the 3D modeling of ancient sites underway via the University of British Columbia's Ancient Spaces endeavor: Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, ancient barks, and more dazzle spectators and hint at near-future, virtual world immersion in reconstructed ancient kingdoms, perhaps the seventh generation of God of War and Zeus: Master of Olympus.
Or, even finer, the greenest of tourism: virtual ancient world tourism. The idea is anything but fresh, but its realization is still eagerly awaited by a longing few.
Perhaps a more general, encompassing, abstract gadgetry review would excite and inform more than DMGadget. The stretches of fancy, the suspension of disbelief, and the bombast needed to portray everything in the cosmos, in technology, nature and the imagination, as a gadget would be galactic.
To review anything of interest, but to review it as if it was a just-released gadget, may just be the theme of our next offering, antiaging4geeks *gauzygizmo or, better yet, approaching40 *elfmachine.
For now, the eremite stirs in his hovel. His antics have not been detailed in some time.
Photo is of a sextant.
