Archives for the month of: April, 2008

this guy has awesome things happening in his brain

April 23, 08 // art

this guys name is alberto seveso and he obviously sees the world through much cooler eyes than whatever eyes god decided to give me.

hailing from italy (more can be read in this interview), seveso has an interesting name he prefers to refer to this style…

“a me mi piace la gnocca”

the english translation he gives is quite crude, but we can refer to it as the interviewer does — ‘sperm shaping.’

the title of this piece, fittingly, is how to kill a man. basically it looks like all you need is bombs and a topless woman.

seems about right.

how the pentagon spread its message

April 21, 08 // david_barstow, interactive

so i recently had the opportunity to work with david barstow on an important project at work. it was the A1 story for sunday’s newspaper and dominated the website for a lot of the weekend.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

i developed the interactive along with david, amy o’leary and michele monteleone. it really was a welcome challenge working with david’s raw documents and copy. our interactive provides a narrative of one theme in the article. it also provides a unique interface allowing users to seamlessly examine the documents. all primary documents are also available for download.

being informed is good stuff.

hi my name is vincent laforet, and yours isn’t

April 11, 08 // photography, vincent_laforet

ok maybe his is, and mine isn’t.

either way, check out these suhweet shots by vincent laforet. plz correct me if i’m wrong, but i think most of these are taken by hangin out of a helicopter with a lensbaby.

try ur hardest to ignore the terrible slideshow viewer that forgets the fact you have it paused when you go to the next slide. try hard. it’s very very annoying.

about: robots

April 6, 08 // firefox, webdev

i’ve been having a browser war lately. with myself. it has totally sucked because i’ve basically been losing, to myself. but not winning. don’t ask me how that works, because it sucks too much to tell you. basically it’s filled with spinning balls and hanging apps.

short story is this. firefox 2 suxorz bad. takes up like a gig of memory and thats when it’s doing well. i had to get off of it, but there are two extensions i can’t live without:

- firebug
- delicious

so i switched to safari 3.1 and installed the delicious plugin and was making due. but that was it, i was making due and no more.

so i was cautious to try firefox when it was in the beta 1 and 2 stages. i don’t know, something about beta 1 and 2 sounds too close to “this sucks and has a lot of bugs so try it.” i’m sure that’s not what it actually means, but that’s how it sounds to me. when firefox 3 beta 4 was released though, i couldn’t hold back anymore, the sick part of me that loves new software would not chill the eff out.

turned out it was pretty cool.

but i needed to get my extensions working. at least the aforementioned two. at least. booyah lifehacker steps up with this post: Firefox 3 Beta: Make Your Extensions Work with the Firefox 3 Beta. tweak out ur about:config and ur extensions are in FX.

or so i thought.

turns out the delicious plugin was only pretending to work, but behind the scenes it was firing blanks. bastard. i lost a full day of delicious posts.

so it was back to safari 3.1 for a couple days. then it arrived. the fifth – and rumored final – beta. i figured that i had nothing to lose since i wasn’t using beta 4 anyway, and installed it. the lifehacker hack carried over and my extensions were still in fx. this did not surprise me. but the ultimate test was tagging a post and seeing if the previously sterile delicious plugin was going to do me proud.

turns out it worked! nice! no serious issues to speak of. it’s def noticeably quicker on startup and it seems quicker overall. gmail is noticeably more nimble which is pretty rad.

so give beta 5 a shot if you feel so inclined. let me know if you think it’s a step in the right direction, or if i’m just totally full of nonsense. but remember, your browser recommendation needs to have a firebug-esque equivalent. that’s bullshit, actually. it has to have firebug.

an interesting postscript: while i was finishing putting this post together, wordpress 2.5 was released. which is really great and all, but the ‘so fresh and so clean’ image uploader crashes firefox 3 beta 5 hard. just spanks it closed. ugh.