Nature and Math
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on May 10, 2010
Came across this beautiful video earlier. One of the first things that we talked about in my intro to design course that I took back in fall was the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean played a heavy role in nature as well as in many major works of art. This amazingly beautiful video on Vimeo goes over the natural portion of this. I absolutely suggest watching it! The video is included after the break.
Favorite Chatroulette Videos
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on March 27, 2010
Well since there’s this massive viral thing we’ve all come to love, Chatroulette I figured I might as well share some of the videos that have become my “favorites.” Some of them are slightly NSFW but nothing too raunchy. All the videos after the break, and just a warning… they’re not in any particular order.
Content Aware Photoshop
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on March 25, 2010
I saw a post from Jim On Light (@jimonlight) yesterday or the day before about Adobe’s new content aware tools but never got a chance to take a look at it. Today on Digg there was a video with details about it. I’ve included the video after the break but first I want to say that I’m pretty amazed by it. Their content aware “deletion”is absolutely amazing and I simply can’t wait to see it when it comes out.
PowerPoint, I’m Not Alone
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on March 23, 2010
Well I’m glad to see that I’m not alone on my general hatred towards PowerPoint presentations. The picture below sums up my general feelings pretty damn well!
[Via FlowingData and dataviz]
Review: Avenue Q (Lighting)
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on March 22, 2010
As many of you know I’m a lighting design student at Boston University and have a general background in technical theater. A few weeks back I went to see Avenue Q at the New World Stages in New York. After waiting an hour to get tickets at TKTS in Times Square I and a friend of mine were very excited to go see the show that we’ve heard so much about. Going into the show my head immediately pivoted upward to see what was in the air. It was a fairly small plot conventional wise however there was a heavier than expected moving light plot (some sort of VariLite). I nearly immediately noticed that only two of them were marked in a position other than their home position. As soon as what I assume was cue 2 was taken mostly all of the movers immediately moved into their marks for their first cue. After that I noticed that they were poorly marked throughout the show and even had a few live moves which to me felt like lazy programming.
Moving on to the conventionals with scrollers I was pretty happy with their marking and moves (slow and deliberate) however during intermission they randomly moved, LIVE! Which I felt was unnecessary and very poor planning, not to mention strange.
The lighting in general though was also quite interesting to me. For this show being Howell Binkley’s fourth Broadway show and sixth major design in his career the lighting seemed very random and at many times I felt as though it wasn’t really aiding the story, or what was happening on stage. I nearly felt a disconnect at some times, it was kind of dissapointing for a designer to went on to become a Tony Award winner, however I guess everyone needs to do at least one “bad” design in their career.
Either way, I really enjoyed the show and would absolutely see it again at some point. Later to come, my thoughts on the performance. Stay tuned!
PS. For the first time in my time in a theater I witnessed an HPL “catastrophically fail” and seemingly shatter a Source Four lens.
Chat Roulette Improv Piano
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on March 21, 2010
One hell of an impressively creative use of Chat Roulette. This guy is sitting at a piano playing improv and reacting to what he sees. Watching this really makes me want to go find someone that knows how to play piano.
WTC Aerial Photos
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on February 11, 2010
Today the NYTimes had some amazing new aerial photos of the World Trade Center collapse. I’m not quite sure where they came from (no I didn’t read the article) but the images are spectacular! I suggest you go take a look for yourself.
Blackberry Desktop Manager Sync Error Fix
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on January 14, 2010
An issue that I’ve met head on a few times since getting my Blackberry is I’m randomly greeted with a sync error. It’s an error that’s sort of crushing to see, that and it usually screws up whatever it’s trying to sync. Today I did some searching after my contact list went missing and came across a post over at VoIP Tech Chat where they went over a couple of fixes and I’m now going to go over what fixed it for me.
First I was greeted with this:
Where proceeded to try to retry a couple of times before getting frustrated and started googling. I came across their post where they outlined a couple of fixes that all circled around Mac OS X’s Sync Manager. The last fix on the page was one that seemed promising (that or I’m biased towards terminal based fixes). I opened up terminal and ran the command below:
/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl reset
First I ran this with Blackberry Desktop Manager closed and then again with it running. Both times it told me that there were no matching processes but if you watch a list, say the list of calendars it will clear out and re-populate after running the command. Hope this helps!
In 2010 I Will…
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on January 2, 2010
Temporary Twitter Accounts
by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on December 3, 2009
The other day while heading to class on the T I had a thought. Why doesn’t Twitter offer temporary accounts? For example, you have an event that you’re promoting via Twitter and once the event is done you don’t plan on ever touching the account again. Why not have a process to automatically remove these accounts? In comes a temporary Twitter account.
Ideally you would be able to create an account and set an end date on which the account would expire. For example if your event is December 11th you could set the account to expire December 15th so that you can see reactions and respond to them appropriately. On the expiration date the account no longer allows anyone to log in and if a user attempts to visit the account directly it will display a page letting the user know that the account was only temporary and has queued for deletion. Additionally at the same time the account becomes inactive it will tweet on last time so that everyone following the account will have been notified in some fashion, at this time the account will be removed from the following list of any followers for the account. After a waiting period, say 60 days, the account no longer displays a warning message to users and is returned to the pool of available names. This would allow for a wide variety of temporary events to interact while not wasting usernames, often times useful ones.
Let me know what you think of my idea in the comments.