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.

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.

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.

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!

Go generate your own New Year’s resolution here.

Thanks for the heads up Mrod!

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.

I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?

Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.

Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.

I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.

I’ve been trying to get around to creating a new portfolio for a long time now and I’ve just launched my new portfolio at http://portfolio.jamisonkissh.com. I attempted to keep the minimalist look of my blog that I adore but I’m not sure if I succeeded, please let me know what you think!

I live in a very small town in Connecticut where everyone knows exactly what is going on in town however things can get misreported. This got me thinking as to how things could be better handled in our town and even within the county. A great example can be found with the Boston Police Department. In an effort to spread news of an emergency they turned to the ever popular Twitter to share incidents with the general public and give warnings.

Since moving to Boston in late August I’ve found this service pretty useful although it rarely affects me directly however it certainly has given me a heads up to what’s going on around me. For example, earlier in the week I saw this tweet after I got the alert that the T had struck a car on the BU bridge and knew that traffic was probably going to be even worse and that I should walk down past the incident to pick up the bus or the T to avoid getting delayed and be late to class.

I have a feeling that between the Boston Police feed and the Boston Fire feed any true emergency situation that would affect me directly would be easily conveyed and help keep me and others safe.

Bottom line, Twitter + emergency services = great idea.

Well as I mentioned about two weeks ago I  had plans to call HP’s “Executive Care Office.” Turns out that is possibly the greatest idea that any has given me in a very long time. In 7 minutes I had accomplished more than I had in an hour on my first tech support phone call. Within those 7 minutes, the woman I was talking to had decided it’d be best to have my case escalated to a case manager. The woman in customer relations with whom I was speaking then tried to get a case manager on the line with me however she kept having her calls dropped. She finally took my phone number and agreed to call me back if she managed to get another case manager in the next 5-10 minutes. A few minutes after hanging up customer relations called me back and she let me know that she had finally managed to get a case manager on the line.

I was put through to this case manager who just asked me a few basic questions and to confirm my information. She then created a case ID for me and offered me two options. 1.) She ships me the parts in 3-5 and I do it or 2.) HP picks up the bill (they even send you packaging) to mail the computer to them and they replace it for me. Needless to say I went with the lazy method, having them change it out for me. This was by far the most pleasing experience I had with HP and I’m glad that not all their departments are lazy and incompetent (low level tech support). I’ll post again with how this whole ordeal ended for me.