Weird Machines

I know I said I wanted to keep this blog technical, but it looks like that may not be the case. Maybe I can look at this from a technical point of view...

http://twistori.com/

twistori is an interesting, social experimentish Twitter visualizer that lets you choose one of 6 predefined words relating to emotion, and watch as related tweets go by. Technical: It's not Flash, which means AJAX + DHTML, which is kind of neat. It's definitely nicely done. So often these things aren't.

Someone showed me a demo from a piece of software called Seam Carver, which uses a very clever algorithm for "content-aware" imagine resizing. The software searches for rivers of what it deems to be unimportant pixels. These rivers or "seams" are then removed as needed to resize the image. Check out the website/video for a more detailed explanation, and mind-blowing demo:

SeamCarving.com

I keep thinking about it, I swear. I want to blog for you. All of you. I feel like I have things to say, but when it comes time to put... uhhh... keyboard to text input, I blank out. There's plenty of personal stuff I could post about; I'm a little panicky about graduating, money is a scary thing, etc. But that's not what I want this blog to be about. I want this blog to be more about my identity as a New Media... guy.

But since I have nothing else to post about, let's go personal for today. I've started running, but not in the way that I've done before, where I run for a day and then forget about it for a month. It's only been two days in a row, but I feel far more committed to it. I think it has something to do with the fact that Rochester has come out of its annual Dark Age. I think I finally realize why people like running: Endorphins.

Well, I'm back from FITC! It was pretty awesome. I'm sorry for not posting about days 1 and 3, but rest assured they were cool, and I got a lot out of it.

I went to FITC with the intention of going to a lot of cool tech demos and hearing the latest about Flash and ActionScript and all the other cool technology that I use, but as time went on, I found myself drawn more to the creative/design talks. They were much more inspiring, and I realized that I could get much the same info online that I could in the technical topics. No real substitute for inspiration though!

I realize that I haven't posted in forever, but I'm at FITC, and I just paid $13 for a day's worth of internet, so I'm going to use the internet to its full advantage, god dammit.

So! I should probably make a retropost for Day 1, so look for that later. Right now, though, I just got back from seeing ISO50/Tycho and a panel on getting into the industry and some famous designer's experiences. Horrendously interesting stuff.

I also bought a few ISO50 posters! They're awesome.

Time to get back to it.

PS Remind me to talk about our little sneak peek from Adobe of Flash CS4. F-curve editor for tweens? Yes, please.