Project Orange Cone: The ripping up of our streets

What about these signs, they are so um, I can't put my cone on it. Anyhow, Go little orange cone'r you go little guy!

Alley Art: Little graffiti when you need it

When things don't work out, try a baseball bat.

Down boy, down.

Artmart at Lake Montebello

Artmart down at Lake Montebello was a nifty event today. People were out and enjoying their favorite park and the kids were mostly running things (namely hula hoops and the stage). Anyhow, I did a quick walk around the vendors and snapped some photos of their wares. If you'd like you can click through to the flickr page and download full sized versions here.

Soon There Will Be More Genius Bears

Genius bears, who would've though? Via the NYTimes

Rocky Road Cupcake’s

Katie made some cupcakes out of the Cupcake Heaven cookbook; delicious.

Road Trip To Rhode Island and Mass

I picked up an awesome knob for a dresser of mine that needed one.

I forgot to mention that I took a road trip up north, here's a handful of photos from Newport, RI.

Socialmedia Quicklinks, an easier way to share your sites

Here's a great idea on how to easily share your social networking sites via Josh Baer at austinpreneur.com.

The idea is to take your domain (say jewishtimes.com) and have it redirect to your facebook page; like this jewishtimes.com/facebook. A lot easier to remember and share in person then the actual link http://www.facebook.com/pages/Baltimore-MD/Baltimore-Jewish-Times/46226726994

His suggestion was to use subdomains (facebook.jewishtimes.com) but I prefer my way as it's a little bit simpler.

Junestar and The Dig at the Windup Space Friday Night

Getting a few shots from side stage the small lamp gave a nice glow, check out the rest of the photos here

I finally made it out to get some 'rock photography' in which was the main point of picking up a dSLR.

Despite the challenging conditions I managed to get a couple of good shots. I found that going in full manual mode was the best way to get a the shots I was looking for. Going for an aperture priority or shutter priority wouldn't cut it. Also when using the flash I found that it cast way too much light but in the manual setting I was able to compensate. All in all I feel the Rebel XS is a good start but I might need one of those 50mm 1.4" lenses to get the effect that I'm going for.

Creepy Facebook ads that stalk me with my friends should go away

I remember the days when it was the norm to create a pseudonym for a social network or a creative email address that in no way reflected the owner’s real world identity. A wonderful example of this is my former AOL user name, WkSteele4 and other various names I would rather not share. (They’re still anonymous)

I’m not sure when the shift happened but at some point I noticed everyone around me had first.lastname@gmail.com for their mail and their phone numbers on Facebook.

I don’t mind it so much, yes I could go back to being anonymous and I know a few of those people on Facebook but I don’t think it would be worth it. I enjoy how a lack of anonymity shapes communities and how it makes them more useful. (I can be found by people that I want to find me, IE people I know IRL)

That being said, I recognize that I’ve given up a lot of my information freely and without question yet it’s still creepy and offending when I see it used in unethical ways.

Specifically, this feeling came over me today when I saw a little add, that had borrowed the name and picture of one of my friends to try and lure me to click somewhere.

I know for a fact that my friend had not “challenged me to a game of Bubble Boomers” but what am I to say at this point?

Somehow that app has ‘borrowed’ my friend’s data, either through me or through them allowing the app and while we get what we click for, it’s still wrong. Our personal information and our identity is sacred (at least it is to most people) and when it’s misappropriated its offensive.

I know that I’ll be removing the app and double checking my privacy settings but it’s still a big wide web out there and who knows where it leads to.

Learning Processing and Learning Programming and Learning Physical Computing

In the last year or so I have become a big fan of data/info visualization which is a fitting extension of my geeky tendencies. I'm drawn to this field because of how it helps to cope with the mass of information that our modern world generates and I see it as the logical solution to making decisions in the future.

Even more so, infoviz is kind of like the Flaming Lips of design/programming. It manages to push boundaries/be experimental while still being beautiful and functional. I am overcome with awe when infoviz is used as an art form to capture and explore our emotions like twistori and i want you to want me does.

As I've been exploring this field of study and subsequently becoming more passionate about it I've been trying to find ways to make a career within it or at least contribute to it.

Not always an easy task.

My background in the liberal arts (degree in Organizational Communications) has prepared me to ask questions but left me without the technical skills to answer them.

I have been developing my technical skills, as best I can and I have been coming along. I'm getting proficient with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, yahoo pipes and have coded my first google visualization API mashup just recently. Amidst all that goes on in my professional and personal studies the going has been slow and so I've been looking for ways to speed things up.

To do so I ordered a couple of books from Amazon.com recently and when I mean a couple I mean a stack.

At the top of the stack is Learning Processing by Daniel Shiffman and Visualizing Data by Ben Fry. I have chosen to focus on Processing because it is a great first language to learn and the projects that I see/like are coded with it.

So far Learning Processing has been amazing for teaching me how to think like a programmer and Visualizing Data has been great for getting me excited about programming. Together I feel that they dovetail with each other and will take me to a point where I will be ready for more advanced studies.

In teaching myself I thought I could start with a more advanced language but as I tried I found that the skills I developed in high school/freshman year of University had atrophied to the point that it would be best to start at square one. As a little background, I switched my major (so long ago) because I found the CS program at Shippensburg to be dull and focused around raw computing; to me the exciting part is how humans interact with computing and exploring new ways of shaping that experience.

Perhaps I should have held off on purchasing the rest of the stack; Physical Computing by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan, Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe and Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi but then what would I do with my new soldering iron? No really, as a nice dovetail, the programming side of these books use Processing as their programming language and they should turn out to be a blast.

Collectively these books add up to the first semester (probably) at the ITP graduate program within the Tisch School of Arts at NYU. Amongst the book authors three are professors at ITP and so as I work my way through them I will be checking myself and asking: "Is graduate school really worth it, can I get the same knowledge without going?"

I'm not sure of the answers yet but hey who cares, I'm having fun!