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!

Andrew Grimm Sings The Streets Of Hampden On A Friday Night

His guitar and sound filled up the street with music, if you want to see more photos check out my flickr.

Last night while walking back from a sale at the Shine Collective in Hampden I stopped for a few minutes to listen to a guy named Andrew Grimm that was singing in front of Dangerously Delicious. I dunno I guess I found his music warm and honest; that's what I like and how I try to play. He's got a great voice and plays a guitar well so if you're around check him out sometime.

Glowing Box Photoshop Tutorial

Yaaaaaarrr haaaarrr, looks like there might be some booty after all~!

Since I work with the web on a regular basis I find myself using Adobe's Creative Suite every day and yet I know there's so much that I don't know. That being the case I try and make a point of running through a tutorial once or twice a week to pick up some new skills and better understand how all of the tools work.

So this morning I was delighted to see in the twitterverse this tutorial from six revisions going around.

I found it to be interesting and it appeared challenging enough for me. After working through it, I would grade myself about a B on this project. I couldn't figure out Step 17 and I feel that my little glowing orbs didn't come out too well. Nonetheless, I'm happy to have given it a try.

Things that I learned from this tutorial? How to use the pen tool to cut out a shape, how to make things glow with a nice gaussian blur and how to make clouds come out from behind something. If you want, I have the psd file here.

A walk through Baltimore

A quick cocktail at Dougherty's Pub before I headed out into the beautiful afternoon.

Last Friday after work I took my camera and set out to get some exercise and a few photos. It wasn't too amazing but turned out to be cool. You can see the whole set on my flickr page.

Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer

About a year ago I came across the ITP graduate program at NYU-Tisch I was amazed and excited by the work their student do. It's a program that describes itself as a "center for the recently possible"; students study media, electronics and programming and use them in innovative ways.

So it was no surprise when I stumbled across an experiment in human-robot interactions that it turned out to be an ITP project by Kacie Kinzer in the ITP program. The project is called (adorably) Tweenbots and the goal is to get a helpless and robot from Point A to Point B. The robot cannot steer, is not robust and elicits human interaction with a flag that states "Help! Get me to my destination".

Watch the video and enjoy the soundtrack

MICA Students and their Squirrels

The zombie squirrel that hangs out on the MICA campus in Mt. Vernon

In lieu of actually writing or thinking I've been using these sunny days to make the most of my Rebel XS. Today was a great day for it and I found a wonderful subject. This squirrel is appropriately fenced in on what I believe is a part of the MICA campus, some old train station in Mount Vernon. I had a blast taking photos of him and got a strange look from the janitor...perhaps he gives the same look to MICA students?

Chinese Good Luck Coin

A Chinese New Years good luck coin. Shot with my new Canon Rebel XS and a 50mm 1.8" lens, I'm very happy with how it performs.

Boston.com home of great galleries and my thoughts on dissent

Demonstrators climb out of the broken windows of a Royal Bank of Scotland branch, near the Bank of England in London April 1, 2009. (REUTERS/Andrew Winning) #

Without much intent but on a regular basis I find myself viewing a wonderful gallery via boston.com. I really appreciate the photos they pull together to visually tell a news story. The captions are minimal and let the photos do the talking.

This morning I've come across a gallery of photos from the protests against the G20 conference in London. The photos capture the push and pull of protesters and police but they also capture something else. The journalists themselves. Photo number eleven and twelve are amazing, three or four protesters with a message and two dozen professional cameras trained upon them.

I can remember protesting the lead up to the second Iraq war and wondering if we would get any coverage, obviously we didn't get enough. Now that we are few more years into the digital age I feel it's easier to get that coverage, especially if a protester is willing to take violent or extreme action. Such action feeds the media.

In turn it also feeds the police state that we've found ourselves in and by escalating the situation the police further militarize themselves and their actions.

Protesters and dissenters feed on the lunacy of a police state and since the media gives little coverage to little else but violent action, that is the path they take.

It's a circle of violence and it's only taking us down a path that will cause more pain.

What can a dissenter hope to accomplish then? We can hope to find ways and means that disarm our police-state and make their method of containment pointless.

Is this possible? It must be, our only other choice is razing the fields that we have sowed for so long.

You say we don't have to anything anyways? You don't really believe the economy is fixing itself right now? Do you?