ceci n’est pas un blog

I’ve recently been researching different ways to portray large amounts of data visually, and found one that shows web tags in a graphical representation. It’s a fun way to compare the structures of different sites, and you can try your own site on Websites as Graphs.

Wowsers. I love coffee. I don’t love Folgers, but this bizarre commercial done by Saatchi & Saatchi sums the love up pretty well. And it’s invigorating!

James Craig just sent me a link this morning to a fascinating Shockwave artwork in which you can navigate through images by zooming into one picture which has colors that are comprised of other pictures which in turn you can delve deeper into. It’s mesmerising, and it would take a very long time to explore it before you could see all the images.

This reminded me a lot of Chuck Close‘s paintings. I’m not sure if it was he who did the original images that were made up of smaller images and which were so popular in the early nineties, or if that was someone else.

It also reminded me of two literary works by Julio Cortázar. The first was the short story called “Blow-Up” (which inspired the 1966 film by Antonioni even though the two are very different) in which the photographer protagonist discovers a hidden story by seeing the details in a blown-up picture he casually took. The second work is his masterpiece Hopscotch which is an open-ended anti-novel that is composed of a bunch of short chapters which can be read in various orders to create a vast number of possible stories. Nifty indeed.

Really neat photography of miniature people and scenes on food landscapes: http://mapage.noos.fr/minimiam/go.htm Love it!

Can one ever have too much functionality in a browser? This person who installed 100 of the most popular Firefox extensions seems to think that one cannot. They wrote that

It was really extraordinarily stable. The work of hundreds of programmers who had no idea their code would be used together, coexisting happily in the browser.

I have fourteen extensions installed and that’s all I think I really need. I’d love to know others’ favorite extensions, so feel free to comment if there are any you can’t live without.

I really enjoyed this very unique show tonight. I took some more pictures which are available in this flickr set. I wish I could live on the same street as the Cathedral of Junk! At least I wouldn’t call the cops for loud music at 9:30 at night.

I dig eclectic and experimental music. It’s nice to see something in this vein used effectively in a mainstream ad. Check out a choir making the sound affects for a Honda Civic in this video.

(Thanks, James!)

I found some illustrations of my dream home in some Motorola ads from the 60’s. Oh the wonders that the future holds!

I’m always looking for new ways to brainstorm. Occasionally when I’m strapped for ideas, I visit websites that start the wee gears spinning again. Here are a few I just thought of:

the visual thesaurus: Great tool to visualize interconnected associations of concepts
flickr: Fun to search different tags to see variations on themes, especially through the slideshow feature. This site has the potential to become fairly addictive, so beware!
css zengarden: Always inspiring how many different designs can come from the same html.
zefrank’s scribbler: Relaxing/stimulating to do a scribble which automatically develops over time.
wallpaper design zine: Design-o-rama with pics.

If you have any others that help you out of those creative blocks, feel free to share.

I just did a quick write-up about the 37th Street Christmas lights for the Austinist. I’ve enjoyed this street for several years and was glad that I could finally learn a little bit more about it for this. Lots of people have pics of the lights tagged with “37th street” on flickr.

I’m pretty impressed with the Google Analytics service. I was one of the first to subscribe right after they started offering the service for free, and have been very pleased with how well it performs compared with other web trend software I’ve used. I really like that it’s a flash-based interface, so I can see all the charts and stats with cool dynamic features. There’s even a little map that shows where in the world I’m getting visitors to my site from.

Unfortunately they’re not currently allowing new signups (due to the extremely large response they got), but for all those interested in site stats, I’d recommend signing up to be notified when they’re going to open it back up on the Google Analytics site.
I heart google.

Last night I went with a friend to see “Napoleon Explosive: The Chinese Napoleon Dynamite” at the Alamo Drafthouse (which is one of the many places that I consider makes Austin the wonderful place that it is.) It was Napoleon Dynamite in “Chinavision,” which basically means that they show a DVD of the film from China which was subtitled in Chinese and then translated back into English subtitles. It was very surreal.

I completely understood the translation of “Napoleon Dynamite” to be “Napoleon Explosive,” but how did Pedro’s name translate to “Virtuous Shell?” Is it a phonetic thing? Hopefully there is someone reading this out there who knows some basic Chinese and can resolve these profound questions of life.

One of my favorite translations from the movie was when Napoleon asks about the chicken’s “large talons”, and it was translated to something like “big marketable skills.”

For those wondering, no, alas, I was not one of the lucky ones to win a “Vote for Virtuous Shell” t-shirt. I like how those shirts made what was originally a somewhat obscure movie reference (and which became so mainstream that even Target was selling “Vote for Pedro” shirts) back into an obscure jest.

Last night, a friend came over and made the most delectable, rich chocolate dessert that I’ve ever had. I told him that I love the combination of chocolate and spicy chili powder, and so he took this epicurious recipe (using good chocolate with a high cacao percentage), and topped it off with a sprinkling of 40,000 Scoville heat unit chili powder. The extremely spicy side of it was toned down by the sweet richness, so we got that good endorphin kick without much burn. ‘Twas sinfully deeelish!

This very interesting art tool called the I/O brush allows you to paint with objects that you have recorded on video. It’s a normal paintbrush that has a small video camera embedded in its center so that it can pick up patterns, colors and movement of whatever you brush it over. So you can basically paint with animation and use anything you can film as your painting medium. Although I’m sure it’s hard to visualize from this description, it’s easily understandable with this hi-res quicktime video. The tool was developed by people in the MIT Media Lab. Neato.

This page, "Sushi, Do you eat?" combines three things I really like: Engrish, paperworks and sushi. It’s an adorable resource for all those who want to cut out high-resolution graphics to make their own paper models of sushi; it even has the beer accompaniment and little faces on the egg and rice.