Ava vs. Johnny

Who's a bigger rebel - Ava or Johnny?

Graphic Design 101

Here's a little glimpse into the creation process of a recent job at work. I find this sort of stuff infinately interesting, so maybe you will find it atleast partially amusing.

I made a holiday email for a Microsoft client last week. Here are the indivual images that I used.

Combine all of these together, add some type, a couple color gradients, and paint on some snowflakes, and you get this:

Les Rhythmes Digitales

Dig this jam. I think I saw my friend Ben dressed up as robot in there, too!

Canadian Fish Finder

OK, there is no faking this shot. That shit is real!

Water Pipe Excitement

Earlier this week Kathleen noticed that the washing machine was not working. I deduced that the pipes were frozen, thus restricting water flow to the appliance. So on Wednesday, I was working from home and decided to put a space heater in the laundry room to thaw the pipes. Well, it worked. They thawed and proceeded to fill the wall with water, which pooled up to about an inch or so of standing water, which then spread into half of the garage!

Thankfully I was home! I wet vac'd the water out and had to scrap up a lot of it because it was freezing. I then proceeded to tear the wall open and found the busted pipe. A couple of trips to the hardware store later, I had the new pipe soldered in place and we even did a couple loads of laundry. :)

Bokeh

I learned a new word today... "bokeh".

Here's the Wikipedia definition:

In photography, bokeh is the blur,or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light."
The term comes from the Japanese word boke (暈け or ボケ), which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji (ボケ味), the "blur quality". The Japanese term boke is also used in the sense of a mental haze or senility.

The English spelling bokeh was popularized in 1997 in Photo Techniques magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue; he altered the spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable". Bokeh replaced the previous spelling boke that had been in use at least since 1996, when Merklinger had also suggested "or Bokeh if you prefer."

The term bokeh has appeared in photography books at least since 1998. It is sometimes pronounced /ˈboʊkə/ (boke-uh).

Ricky, you little PERVERT!

Get out of this house! OUT, I say!!

Mud Room Update

All I do is eat, sleep, go to work, and then work on this mud room. OK, sometimes I go running or watch a movie. But this project feels like it has consumed me. We are making good progress, tho! The exterior is pretty much entirely finished. Just a couple little spots to touch up w/ paint, and a little reworking of the rain gutter downspout. I gotta say, it is really exciting coming home to my new back door. And it feels so luxurious when it's raining and we need to get the laundry. It used to be that we would just dash from the house to the garage and back and try not to get too wet.




Next step is the electrical. Oh boy!

Virtual Workspace

Making a funny video is hard.

This is the lesson I learned (again) last month. We had a client that wanted us to make a YouTube video that would highlight all the key points of their software, but be funny enough to be viral. Oh, and they barely had any budget.

So I ended up basically writing the entire script, doing the shooting, editing, some directing, and even some acting. People - I AM NOT A COMEDY WRITER! This stuff is fun, but difficult. And a big challenge is that comedy can be so subjective. I mean, think about how many sitcoms there are on TV, and how many of them do you actually think are funny? And those shows have huge budgets, with teams of professional writers, actors, directors, etc...

All that being said, it was still a fun project and it was refreshing to get away from my desk and strut down the halls at work wearing my new wig!