Author: Tim

An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.

My phone is trying to tell me something

I don’t know where my phone got the idea that I live some kind of crazy lifestyle, but here are a few of the things its T9 auto-complete thought I was trying to TXT:

  • Have a baby on Halloween
  • Wish I’d skip on the Hat
  • get lock from your mistaken Chang
  • put Ice on santa
  • Get up Cupcakes
  • Get up Like a Virgin is Parking
  • galang galang galang galang galang galang
  • You should consider re-evaluating the life choices you’ve made for yourself the over last few years.

Crazy phone, huh? I have no idea what it’s talking about!

The Lego Mini-Mizer

Okay, so maybe the something-ize me fad has already come and gone, but Chris Doyle (who wants to make absolutely sure you remember Reasonably Clever is a site created by him, Chris Doyle*), created the Lego Mini-Mizer, where you can create yourself out of a Lego minifig.

Choosing from a wide variety of Lego pieces and colors, I was able to whip up a version of my idealized self, only to realize I unconsciously dress like a Lego figure already.

Lego minifig Tim

So try it out, just don’t come crying to me when 7 of your 8 top friends are pictures of Lego Minifigs.

*Hi kettle, I’m pot. Did I mention you’re black?

Heinz ketchup: made with menstrual blood?

I’m not saying it’s true, just that some people are saying it. Hmm… what else was I going to say?

Oh yes, my commercial got bumped from the Heinz Top This TV contest. The form letter I received listed some of the possible reasons:

  • The commercial isn’t 30 seconds, and nothing ticks off the TV network guys like an ad that’s too long or too short.
  • The commercial contains “copyrighted material”—stuff like music or video that somebody else created and/or owns.
  • The commercial contains inappropriate content that your mother may not like and we can’t show on TV.
  • The commercial contains another company’s name, trademark or logo.

Well I’m not an idiot, if you look at the timeline you’ll see the clip is 30 seconds, so that’s ruled out. And although it’s a pretty good imitation of the Saw movies, I didn’t use any copyrighted material from them, so that’s the second one. Finally I took care to cover up the Sharp logo on the TV (maker of quality sets owned by people such as Hollywood actor Harrison Ford), so it wouldn’t interfere with my creative vision. The only possibility is the third one about content your mother wouldn’t like. I actually thought this would exclude 90% of the other videos because my mom doesn’t like mawkish, saccharine pabulum.

Oh well, maybe Heinz just didn’t want their product associated with people who kidnap and enslave young girls. You say tomato, I say strychnine (hint). Whatever. Anyway, here’s the video again; and of course, thank you to all my friends who helped out!


Anyway, look for the video on the comedy website Weak Nights!

Also Chiller TV is having a video contest, so maybe I can throw together a light-hearted musing on a talking ketchup bottle for them.

Categories
Shorts Video

I Saw You in Captivity at a Hostel Last Summer

Like a billion other suckers, I made a commercial to help advertise the most ubiquitous condiment on earth.

Hmm… looking at it now, I have a feeling this entry may not even get in. But please, watch and enjoy. And rate it 5 stars as often as you can. Thanks, fifteen readers!

Continue reading “I Saw You in Captivity at a Hostel Last Summer”

I was committed

When I was first admitted, I didn’t know what to make of the place. It all felt a little odd to me, but I was committed by now. Where else was I going to go?

Cuckoo!A girl sits rocking back and forth in the corner. One of the people who worked here was trying to coax a disoriented man up off the floor. Another older man lies on his back, trying to swing his legs over his body in a very peculiar way — he does this maybe 20 times before he stands up, quite normally, as though it never happened. I know the staff is there to keep the inmates from hurting themselves, and sure it’s better they’re here than out on the streets, but you can still see the hollow look in their eyes. When not being coralled by the staff, or daydreaming in their own worlds, the committed mill about, looking with vacant stares, but still careful to avoid eye contact.

I suppose I’m still adjusting to life at the insane asylum athletic club.

Categories
Blog

Harder, Better, Faster Guitar Hero

I have a lot of friends who are into Guitar Hero, and several friends who are into Daft Punk, but in their Venn diagram, there’s no overlap between friends who are into GH and those who are into DP. Woe is me, for I have no one with which to share this clip of Daft Punk on Guitar Hero awesomeness:

Yes, err… remember that part in “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” with all the killer guitar riffs?

I saw Daft Punk perform!

Gallagher’s Copyright Infringe-O-MaticBut before I can tell you that story, I need to tell you about Gallagher and Andy Kaufman. The watermelon smashing prop comic, well known as Gallagher, has a less-well known brother. A twin brother in fact. And so when Gallagher’s comedy career began to take off, there were plenty of places for him to wield his Sledge-O-Matic and similarly cudgel-like wit. In fact, there were so many places for Gallagher to perform, it turned out to be more than one man could do alone….

Continue reading “I saw Daft Punk perform!”

The Synesthete’s Alphabet

Much has been made of Daniel Tammet, the “Brain Man” who could recite Pi to 22,000 places. How the savant achieved this feat was by picturing the digits that make up Pi’s infinite and complex string of numbers. The condition facilitating this monumental task is called synesthesia, where the mind unconsciously blends together two different sensations. In this case, it is grapheme-color synesthesia that causes his mental picture of a number (or letter) to appear as more than just an abstract numeral, as it would on a page. Instead he perceives it to have a great deal of unique, identifying characteristics. To a non-synesthete, 3 is just 3, but to him, “every number up to 10,000… has its own color, has its own shape, has its own texture.”

“For example, 289 is an ugly number, I don’t like it much.” And he’s got a point. Yellow, inky-blue and reddish-pink? Yeck, what an ugly color combination!

Though my degree of grapheme-color synesthesia is nowhere near as profound as the Brain Man’s, I’ll share the colors I associate with the letters of the alphabet, as well as the numbers 0 through 9.

A B C
Continue reading “The Synesthete’s Alphabet”
Categories
Work

Internet on the iPhone: separate but equal?

Much has been made of Apple’s lack of support for Flash on the iPhone, with Apple passing on it in favor of open standards, using AJAX, canvas and the HTML 5 spec to achieve the same slick interfaces that have until now only been seen within Adobe’s Flash player.

Apple has famously proclaimed that the web on the iPhone isn’t the mobile internet; not the “watered down internet” — and yet, it’s not quite “the” internet either.

On Apple’s iTunes page, you get a very cool interactive slider listing all of the company’s hot iTunes-related products, all presented using CSS and Ajax. All done in the browser, all done using open technology. Yeah, holy shit is right.

iTunes store on the web

Now take a look at the same page on the iPhone. It’s similar, but it ain’t the same.

iTunes store on iPhone

Since Javascript can detect which browser you’re using, Apple seems to be slightly modifying its web interface to account for the iPhone. But how many web designers are going to get caught up in Apple’s iPhone-led redesign of the web, only to find out that their spiffy new interfaces won’t work on the very device they’re redesigning their websites around?

Sweetened with CocoaAn internet built on open standards, pioneered by Apple would be pretty spectacular, but Apple is going to have to work out these ‘gotchas’ first. Otherwise, I feel this open initiative will go the way of many of Apple’s previous efforts: Cocoa (the other one, but that’s a whole other article), OpenDoc, interactive QuickTime movies, the Pippin game console and other promising technology that Apple left to rot on the vine.

I for one will support Apple’s initiative because I like open standards and I like the idea that when publishing my videos I can “encode once, run anywhere” — on the internet, iTunes, the iPod or an iPhone… pretty much anything starting with a lower-case i.

And in a perfect world, I wouldn’t be the only one. But I don’t see Jobs’s idea of the standards-based open internet catching on. For better or worse, the web is a heterogeneous place, so any kind of consistency is rare indeed. And for all his shrewd maneuvering, Jobs still has a very pie-in-the-sky idea about human nature. Would you expect anything else from an aging hippie? He should already be able to tell that consumers don’t always choose the best products, and quite understandably, people will make choices that immediately benefit themselves.

It made sense for YouTube to re-convert all their videos into the open H.264 codec to get an exclusive spot on Apple’s hottest new product, but would every Tom, Dick and Harry go out of their way to re-encode their entire collection of failed motorcycle stunts, backyard wresting clips and lip-syncing videos, just in support of open standards? My guess is no.

It would be great if we lived in a world where everyone drove a Prius, roommates would wash their dishes, and everything on the internet was open and free for anybody with a good idea, but as a poet once said, “We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive.”

It’ll take some very real incentives for Apple to lure web developers away from closed, propriety systems and into an open and free internet, not just because it’s the right thing to do. If I were to offer my two cents, it would be to make the tools for realizing your vision more available, and make them easier to use. Make it easy for people using your software to get results. (I think you used to have an OS that did this back in the mid-’80s.)

Finally, for those of you at home who want to see the web the way the iPhone does, just modify your browser’s user-agent to this string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

…just resist the temptation to touch the screen.

I wasn’t working out

I was programming for the internet and editing video in my spare time. I was eating a lot of junk food. I wasn’t working out.

So my first day at a gym was a chance to turn things around.

The Machinist workout planThe problem with working out more in an afternoon than you had in June, May and April combined isn’t just that your muscles are incredibly ill-suited to the task. After my exhaustive first workout, my trainer explained the importance of strengthening one’s core muscles to the gaunt, sweating corpse seated across from him.

“Your body is like a sausage casing. And no matter how much you force into one end, if the other isn’t strong, whatever you put in will just come out the other.”

“Please don’t mention food.”

He stopped in the middle of his routine to notice my glassy stare. “…do you feel a little nauseated?”

I slowly inhaled through my mouth and completed half a nod. He told me to sit there while he went to get me something to drink.

And then I did something stupid.

I said to myself, “Just don’t think about throwing up.”

At that point, it was all over. It’s been so long since I vomited in public, in front of chinese girls getting in shape to be trophy wives, trainers trying to sell new signups on their premium fitness package and everybody, that I forgot what it sounded like. That stifled staccato. That gurgling, unending blaaaarrrggg. It sounds just like what people pretend it sounds like. And I was experiencing it in technicolor and sensurround.

Having successfully wrapped up my first day at the gym, I felt just awful. I was working out.