Navigation
Home | Send me an email. | Links
About This Site
This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!
Members
Login | Register | Member List
Monthly Archives
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
Syndicate
Join our Mailing List
Who Needs the Internet?
I just read an article from CNN called Many Americans see little point to Web. Of the approximately one third of Americans who don’t have internet access, “forty-four percent of these households say they are not interested in anything on the Internet.” What?!? I’m not saying that anything I’m doing online is worthy of their time, but I can’t believe that there is nothing online that is worthwhile or interesting to them.
The story does say that some people just can’t afford to have internet access. I see that as a very legitimate problem. I think having access to the internet has become a necessity of life in the US. Many services are now geared primarily to those who are online—including many government and health care services. If people don’t see a point to the internet, I think we may not have done a good job in educating them on usefulness of it. Read the article here.
Hillary Got YouTubed.
Back in mid-January, I wrote an entry here I called The YouTubified Election of 2008. I expected this election to get pretty mean simply because it seems to be the trend in politics. But when you add in the power and the anonymity of the internet into the mix, things can get really dicey.
This morning I heard about a mashup video circulating around the web—one part Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, one part Hillary Clinton’s videos from her website, one part a supposed message to support Barack Obama. From a technical point of view, I’m impressed by the skill of the masher/creator, but the piece leaves me feeling cheated somehow. There is no substance to message and, more importantly, no one to question about their motivations for creating it. Is this the work of a true Obama supporter? Somehow I doubt it. Is it the work of the group behind the Swift Boat Veterans ad from the previous presidential campaign? I don’t know, but it seems plausible to me. This kind of attack can only lead to infighting amongst the leading Democratic candidates possibly giving an opening to someone else.
You can see the mashup ad below here.
Update on March 21 at 11:12pm: It looks like a tech guy who worked for the Obama campaign actually created and uploaded the ad. According to ABC News, “ Phil de Vellis, until Wednesday an employee of the company that handles Obama’s Web site, boasted in a posting on the Huffington Post that he made the ad, though he claimed neither the Obama campaign nor his former employer, Blue State Digital — which does software development and hosting for Obama’s campaign — was aware that he had.” Read the story here.
I think this is only the beginning of a new style of attack campaigning though.
Can’t My Computer See I’m Working?
I get distracted when I’m working sometimes. I doubt I’m the only one who suffers from this though. Nearly every modern computer has multiple windows on the screen begging you to multitask. And then there’s the internet, the ultimate distraction. Maybe I got an email. Bling. There’s an instant message. I wonder if my favorite blog has been updated?
In order to give my brain a fair shake at actually writing coherent English, I’ve been cheating on my “fancy” computer with WriteRoom, a simple text editor for the Mac.
WriteRoom thankfully takes my computer back to a much simpler time. The look of it reminds me of my dad’s TRS-80. Check out the photo of my MacBook Pro running the software. If you click the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that I’ve got a perfect distraction-free desktop in order to work on this very blog post.
I’ve got it using the default set-up for the most part. I have changed the default width of the writing area to 800 pixels instead of 600 pixels. I’ve also had the line I’m working on have a slight tint so my eye can find it easier when I’m editing. If you’re not a fan of this color scheme though, try black type on a white background. It’ easy to set up.
Could you use a cleaner workspace? Check out WriteRoom for the Mac. There is also a PC piece of software that’s supposed to do the same thing called Dark Room, but I haven’t used it.
Building a Wii from Legos
My favorite toy as a child, before I got my Texas Instruments TI99-4A, was my Lego collection. I could spend hours playing with Legos. I always seemed to run out of the bricks I needed before I could complete some grand project I envisioned, but I had a blast anyway. I wish I had photos of the stuff I built back then. Sigh.
Legos seem to be an obsession with a lot of geeks on the web. There’s a great site called Brickshelf where people post photos of their constructions.
Someone recently posted what I think of as high conceptual art on Brickshelf—a Wii constructed out of Legos. I loved the marriage of the two toys from two different periods of my life. I’ve reposted the photos below.
That’s geeky cool.
A Visually Stunning Movie Except for the Guy Wearing Silly Putty.
I saw the movie 300 over the weekend. I hadn’t really planned on seeing it until I read a review of the movie on Ain’t It Cool News by Moriarty that made it impossible NOT to see it. When a movie is said to “give your eyes boners, make your balls scream and make you poop DVD copies of THE TRANSPORTER,” how can you miss it? (Thanks, Fefa for sending the reivew!)
I did like the film for the most part. I didn’t expect great dialog and, as I anticipated, there were some really sappy lines in the film that had the audience laughing. Visually though, it’s amazing. Given the incredible amount of CGI, it’s almost a stretch to call it a live action movie. After 2 hours of a highly-choreographed orgy of killing on a massive scale (plus a little sex thrown in to guarantee an R rating) you may be tempted to leave the theater for a little relief from the slaughter. Try to stick around for the end titles. I found them to be really well done. They are 2-D vector graphics that move into 3-D occasionally. I really enjoyed them. They looked like they were probably done in After Effects. I couldn’t find much information on them online as I write this except for a small screen grab that I’ve posted here.
All’s not perfect though from a visual point-of-view. A few scenes just felt like the CGI effects were off somehow. I think the problem was having 3D surfaces mashed together incorrectly which messed up the perspective and left some scenes looking flat. The worst part of the visuals was the Gollum-like hunchback guy. This character just sucked the life out of every scene he was in because of his crappy makeup. He simply looked like a man who piled loads of Silly Putty all over his body. It’s an odd visual low-point in an otherwise really well done movie.