Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Reuniting SXC.hu Photos With Their Authors

I’ve been using a lot of stock pho­tos in recent pro­jects, and a good deal of them come from the fant­astic SXC.hu. One issue I ran into, how­ever, was that after down­load­ing sev­eral dozen, mak­ing selec­tions, then even­tu­ally using them, I’d usu­ally lost track of where they came from on the site.

Continued →

jayphoto.co.uk Launches At Last

Started before Christmas, moth­balled until last week, finally com­pleted. jayphoto.co.uk, my attempt at a “pro­fes­sional” web front for my pho­to­graphy, is finished.

The site show­cases all of the pho­tos avail­able as prints from my devi­antART page, while hope­fully avoid­ing some of the slightly less pro­fes­sional ele­ments of the dA site and help­ing the vis­itor get through the selec­tion check­out pro­cess with the least dif­fi­culty. Hopefully it will help me get some expos­ure and sell some art; my main motiv­a­tion to get it done was the loom­ing on the hori­zon of a couple of higher-profile photo jobs that I’ll be tack­ling in the com­ing weeks — details will be forthcoming.

Techie note: The Flash used on the main land­ing page is a heav­ily modifed ver­sion of the “Gallery Tween” sample applic­a­tion included with Flash 8. It reads in a ran­domly ordered list of image file­names from XML (gen­er­ated by PHP from the site’s image data­base) and then dis­plays them on the Stage, using a one-frame loop with ActionScript to shift them from side to side. If people are inter­ested I’m happy to pub­lish the code.

RTF EULA

An amus­ing little piece from TG Daily cov­er­ing some scary and/or comic clauses in vari­ous soft­ware End User License Agreements (EULAs).

New Peacefire Web Proxy

A mes­sage went out on the Peacefire mail­ing list this morn­ing, announ­cing a new pub­lic “Circumventor” site at stupidcensorship.com. The site is run­ning CGIProxy, which I’ve found to be a decent bit of kit, so all the down­trod­den stu­dents in need of uncensored web access should give this a go.

Pablo Francisco and Arnold’s Pizza Shop

I was intro­duced to some gems this week­end :-D. Pablo Francisco, hil­ari­ous comedian — check out the videos on his site, espe­cially the stand-up routine from the Jay Leno show (WMV, RM). This guy had me doing Movie Preview Guy impres­sions all week­end. The other gem was a clas­sic — Arnold’s Pizza Shop. “If you don’t fuck around, I’ll give you good pizza; if you do fuck around, I’ll take a pep­p­er­oni and punch it through your head.” :-)