First Things First

Okay, before I spend another 3 hours here avoiding actually writing about this stuff, let me take a quick moment to talk about the 1964 and 2000 First Things First Manifestos.

When I talk to people about being a digital arts major, I’m generally met with confused stares. It makes sense, “Digital Arts” is such a vague term that it seems to carry no inflection of what I do. In many ways I’m really thankful for this fact, since it also carries with it few restrictions on what I can focus on. When I was still in community college I leapt from Computer Engineering into Graphic Design because I felt that design would allow me a more meaningful means of interaction/communication. Like engineering though, pure design seemed to be missing something as well, sure I now had a means to engage people, but I had no substance to engage them with. After I transferred though, I found a means to backslide a bit, into a sort of middle ground between engineering/innovation and the tools of communication. So when asked what it is I want to do after college, I try to explain to people what it is I do now. Most think about this for a second, blink, and come back with “ok, but how do you want to use that after college.” Not having the words to explain it in terms better than “I want to engage people” I start to talk about how it can be used for things such as marketing. Is this the noblest

I should be…

talking about First Things First, the 1964 and 2000 manifestos, but as happens ANY time I should be doing something else, I just got distracted by Johnny Cupcakes.

I came across a NOTCOT.org entry showing that he’s venturing tshirts into the land of belts.

I’ll be honest, the man’s Tshirt designs over the last 2 years have just been a bit too much for me aesthetically, often falling into the realm of gaudy. But these belts…they’re glorious. Amazingly understated while still maintaining that slight edge that comes with indy brand clothing.

And the packaging is just beautiful. There’s something about wooden boxes that is just nice, fun, and more lasting than cardboard/plastic packaging. I’ve got a collection of boxes from watches, wallets, and cufflinks that I just can’t bring myself to get rid of. I have no need for them, but they still remain. Thinking about it, I even used to keep around the box from a package of smoked salmon until I tripped and broke all the joints.

I really shouldn’t be surprised that JC has such nice packaging though, he and his pay really close attention to packaging, creating very memorable and lovable enclosures. (I didn’t want to use the word packaging a third time in this sentence.) Just look at the boxes from his limited edition Halloween shirts:

Or for that matter, take a gander at what they use in store instead of “bags”:

God, I’m in love.

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls,

because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” – Socrates, “Phaedrus”

I found this quote while reading Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” and as much as I want to, I can’t say I disagree, at least not when speaking from the point of view of personal experience.

I have an awful, AWFUL memory when it comes to absolute facts. I used to joke that it took 12 introductions before I remembered my last girlfriend’s name. My memory isn’t THAT bad…but it’s pretty horrible. However, what I do learn nearly instantly is WHERE to find particular pieces of information.

Is this the alphabet’s fault?

Tumblr

Hate Tumblr. Soooo much. Mostly their rss feed. Far as I can tell there’s no way to get it to give you more than the latest 20 posts. Their api has a read function that’s more usable…but it’s a really ugly xml file.

PHP Blog Aggregator

So here’s a bit of what I’m working on for the backend of this year’s Digital Arts BFA website.

It takes this xml (provided by my feed burner NewsLife) and dumps all the feeds into one very large xml file.

<blogs>

</blogs>

the code in question:

<?php

header ("content-type: text/xml");

$blogfeeds = array(array(),array());

$doc = new DOMDocument();

$doc->load( ‘blogs.xml’ );

$blogs = $doc->getElementsByTagName("outline");

$x=0;

foreach($blogs as $blog) {

$blogfeeds[$x]["path"] = $blog->getAttribute("xmlUrl");

$blogfeeds[$x]["title"] = $blog->getAttribute("text");

//array_push($blogfeeds[0], $blog->getAttribute("xmlUrl"));

//array_push($blogfeeds[1], $blog->getAttribute("text"));

$x++;

}

$out = new DOMDocument();

$out->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

$out->loadXML("<blogs/>");

for($i=0;$i<count($blogfeeds);$i++) {

$docBlog[$i] = new DOMDocument();

$docBlog[$i]->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

if(strpos($blogfeeds[$i]["path"],"blogspot.com")!==false)

{

$tot = new DOMDocument();

$tot->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

$tot->load($blogfeeds[$i]["path"].’&max-results=0′);

foreach($tot->getElementsByTagNameNS(‘http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/’, ‘totalResults’) as $openSeach_totalResults) $total = $openSeach_totalResults->nodeValue;

$blogfeeds[$i]["path"] .= "&max-results=".$total;

}

$docBlog[$i]->load($blogfeeds[$i]["path"]);

$docBlog[$i]->formatOutput = true;

foreach($docBlog[$i]->getElementsByTagName("channel") as $chan) {

//$chan->setAttribute("auth",$blogfeeds[$i]);

$in = $out->importNode($chan, true);

$in->setAttribute("auth",$blogfeeds[$i]["title"]);

$in->setAttribute("path",$blogfeeds[$i]["path"]);

$out->documentElement->appendChild($in);

}

//echo $docBlog[$i]->saveXML();

}

$out->formatOutput = true;

echo $out->saveXML();

Notes:
Nina’s feed seems to be home brewed, so everything she has is there. AWESOME!
Blogger feeds are by default limited to only the 25 latest entries. I subvert that by first opening them empty, so as to get the value from the openSearch:totalResults node, and then reopen them with the query string max-results=[that total] appended to them.
Tumbler seems to also truncate its feed…but I can’t find any way around that (it also doesn’t make any mention of this truncation.)

Still a work in progress.

Looping wonder.

Taiwa-Hensokuki by Mohri Yuko is a text-to-speech-to-text-to-speech loop, where 2 computers constantly analyze the other’s speech, convert it to text, and speak it back. Over time the text degrades and changes. A very interesting experiment in information mutation.

NES Cufflinks

When the weather starts to get colder, or I’ve failed to do laundry in a while, I switch from T-shirts to french cuffs. Cufflinks are far supperior to buttons as they’re just much more stylistically interesting.

Being a giant nerd I LOVE these cuffs

…want.

[Via Unplggd]

Reverse Blog Crawling

In a way this is a self congratulatory post. (alternate title: Hey Look! Make picked up my NOTCOT post)

During this mornings blog crawl I spotted this post on Make

Following the via link brought me to this:

^Hey look, that’s my moniker.

Which I’d also posted here a few months back.

…which I originally found at Make.

Apparently the sphere is a loop…

I build prototypes.

I find that instead of thinking about / drawing ideas I have a much easier time developing solutions if I prototype devices I’m thinking about. I think in many ways this explains why I did so well in physics labs when I was an engineering major, but so horridly in the lecture/theory classes. I need to do.

For my pumpkins I’ve found that the Evil Mad Scientist Snap-o-lantern article really necessitated a flatish pumpkin. (Well, at least one that was less tall than wide.) My pumpkins are round. Tiny, but almost perfect circles.

So I’ve been developing other means to mechanize the jaw.

Here are some of the prototypes I’ve worked out (click the image to see a b&w animation of them in motion):

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for almost 3 weeks now, but I only just now took the photo.

During the second week of our Contemporary Design class we talked about Charles and Ray Eames, going really in depth about their furniture designs, which I confess, are amazing.

After class that day, while walking to work I passed a store with a window full of…pretty much everything we’d talked about.

Unfortunately, since then they’ve moved some of the chairs out of the window, but you can still see them in the store:

I guess to be fair, I should point out they are a Herman Miller dealer…

Andrew S. Parnell

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