Fortunately this joke arrived in my inbox two days ago courtesy of my mom. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a joke to tell!

Maybe this would be best when we hit video assignment week. But because #ds106 is having this discussion about what media can be, I feel strongly that you should see this same sort of discussion underway in the videoblogging community circa 2005. Two things to view by my friend Michael Verdi, one of the first videobloggers, back before YouTube:

First watch Vlog Anarchy and then if you are fearless, and heeding all warnings, continue on to The Yang of Vlogging.

I think it’s cool that Neven Mrgan, who worked on The Incident, adds this to the discussion:

That cover is NOT the original photo, downsampled. It’s a hand-crafted, precisely drawn interpretation of the source.

And, at the same time, he gives a wicked cool example of the hand-pixelated aesthetic. I am totally itching to try this. I hope some other #ds106ers try it out; it will be a few days before I can do this kind of work, if at all (unless I break down and take my laptop to the UK – I don’t think I can do this sort of work on the iPad).

Update: I am a dork for not noticing D’Arcy Norman linked to this in his post. I guess I glossed over that because I’d seen it q few days earlier. Sometimes the Internet is a small world.

The assignment description is:

Reimagine the scene in a road sign. What is going on outside the iconic depiction in the sign itself? Find a road sign image online or photograph it yourself. Redraw it to show the rest of the scene you imagine, and show us the before/after on your blog.

Before

After

Credit: To create the finished version I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create a mashup of my original photo plus Michael Jackson Silhouette by munchester2cool.

How To

Illustrator purists get annoyed with me for showing anyone how to use LiveTrace, but I don’t care, I think it’s a really useful alternative when you just need to get a quick and dirty vector image. I suggest you don’t rely on this technique as a crutch though, because you can make much cleaner paths by working with the Pen Tool, and it is well worth learning. Also, LiveTrace does not work well in all situations, but for this assignment it is nearly perfect.

Watching the YouTube version is your best bet; it should look good played at full screen (especially if you switch up to 720p). The QuickTime version is included for anyone who subscribes to my podcast via iTunes.

So, this tutorial should be useful for either the Reimagined Road Signs assignment or the Four Icon Challenge. Anytime you want to make an icon actually. And it covers:

• Advanced image searches using Google (to find images licensed for reuse)
• Illustrator: LiveTrace for pasted or placed pixel-based graphics, Rotate, Erase tool, working with Layers
• Photoshop: Quick Select and Magic Wand tools, Threshhold adjustment, Transform (skew) tool
• And much more!

I hope this has been useful. Your feedback on the tutorial would be awesome. Share and enjoy!

Then today came Lou McGill’s post Layers, which took the idea to a whole new level. I still aspire to make something as wonderful as the final image of his her dad. But that’s not the direction I went today, though I did push this averaging thing a little further along in a different direction.

It was Tim Owens’ averaging tutorial post that pointed me toward the work of Jason Salavon, in particular his portrait project. I am crazy for these things, these “atmospheric meta-portraits”.

As it happens, I had a ready-made image series to experiment with. In summer of 2009 I took a Drawing I class, and our final project was this: dress up as your alter ego, shoot a bunch of photos of yourself, pick the best one, crop it to the right proportion, print an 8×10, and use that as a reference to enlarge and redraw at 16×20 inches using our choice of media. We could draw black and white or color images. I chose to create mine in color using art markers. So you can see the photos I started with, here is a video I made documenting that drawing assignment.

So from the photo shoot from the drawing project, I had 62 photographs that were of similar composition. I decided to make an averaged portrait. I followed Tim’s tutorial. When I saw the result I was happy with it, but I still wanted to try adding it to another photo, like Lou McGill did. I tried some other photos in my catalog of images but I just wasn’t happy with the juxtaposition for any of them, and then it hit me:

Animated GIF.

I brought my final selection photo, the one I made my drawing from, and masked it using the Quick Selection tool to grab only my skin, feathering the selection about 60px and then turning that selection into a layer mask. I liked the Soft Light blending mode, but you could still see my face too clearly, so I reduced the opacity to 10%. Then I made an animated GIF, playing with the timing and whether the masked photo layer was on or off, varying the opacity when it was on. I only needed eight frames to get what I was after – a sort of flickering in and out of the more discernible version of my face.

So here is my final result, an animated GIF + amalgamated self-portrait using averaging. I’m liking it.

My laptop battery has begun expiring with no “low battery” warning, somewhere between 30-40% power. This means my laptop shuts down completely no matter what I’m doing, with no warning at all, and I lose work if I’m not paying very close attention. When I charge the battery back up, it never just stays at 100%, instead exhibiting the utterly annoying behavior of bouncing back and forth between 99% and 100% capacity. Very visually distracting.

Now I have to decide if I can live with it until summer, when hopefully new MacBook Pros come out. I guess whoever I sell this laptop to would appreciate a shiny new battery, so I may as well buy one.

I’ll try recalibrating it, but I’m not optimistic.

Mr. C. opened this bag of cat kibble around breakfast time to give the outdoor cat some food. It took until noon for our indoor cat to figure out the bag was open and learn how to help himself. I’m impressed enough to document this for two reasons. One, that he can get the food out without knocking the bag over and spilling the contents. Two, that he can eat hard dry kibble with no teeth.

It’s been hours since I’ve eaten it. I’m not dead yet, and no stomach ache.

I guess tofu is indestructible. Or, my stomach.

(Actually I think what he’s doing is astonishingly cool. I can’t wait to see what he ultimately builds. Drawing a circle is just a test for being able to cut a circle from a piece of metal.)

What I forgot to say in the video: Email from the Guardian gives brief article summaries and links to the full articles on the Guardian web site. If the full article text came in my email, I’d be happy to get the email. But I have to read the articles on the web site whether I get the email or not. So why can’t I just skip the email?

Update

I guess at least one other person has looked into this. These are not the results I’m looking for:

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20325811564

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326282271

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20326514198

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326898286

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20327785699

And by “this” I mean, of course, the “Modify Your Subscription” statement at the bottom of every email stating that my account preferences are in my control and can be changed, which I linked to as a screenshot.

Anyway, many thanks and a follow to @robb1138 for at least replying. Still nothing from the Guardian. This isn’t going far to convert me to a paying subscriber. Why pay $30 a month when that comes with daily emails you don’t want to receive?

About a month ago my husband asked if I needed a watch repair. It was on his list of errands. So I gave him two that had stopped running for battery replacements. Off he goes on the errand running, and I forget all about it because I rarely wear a watch (I just look at my mobile phone).

Today, more errands are happening. Usually he tells me where he’s going in case I need anything from there too (see above). But today not so much, which I thought was very mysterious, but nothing to be concerned about. So I’m minding my own business when hubby bursts in and presents me with:

The Starkist 25th Anniversary 1961 – 1986 Charlie Tuna Watch

I think I got this watch by sending in a bunch of tuna labels or something. In 1987 I wore it every day on a month long tour of England, Scotland and Wales, along with my normal watch. My normal watch was set to local time wherever I was, and Charlie always told me the time at home. So I have odd associations of comfort and home attached to this otherwise silly branded item.

Evidently the watch had to be sent to Hong Kong to get a new movement put in it. I have no idea how much this cost. I hope it wasn’t much, but these days, it probably was much.

Love

Today I can’t think of anything sweeter my husband could have done than have this stupid thing fixed because, even though it’s stupid and silly, I love the thing.

Thanks, honey.

Kath published some intriguing thoughts about time, the data-body, and outsourced memories along with her video. Her piece begins with a quote from “Time Squared,” a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Which is kind of funny because when I think about time, I always come back to Delmore Schwartz’ poem Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day, which, of course, provides a big theme for the Star Trek Generations film: Time is the fire in which we burn. And I also come back to Don Charles’ song, “Little Pieces,” performed by D-Squared, which I used as the soundtrack. As Charles says, we’re all just “walking, talking, burning little pieces.” And for the origin of both, you can always look back to Heraclitus.

I can’t help it, friends. He’s still new to us, and it’s a delight getting to know this little guy. I may as well share my delights. I hope you understand.

Sorry about the low light and autofocus. I was afraid he’d wake up if I got up and turned on a spotlight. I justified it – out-of-focus looks like semi-conscious. But it doesn’t. It just looks like amateur. But I don’t care, I got the shot before he woke up.