Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Here’s a strange one. It may help you become a better salesperson, and a stronger individual, but this technique is probably not long lasting.

Worried about the endless day to day grind of tasks? Perhaps if you had time to study the design of these tasks you might work smarter, not harder. Maybe you have an invention idea and you would like to build a prototype before going into mass production. UC Berkeley Computer Science Graphics Group Professor Carlo H. Sequin offers a course in procedural modeling that may help.

A huge crowd of happy, peaceful people gathered for the free concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love that had a created a definitive home in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park neighborhood in 1967. Many from back in the day were there or honored and remembered, such as Chet Helms. The music and the vibes today were great. You had to be there. I shot nearly 2 hours of video and a few photos, to help preserve the mood.

As a dumbed down convenience, the mass media brands the celebration as just a bunch of old hippies, etc. I do not agree with SF Chronicle radio columnist Ben Fong-Torres, quoted in a CW Nevius article, “We anniversary everything to death. Hopefully this will be the last of it.” Whoa, cynical grinch! Where is your humanity, dude? This is a rallying occasion for many voices to speak out. Far more mindful than an everyday baseball game, football game, etc. This gathering has a serious tone, a seeking for answers and connections, since it is so abundantly clear this country has been misled in a ominously wrong direction.

Unfortunately, shallow reporters who are not truly engaged in events taking place in front of them miss the point. Forty years ago and today [enter cynical, negative label here] the movement holds many concerns far above music. There are many who seek positive solutions and a consciousness awakening. Embrace the light and shake off the dark, repetitive history of fear, hate and war!

Update: Joel Selvin of the SF Chronicle gives a well detailed review of the day at SFGate.com

Reports of a suicide attempt by Owen Wilson are all over the news. Poor guy, maybe sometimes he felt like he was tied to the whippin’ post. The pain was great, he felt the urge, but only went part of the way… a suicide chump.

Let’s face it, we’ve all contemplated Death. Do we wait it out, it may surprise us too early, or do we take life into our own hands?

To take your own life, I can only imagine, would require the ultimate careful planning and discipline of execution. If your intent is half-hearted or sloppy, you will certainly botch it. You could enlist the help of others: park on a railroad track, drive into on-coming traffic, thus taking the innocent others with you on your sad trip.

There was the recent hip double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, writer and artist. Frank Zappa did not choose to die, cancer got him.

My guidelines for suicide prevention are as follows (listen up Owen):

1. If it gets really bad, travel someplace far, far away and see if a new perspective helps.  Consult your travel agent for places that are still fun: Norway? Thailand? Hawaii?

2. Get outside yourself. Get a pet. Make new friends. Do charity work like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Owen, come hang out with me a few days. Let’s party. Then kill yourself.

Seriously Owen, since Bottle Rocket, I like you, so before checking out, give me a call and let’s get things right.

VentureBeat‘s article points out that Slide is contributing to the addition of one million new Flash widgets daily across all non-Facebook social networks, such as Myspace. Facebook is listed on the Slide web site, so I’m not sure what the distinction is that VentureBeat is making.

So what’s the big deal? Slide has created templates of clever skins and image processing tricks to enable non-Flash programmers to build slide shows and customized animations using their own digital images. You can take a Flickr photo or a YouTube video and jazz it up your way. Personalization is a big deal in the world of social hobnobbery.

Recently at lunch with friends at PDI/DreamWorks, and the conversation included some of the usual rumors within the feature animation business.  There was the worry that perhaps Sony was shutting their animation studio in L.A. (again?), and there was buzz about “the Mecca Studio.”

“What’s the Mecca Studio?” I asked.

The Zemeckis Studio, they corrected me, which is actually going by the name ImageMoversDigital. The studio is putting down their roots in San Rafael, so it should be interesting to see how this plays out, and what the studio produces.

A few of their artists put up a really cool blog of their ideas and sketches, The Image Depot.

The blogosphere apparently enjoyed the Karl Rove piglet caricature, so here is Alberto Gonzales The Weasel.

Like Gonzales, I cannot exactly recall where this idea came from.

When I first asked Joel Eisenberg about posting a few of his Grateful Dead concert photos on a few back pages, Rockpix, at this here Media Spin web site, I added that it might take awhile for folks to find us. Well, in less than two years, two of his images have risen to positions #1 and #2 on the Google image search engine when entering “Grateful Dead Concert“. Of course this is an ever-changing statistic, but for now, as Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.

A Google search for simply “Grateful Dead” yields us the #8 and #9 spots. The image appearing in both searches has ghostly lettering “Grateful Dead” which I added using Photoshop techniques.

I’ve seen a number of these images linked at large sites such as Myspace, and music forums all over the world, so I suppose that is how these receive such high rankings. Other than running Google ads, Joel and I are curious about how to monetize the images. We’ve taken a few requests for photo prints on an individual basis, but merchant sites such as CafePress.com do not allow the marketing of celebrity images.

As exciting as this is, it reminds me that I must soon build a new web site for my own professional design work. Mediaspin.com has organically sprawled into my own little multi-purpose fun site, since Media Spin Interactive, Inc. closed its doors in 2003. I’m planning to use a new domainname for my professional design website, and maintain Media Spin as the random fun web site. That way professional business contacts will not be confused by the diversity and commercial nature of the current Media Spin site. What a long, strange trip it’s been!

See the video! Joel and I do a show and tell on Tubular TV about his concert photos.