Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Life is complicated.  There are many choices, paths and decisions for us to make in search of our destiny.  There are paths we follow regularly that we are not even conscious of, such as the metabolic pathways keeping us alive in our immune systems.

I had little understanding of these paths, until I began these illustrations for Epitomics, a biotech company that manufactures over 1,000 different antibodies from rabbits.  According the Wikipedia, “Antibodies are gamma globulin proteins that are found in blood or other bodily fluids of vertebrates, and are used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects, such as bacteria and viruses.”

The maps are being carefully constructed in Adobe Illustrator from Epitomics diagrams and then imported into Flash to add linkage to their many unique antibody products.  Click here to see the current Flash Pathway maps, and there are more in the pipeline, and more data to be linked using XML.

Obviously, it is important to faithfully construct the pathway maps with scientific accuracy.  The spherical antibody nodes remind me of paintings I’ve made of beach stones, whose arrangements are pretty much random and meaningless.  I’ve been thinking about picking up the paint brushes again, and working on a few more of “the rock paintings.”  To make the stones more interesting, and their arrangements perhaps more meaningful, I plan on using image processing techniques, Photoshop filters and 3D rendering before projecting the design onto blank canvas.  I’m thinking about painting layers of imagery, similar to constellation star maps and the work of Julie Mehretu.  It’s a pathway I’ll have to decide to go ahead on, while my antibodies are still doing their quiet work to keep me in good health.

To see the artwork of Julie Mehretu, please visit her page on Artsey.net. (Update July 18, 2015)

One-sanfrancisco.com is now live and ready for business!  Educating and promoting the .TEL address, a mobile business card, is the website’s mission.  As Jake Widman, writer for Information Week puts it, “SMBs can use .tel address to put all their contact information in one accessible, mobile-friendly location and easily organize and update it.”

One-sanfrancisco is the sister site of one-vancouver.com , developed as a .TEL initiative for their local business community by webnames.ca.  Just like one-vancouver.com, we will highlight our own Bay Area .TEL community members with .TEL Of The Day postings.

Another exciting development by webnames.ca are their innovative .TEL Gift Cards.  We look forward to placing .TEL gift cards in local Bay Area businesses for point of sale transactions of individual .TEL addresses.

For only $19.99 you can own your .TEL listing for 1 year.  Get started here. What are you waiting for?  Want to learn more before you buy?  See our Discover .TEL FAQ section.

Recently completed a website facelift of a fascinating Hollywood tour service run by Scott Michaels.  Scott was referred to me by a good mutual friend, and he was in a hurry to clean up the website for the busy LA summer tourism season.  Scott specializes in touring locations of Hollywood celebrity deaths, and when the Michael Jackson tragic death occurred, there was a surge in interest.

The original website was functional, but had very little layout or graphic design.  That was the first step, which is now complete.  In a future upgrade, the site will be coordinated with CSS and CMS, especially as we look ahead at upgrading Scott’s larger, heavily trafficked website, findadeath.com.

To show a few shots from the LA roadtrip to visit Scott, I tried out a few WP plugins.  Lightbox Plus maddeningly failed to load all images reliably, and finally I found a less complex, simple yet effective plugin that works flawlessly, slimbox. Click the image icons to see a much larger photo.  They can also be navigated in sequence by clicking on the full size image’s left or right side.

Difficult to capture on camera in low light, and definitely worth a visit: The Museum of Jurassic Technology.  The bookstore itself is mind blowing.

This hasn’t happened to me in awhile: getting caught up in the flow of Internet exploration. It all began when something drew me to go visit tumblr which is a website full of all sorts of mini-media blogs, I guess they’re called tumblelogs.

So, there are all these cool photos posted there, linked to other places, such as FFFFOUND! which is a very fun place to get lost in. Which is where I found the image above, at Jim’s collection of Worst Album covers of all time (plus some).

Speaking of vintage artwork inspired by sound and music, I’ve been receiving scans of 1920’s Grebe radio ads which are being posted at greberadio.com.

OK, I’m out of the wormhole for now.

Recently worked on a Flash splash page for the Kapow Technologies web site that involved a lot of hand animation that could probably be done in Actionscript2 or 3… if I knew the code! So, working on expanding my Flash horizons and found these cool examples, some with source code. Most of these are in my pursuit to deconstruct the iTunes coverflow image browsing interface, and a few are purely inspirational. Here are the links:

• Papervision3D FAQ
• Papervision3D Examples @ dusanwriter
• Papervision3D tumbling cube @ The Flash Blog
• Papervision3D Carousel Example FLA
• 3D Wall using Papervision3D by Flashloaded
• Weber Design Labs Flash iTunes Cover Flow
• Flash Based Coverflow with controllers
• Coverflow using Fluid
• The World of Mekanism (don’t miss the cool LP record shop under About)

Heading into SF on BART last Tuesday on business, noticed the growth and development of the Lafayette Crosses memorial. Here are a few photos of how it looked.

My appointment in SF took me near the Moscone Center, where the Web 2.0 Conference was readying for its open on Wednesday. It seemed quiet. Not much to shoot photos of. Looked at the Web 2.0 program and did not see companies listed that I perceive to be collaborative, social networking websites. Instead I noticed large computer and telecomm corporations, and Disney.com. Since when is Disney collaborative?

What a joke. The best way to get into Web 2.0 is to use it on the web. The rest is just hype. Back in Lafayette stands a truly collaborative work, low tech, with heart and humanity… but at what a cost.

No sooner had I completed my LinkedIn profile, then I began receiving e-mail nudges from my Plaxo account. How socially, professionally networked must I be?

Through the serendipity of search engines, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch found my Social Networking image and posted it in a thought provoking article, I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day. Nice.

If you have not read TechCrunch before, you are missing the bouncy beat of new software announcements and Silicon Valley startups.

P.S. The image mentioned in this article apparently was removed from Arrington’s original article after AOL bought TechCrunch. Draw your own conclusions, I have mine. May 6, 2012.

If you’ve got, flaunt it, but it might attract a crowd. Lindsay Lohan’s provocative poses overwhelmed New York magazine’s Web site and readers complained of not being able to load its pages, which contained nude photos of Lohan posing as Marilyn Monroe. Nice, a sexy girl brings a computer to its knees.

Meanwhile, over in The New Yorker magazine, Adam Gopnik wrote about French existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir tout ensemble and spared their webmaster some grief, by not publishing the photo. So, I had to look it up, naughty boy that I am. Here it is, and others by photographer Art Shay are at the Stephen Daiter Gallery website. I like his 1980’s photo of cartoonist Robert Crumb too.

Of additional interest to nude lovers, also in The New Yorker, is an excellent review by Peter Schjeldahl about The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ten new galleries dedicated to nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century art. About the painting below Schjeldahl writes, “The lovely, small “Bacchante by the Sea” (1865) is like a Rosetta Stone of painting, in which a studio nude and a landscape differently translate a singular, poetic imperative.” Click on the nude below to see a slide show portfolio of work on display in the new Met galleries.