I did an image search for the word “beautiful” and this is what I got…
I’m not sure what it says about us as human beings, but I found it interesting.
Categories
Beautiful
Categories
Activists, meet Freedom
It seems some folks are in awe of how a service with rules about how it can be used are affecting their activities: Activists upset with Facebook.
You’re playing with Facebook. It’s their ball, it’s their bat, it’s their field… they run the place, they make the rules, they can change the rules, and they can create new ones just to ruin your life.
One group that has been critical of the policies of Facebook and other social media sites, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the boycotters have discovered the perils of relying on a website run by a private, commercial entity.
“They’ve set up this walled garden and when people use these things for organizing in this context they’re buying into the arbitrary rules,” said the foundation’s Richard Esguerra. “This is a risk or consequence of doing these things in walled gardens……It’s important for them to decide what they might be giving up, what kind of overarching control they might be giving up whether it’s on Facebook or any other social network.”
This is why I believe in the free and open web. Would things be different if they had set up their own domain and their own server as their home base instead of relying on a private, commercial entity? Probably…
I know the barrier to entry on Facebook is low… perhaps too low. It’s easy to set up a page on Facebook, and it’s even even easier to click a ‘Like’ button to join a cause, but for every 10 people who click a ‘Like’ button, there may only be one person with the dedication to actually follow-up and do anything useful. Sure, setting up their own site outside of Facebook’s walled garden may have resulted in less people ‘liking’ it or signing up, but the quality of the people involved may have been higher. And yes, getting a domain name and a server may cost a bit of money, but again, there’s a barrier to entry, and if you’re serious about a cause, you should be willing to put some resources towards it. Invest in what you believe in.
Using Facebook, Twitter, and other sites (be they “social media” or blogs, forums, etc.) are great ways to spread your message (respectfully please!) but your central base, your headquarters, your home on the Internet… owning it, as opposed to sharecropping, is a good idea.
Categories
Production Assistant Needed
Are you interested in the exciting world of filming things? Pointing cameras at people while they do things? Lighting? Sound? Well, have I got an offer for you!
I’m filming two days next month where I could use a Production Assistant. Ah yes, a Production Assistant… Sometimes considered the lowest of the low jobs on set, but not our sets! If you’re interested in how all this filming stuff works, you can hang out with us for a day and see what we do. It should be a pretty laid-back shoot, but we could still use one more person who is willing to help out, and willing to learn.
So what will you get?
- A copy of The Production Assistant’s Pocket Handbook
- Lunch
- Experience
What an offer! Now don’t all come running at once… Seriously though, If you’re interested, get in touch with me.
Categories
iWork Smarter, not Harder
I have a confession to make… I’m becoming a fan of Apple iWork.
I’ve always hated office suites. I entered the work world through the creative door, and we used tools like QuarkXPress, and Photoshop, and when I got into web development I used text editors. I never really had a need for office suites to create anything. My relationship with them was always in the form of document transcoders. Transcoding documents was not always easy in the times before free office suites like OpenOffice or NeoOffice.
Oh yes, OpenOffice and NeoOffice… When these came along I was thankful. Very very thankful. Finally, we could open those damn Word documents, and get the text out of them for whatever purpose we needed! Print brochure, web site, whatever. They were like can openers (or crowbars) for those .doc formatted files.
Years ago I did a contract job as a web developer in a Windows shop. They gave me Microsoft Word for some work I had to do, and no matter what I did, I could not get the thing to work the way I wanted it to work. Maybe I was used to QuarkXPress or InDesign, which are page layout applications where you have control over everything, but Word seemed to have a mind of it’s own as to where it would place things and how it would format them. It was maddening!
Sadly, while OpenOffice and NeoOffice are free alternatives, and great open source projects, I still didn’t find either one that good for creating documents. They just seem to do “weird” things that I don’t want. But recently, I started using Pages… lo and behold, it actually seems to do things that make sense. It actually seems to work the way I expect it to work. I don’t know if there’s some “Do What I Mean, Not What I Say” magic in there or what…
My only gripe about Pages so far is that it can’t open .odt documents. This would be an ideal feature, as I could easily open all those files I’ve created with OpenOffice and NeoOffice. Sadly, to get the most widespread ability to open a document, it looks like .doc is the best option. It can be opened by Pages, TextEdit, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Microsoft Word, and many others… It’s not an ideal solution, but it works.
And Apple, why can TextEdit open .odt files but Pages can’t? You obviously have the capabilities. Yes, there is some loss of formatting, but it would save one more step in the chain… Hmmm, maybe you’re working on better .odt support for Pages… yeah, that must be it.)
See Also: iWork Smarter, not Harder (Part II)
Categories
Tuff Tacos!
(consider it cc:by)
Back in the early 1990’s (pre-WWW) I came up with a concept for an animated series called “Tuff Tacos!” (or possibly “Tough Tacos!”) which featured a gang of hard-shell tacos who dressed like cowboys but rode motorcycles. They got into some sort of adventures, probably in an Old West setting. There was also a soft-shell taco who rode a scooter. He was sort of the wimpy member of the gang.
I never did anything with the concept, so here’s a crappy drawing I made today. Also, there are other Tuff Tacos out there, arguably much better.