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  • Working at an Award Winning Tattoo Shop
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If you have been following the blog for a while you might remember me getting a job at a local Tattoo shop, Visual Expressions. If you live in the CT area you might also have heard us getting some love from WCCC (106.9FM).

They (WCCC) did a listener driven contest to find Hartford’s favorite tattoo artist, and wouldn’t you know it – it’s our very own Kelly Green. You can check out her portfolio here. We didn’t win anything but bragging rights, but it was fun to compete. Im wicked glad to be learning from such amazing artists – everyone in the shop has something to teach me.

I wasn’t sure when I got the job if I was going to keep it. Now I wonder if I am going to keep my other jobs. I really enjoy tattooing and like watching people show off my work. It makes me smile as an artist in ways no amount of money can. I like that.

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I had my first in person meeting with a new client yesterday, The Autism Society of Connecticut. This is the first project I’m using the gray screen development process for and I LOVE it. The process is much more straight forward and we covered in detail almost all the pages in the site objectively. Because I had the whole site mocked up we could see potential problems that would otherwise not have been evident and we were able to completely rework the navigation from the way it was in this first round of revisions.

We’ll see how it works in the next round and make more revisions on it I’m sure, but this was awesome in a first meeting. I’ll build out the backend as a gray screen using developer notes instead of actual database functionality.

NewFangled, hats off to you for bringing this technology to my eyes. You broke the industry. If you dont know who these people are, click the link and check out Process >> Prototyping. You wont be disappointed.

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In their infinity profit seeking wisdom, the owners of Myspace (should be called TheirSpace) have opened the floodgates to CPC advertising which can target based on location, age, interests, or gender. Its a matter of time now before a stampede of companies throw their ads on Myspace and make the site one more step worse than it already is.
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Great video I saw this weekend that really puts into words so well some of the common themes and ideas I have about torture. Former Gov. Ventura is the man! I love how he is able to simply talk over the people on TV who I normally see bully their guests (Bill O, Hannity and the like). Whats even better is that he is speaking sensibly. This is one of the most “Common Men” logic arguments I’ve heard in a long time and Thomas Paine would be proud.

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Happy Memorial Day; my thoughts on that aside.

I figured out a wondrous thing tonight while I was driving home from Springfield this morning: The best way to determine the morning/night status is to look at the street lights. If they are still on – it’s still night. Once they turn off (about 5:33am this morning in case you were interested) then, and only then, is it considered morning by civilized people.

The normal argument would say 12:01am; but that’s only if you want to be a dick about it – of course you’re not wrong, but practically speaking I’d say that I left the party at around 5:20 last night and got home at about 6 o’clock this morning.

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Ever wanted to create a program for you iphone but didn’t want to write it in C+?

With this new framework you can develop programs for smart phones and their kin using native hardware features (screen shake or tilting for instance) with nothing but HTML and JS. This is currently a free and open source project under the MIT licensed and should hopefully stay that way.

5 Years ago you could sound really cool by talking about flash. 2 years ago you got to sound cool developing flash programs that worked on the odd Nokia phone. (deploying these programs in any sort of a meaningful way was a whole norther task all together, but being able to do it at all was step 1.)

I think the next milestone is looming overhead: learn JQuery or MooTools well enough that you make flash developer’s jealous and deploy your program in a way that actually works. SWEET!

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Great archive of different show/hide effects using JQuery, which I gotta say is quickly becoming the new “Flash” of the internet. You dont need a special player for JQuery and it interacts (and even plays nice) with other non JQuery elements, something Flash can never do.

http://devsnippets.com/article/10-transition-effects-the-art-of-showinghiding-content.html

Check out whats possible and then start learning JQuery.

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I got to guest host on Dawn of Chaos, a weekly radio show on 91.3 WWUH. We had a great time talking about politics (Piracy & the British TV tax). I shit you not; its illegal to watch TV it Briton without a license – how sick is that? I have to pay someone for the privilege to watch ads? The real winner this week though was a story about how the French are kidnapping their bosses if they threaten to ship jobs over seas. THATS A UNION IN ACTION!

From there the conversation digressed into Ultimate Warrior – a show I’ve never seen from beginning to end. It pits fighters from all around the world against each other in mock battles that would never happen (Pirate vs French Knight). I’ve seen clips from it – but I never get through the whole thing. The scripting seems lame and the match ups moronic. (Ninja vs Spartan? Ninja would never fight a spartan head on… kill him in his sleep. Done.)

Anyway, I was happy to get some good ol punk into the mix. Most of the time the show plays metal but I brought in some T.S.O.L. Decedents, Exploited, and the Necromantics and we had a ball…

Ill be back next week Tuesday 12-3am on 91.3 WWUH with more political discourse, ramblings and rants.

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To all my students: Thank you for all your hard work this semester. I hope you got as much out of the classes as you could. If you have any questions in the future – please dont hesitate to ask me. Just because you’re no longer in my class does not mean my door is closed.

Reflections:
Im only going to teach one class a semester from now on. I wanted to able to go in deeper with both classes and I think I could have if I was clearer about the class objectives and what I was expecting. This was my mistake. A demo reel of examples I had found to go with each assignment would have been instrumental in achieving this.

I’m glad I did it though, I learned Flash CS 4 in 5 days and met some new people who I hope to be working with int he future. Actionscript 3 is still greek, but I’ll have to learn it evenutally to begin working with
AIR.

The easy road isn’t rewarding… It’s easy.

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Fliers cost money and everyone throws them out. Myspace and Facebook take too long and you have to know a college kid with enough time to do nothing other than friend 8000 people on each service and then spam them day and night with messages, comments, and bulletins every time you throw an event.

Twitter is the next step. It’s like word of mouth with instant gratification and all the linkable goodness the web provides. Event pictures, videos, and reviews are all done via text message style communication and from the promoter’s prospective it’s even better because it’s public.

Spris in Hartford is already on this trend, but I think they can go further. You don’t have a lot of options to customize your account’s appearance in Twitter, but you can customize the background a little bit to add some function in there, like contact info for bottle service, emails for djs to send a demo, the flier for the month’s party, etc.

I see this going a lot of different ways. Makes me think that the next hot wave of ideas will be ways for people with huge Twitter lists to make better use of their lists and manage them it ways that makes sense.

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