October 2007
Oct 26, 2007
Time to phone it in.
This hasn’t been a very creative week. Between catching up with old friends, fighting a minor case of self-imposed food poisoning and straining exactly half of my 639 muscles, I’ve done little more than establish a one-way data pathway between Flash and MySQL. And that’s…well…anyhow.
So I’ll leave you with this sketch of my reaction after seeing and sharing an elevator with John Lithgow at the Charles Hotel last week.
Seriously. He’s like eight feet tall. Should he desire, he could rampage Tokyo with little resistance.
Oct 16, 2007
Knowing when to back away.
Am I a horrible person for finding this funny? Probably…
People Getting Punched Just Before Eating via Daring Fireball
But in classic SNL fashion the skit goes widely off the rails in the last 20 seconds. That’s what makes SNL unwatchable nowadays.
In college, I was assigned a 5 minute video project. It was supposed to be an audio intensive creation where 80% of the time was solely devoted to sound while the screen was blank. My take on the project to gather used audio samples from a ridiculous amount of sources and mix them out of context so they seemed to be talking to each other. Ever heard Crow from MST3K comment on a mid-western, mega church preacher who debates the merits of cotton candy with John McClane? I have. It’s hilarious. More accurately, it was an exercise in re-contextualization. But I got so caught up in re-sequencing dialog tracks that I didn’t pay attention to the message I was crafting. When I hit the five minute mark, I just stopped.
At the critique, my professor simply said, “It seems like you couldn’t figure out when to stop.” He was right. I had so fixated on filling the 5 minutes that I ignored that I only had a little more than three minutes’ worth of material.
When the zombies appear in the SNL clip, it’s obvious that they are just filling out the time they have.
The hardest thing about creativity is knowing when to back away and declare it done.
Oct 10, 2007
MyNemesis
I am in the midst of developing a back-end database for a Flash front-end I finished a couple months ago. It’s been something of a struggle fitting all the pieces together. I mean I have no problems with ActionScript. Nothing is tripping me up when I hook up Flash Remoting as the bridge between the model of the front-end to the ColdFusion components. Even the components themselves were not too hard to assemble.
But then comes SQL.
There’s like 5-8 words in each of my SQL statements. And it takes me hours to debug all of them. And I find out the a single pound sign is the difference between a relaxing afternoon and a frustrated search through some of the most cryptic documentation I have ever read.
But then I stumble across a web comic like this. And it’s not so bad anymore.
