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Posts from March 2010

Zagat calls our pork roast “radiant”

Zagat calls our pork roast “radiant” published on No Comments on Zagat calls our pork roast “radiant”

As an adult, some part of me revolts against the enforced, unbroken diet of sweetness of so many children’s books, television and movies. My subconscious dreams up especially nasty ways that harsh reality might intrude on their walled gardens of bliss (“Suddenly Pippi Longstocking realized she was looking into the cold, remorseless glare of a T-1000 Terminator”)… but I don’t share them with my kids.

The reason being, another part of me knows my children only have so long before they learn that much of the world actually isn’t benevolent, that not everyone wishes them well and that terrible suffering is all too possible (and, at some point, likely). Maybe the part of me that reacts so strongly to that marshmallow-and-lollipop portrayal of the world misses the days when it was all I knew, too.

Or maybe at some level, I’m just kind of hungry, and bacon sounds good. I do know one thing: it’s going to be a long time before I share the caption to this one with either kid.

Dial ‘M’ for ‘My God, You’re All Over the Road’

Dial ‘M’ for ‘My God, You’re All Over the Road’ published on 1 Comment on Dial ‘M’ for ‘My God, You’re All Over the Road’

I live in a place where they’ve recently banned the use of mobile phones while driving, with additional penalties for texting. And I have a lot of company: Six U.S. states have prohibited handheld mobile use by drivers, and 20 won’t be happy with you if you SMS from behind the wheel.

(It’s having an impact. I’m noticing a sharp reduction in “Totally just ran someone over” tweets from friends.)

While the focus is on safety, and rightly so, I do wonder if there might be another benefit: inspiring more people to leave the car at home and take transit. Don’t laugh (well, not until you get to the cartoon, at which point I’d kind of appreciate it if you would). A lot of us treat mobile connectivity as a compulsion, and the enforced hour-long severing from the hive mind for twice-a-day commutes is a genuine pain point. And the growing strength of everything from location-aware apps to augmented reality will only sharpen it.

For car drivers, the freedom of the open road, as illusory as it has been for decades, is about to get more so. Mass transit may at times be crowded and uncomfortable, but with the escape to cyberspace just a few keystrokes away, buses and trains may well eclipse the car as the homes of true mobile freedom.

Force me to choose between my mobile phone and my car, and I’ll do my best to hang onto the phone. Your mileage, of course, may vary; what choice will you make?

These teeny tiny plastic boots were made for walkin’

These teeny tiny plastic boots were made for walkin’ published on 7 Comments on These teeny tiny plastic boots were made for walkin’

October 26, 2010: WOW, that’s a lot of traffic today! Thanks for visiting and spreading the word, folks. As far as I can tell, this cartoon is either spreading by email, or was in someone’s (pretty large) email newsletter. Anybody know the source? I’d love to thank them.Oc

October 27, 2010: And the answer’s in. Commenter Patricia Washburn, below, explains the cartoon was posted to Systers, the legendary mailing list for women working on the tech side of computing, started by Anita Borg back in 1994. That couldn’t be more cool!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, all. May all of our daughters grow up in a world of open doors.

Updated: And here’s the cartoon being drawn:

Updateder: And here’s the four-minute speeded-up version (maybe imagine Benny Hill music in the background):

Got content?

Got content? published on 4 Comments on Got content?

Have you noticed that we aren’t writers any more? Or filmmakers, or video producers, or even musicians or cartoonists? We’re content-creators.

Way too often, I hear Web folks talk about “content” as some kind of undifferentiated commodity: “Yep, figger we’re gonna need ten, maybe twelve kilos o’ content for that page. You got a bulk discount?” Back a cargo truck up to the content silo, fill her up and you’ve got yourself a website.

But there’s actually something interesting about the term – once I get past my visions of container ships laden with content, plying the seven seas. It’s a way of dismissing the value of individual creativity, sure. But it can also be a way of capturing the idea that so many of us now communicate in different media, and that digital technology has gone a long way toward democratizing personal expression.

How about you? When you hear “content”, do you think of the lorem ipsum that fills in the space between the revenue-generating ads… or something else?

Archived at The WayWayWayWayback Machine

Archived at The WayWayWayWayback Machine published on No Comments on Archived at The WayWayWayWayback Machine

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present…. the first ever abandoned blog. (That’s what you get for using ghost-bloggers. Well, in his day, probably slave-bloggers, actually.)

Hey, have you pledged to blog about women and technology on Ada Lovelace day yet?

Update: Over on the N2S Facebook Fan Page, a discussion led to the following:

“There once was a blogger named Oz / Whose empire vanished because / His follower count / was the only amount / by which he would measure his flaws.”

(prosecutor to accused) To quote further from people’s exhibit A, your Twitter feed, “@holdupguy I’m in the getaway vehicle with the money and hostages. Where RU?”

Twitter: To invoke your right to remain silent, use #miranda

Twitter: To invoke your right to remain silent, use #miranda published on 3 Comments on Twitter: To invoke your right to remain silent, use #miranda

From our vaults, another Twitter cartoon that inexplicably failed to make the transition to the new site.

Actually, I’m always tickled to find another one of these – especially if it’s one that I’m particularly happy with. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the defendant’s expression here strikes me as just right. </bragging>

Now, if I was drawing this today, it would probably have the bank robbery in progress, with the head of the gang snarling at one of his underlings, “What have I told you? Don’t check into the bank on FourSquare!” (Update: On second thought, let’s stick with Twitter.)

(updatier) Prescience alert.

Your GPS doesn’t lie: you aren’t at SXSW

Your GPS doesn’t lie: you aren’t at SXSW published on 3 Comments on Your GPS doesn’t lie: you aren’t at SXSW

For anyone in this business who isn’t at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, pretty much every social media channel feels like sitting next to a high school clique loudly talking about a party you weren’t invited to.

If SXSW doesn’t interest you, or if you’re able to rise above it all, then my hat’s off to you and your Zen-like transcendence.

For those of us who still have some lingering envy or a fear that we’re missing out on… well, we’re not quite sure what, but something really cool… there’s actually some soothing relief this year. Check out the Twitter discussion on the #fakesxsw hashtag: if it doesn’t bring a grin to your face, well, maybe you don’t deserve to be at SXSW.

And if that doesn’t help, well, there’s always the Sally Struthers approach.

(First posted at ReadWriteWeb!)

SXSW shwag bags

SXSW shwag bags published on No Comments on SXSW shwag bags

Closing the distance from the cartoon to your screen: JotNot

Closing the distance from the cartoon to your screen: JotNot published on 5 Comments on Closing the distance from the cartoon to your screen: JotNot

I love drawing Noise to Signal, but I’ll admit it’s sometimes frustrating. Especially when I’m away from my desk.

Here’s the workflow I used to use:

  • rough out the cartoon in pencil
  • on tracing paper over the cartoon, draw the cartoon in marker, brush or dipped pen
  • scan the ink drawing
  • troubleshoot the scanning software
  • rescan the ink drawing
  • touch it up, often adding shading, in Photoshop

Sure, you suffer for your art. But that’s a whole lot of steps for a fart joke.

So when I got a 12″ Wacom Cintiq for my birthday last year, I was delirious with joy. It took a while to get used to, but now I have the workflow down to:

  • plug in the various cables for the Cintiq
  • find the stylus
  • rough, “ink” and shade the cartoon in Photoshop on the Cintiq

Which is a lot more efficient… except all those cables and adapter boxes isn’t a trivial matter if I want to doodle while we watch TV in bed, or draw at a café (where they usually look a little askance at the guy hauling out a laptop-sized drawing tablet, paperback-sized connection box and rat-sized power supply, on top of the laptop and power supply he’s already got on the tippy little table).

Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled with the Cintiq. Thrilled. With. The. Cintiq. Got that, Wacom Giving-Away-Free-Products Division? Thrilled.

Rob shooting a cartoon with his iPhoneBut I’d also like a simpler option, especially when I’m on the road. There, my usual workflow involves shooting the cartoon with a Canon SLR, importing it into Photoshop by way of iPhoto, and performing a certain amount of surprisingly time-consuming magic on it to make the paper uniformly white.

I’ve tried shooting the cartoon with my iPhone, but so far have been unimpressed with the results.

Until today. Catherine Winters, who almost certainly ought to be cartooning because she has a wicked sense of humour, told me about an iPhone app called JotNot. It’s $4.99, but there’s a free version that watermarks your image, displays ads on your iPhone and lacks a few other goodies.

The promise is that JotNot will create crisp, clean, high-contrast images from your documents and whiteboards – not unlike a higher-res fax. And while that isn’t the kind of quality I want for any images I’ll ever be printing, that could work for shooting quick drawings from my sketchbook. So does it?

Untouched iPhone shot of a cartoon

That’s the untouched iPhone photo, from my Olympic sketchbook. I didn’t work to hard to keep the light at all uniform, and the result is a pretty fierce gradient darkening toward the lower left corner. Turning the paper into pure white without sacrificing (too much) drawing quality is typically what consumes most of the time in this process.

But our friends at JotNot promise to do that for me. Do they deliver?

JotNot screen

Above, the photo in JotNot; you drag the corners to eliminate any distortion caused by shooting at a bit of an angle.

Note the ad. Also note I’m not really interested in searching 50 million singles. There’s an argument for the pro version.

Revised version of cartoon

This is JotNot’s automatically cleaned-up version of that scan. For the most part, it’s really not bad at all – the blacks are crisp, with only a few dropouts, and until you get to the darkest part of that shadow, the whites are white.

But there’s still a lot of noise from the shadow as you get to the lower left. This might well be acceptable if you were shooting a text document… but for the cartoon, it would require a lot of work to tidy up.

Improved image

That’s more like it! I reshot the cartoon, this time moving the sketchbook into better light. If you looked very closely, you’d still see a little noise in the lower left… but much, much less.

So what’s the verdict? I’m impressed, and surprised. Once I gave it some decent lighting, JotNot did a bang-up job. I’d love to have something higher-res (this looks pretty nifty) on the road, but I could easily see myself using JotNot for cartoon-blogging an event. And while Photoshop Mobile gives me more control over image adjustments – which would likely take me a minute or two to tweak – JotNot just got it right in seconds. (The watermark is a non-starter, of course, so I’m going to shell out my five bucks in just a minute and buy the full version.)

Expect to see a few more quick sketches here, then.

(What’s still missing: an easy way to post from my iPhone to a Webcomic-powered WordPress site. Ideas?)

Relaxing and doing nothing? There’s an app for that

Relaxing and doing nothing? There’s an app for that published on 1 Comment on Relaxing and doing nothing? There’s an app for that

This one’s in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you’re never really 100% present in physical space.

Oh, sure, it has its drawbacks – the car accidents, the walking into parking meters, the wedding that got called off because you just had to Twitpic a photo of the moment to your tweeps (awkward, as you were the bride).

So here’s a salute to all of us who proud members of the hive mind.

And if you’re not just a member of the hive mind, but helping to build it, you’ll seriously want to consider attending ReadWriteWeb‘s 2010 Mobile Summit (facilitated by friend-of-the-show Kaliya Hamlin). It looks like it’ll rock.

And if you’d like to see this one being drawn, here’s the high-speed version…

…and here’s the full video!

“Be my friend… Godfather.”

“Be my friend… Godfather.” published on No Comments on “Be my friend… Godfather.”

What is it about the mob that makes me think “social media”? Is it the opening scene of The Godfather, where Don Corleone forces Bonasera to ask him to be his friend? Is it the resemblance of most Terms of Service to loan shark agreements? Is it just that the incessant torrent of Mafia Wars advertising has finally taken its toll?

Whatever the reason, here y’go. For the first time in a while, this one was drawn with an actual pen on genuine used-to-be-a-tree paper. And then shot on an iPhone.

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