House of Scott

Santa brought me a monitor colour calibrator Christmas morning! I’d never been happy with the manual calibrations I gave my trusty LaCie monitor, so I had asked for the Huey. I guess Santa thought I needed better because the Pantone/ Gretag-Macbeth eye-one display LT was under the tree instead.

What it is is a fancy bit of software and a USB powered colour sensor that you temporarily attach to a monitor. It has suction cups for those with CRT monitors (unfortunately it leaves behind a ring of tiny suction circles when removed, but a quick spritz of glass cleaner and a paper towel took care of that) or a small led weight that attaches to the cable as a counterweight to suspend the sensor in front of an LCD monitor.

With the sensor in place you fire up the software and go through a series of tests and adjustments creating and refining a profile specific to your monitor in it’s specific lighting conditions. The software took a little sleuthing to figure out, better paper documentation would have been welcome. As it is right now it’s reminiscent of Ikea furniture instructions. But once you figure out how the interface works it’s easy going.

There was a noticeable and much improved difference between my manual and the eye-one profiles. Now I stare at rich blacks and bright whites and a rich spectrum of colour in between. If accurate colour is important to you, which it should be for anyone who does any kind of digital work, the eye-one display LT is a great investment as a mid range monitor calibrator. Sure, I got mine as a gift, but if I had bought it myself it wouldn’t have been money wasted.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViE[/video]

OK class, today we’re going to talk about Net Neutrality.What’s that you say? Long story short: The ability for everyone with similar connection speeds, regardless of location or provider, to access the same content, unrestricted.Easy enough to understand, and it seems like a good idea. This very site is possible because of net neutrality. I pay a small yearly fee for a small chunk of the internet landscape that I am free to do with as I please. My Mom can view this site at the same speed as she can Apple’s, or Canon’s or CBC’s. With a few exceptions we’re all on a level playing field.

But greed is changing that. Companies are conspiring to make a multi-tiered internet. Imagine an internet where a company can pay to be the sole search engine provider you can access. Where a company can have you surf faster on their site than the competitions, where certain services are blocked all together if they conflict with your providers. Where certain points of view can be denied solely because it may affect a companies bottom line.

Look at the other big mediums:

Print: Have you ever tried to have your views heard in print? Self publishing is prohibitively expensive for most people. Letters to the editor are only printed if they don’t offend the majority. You can print out a newsletter at Kinko’s, but how are you going to get people around the world to read it? You can’t.

Radio: Once upon a time anyone could broadcast over the airwaves. Equipment for local broadcasting was cheap. And it still is. But licences and restrictions and corporate ownership make it all but impossible now for an independent voice to be heard.

Television: Have you ever seen a Public Access television show? Commercial air time is expensive and prone to corporate censorship.

The only public venue, and quite possibly the best one, is the Internet. Blogs allow anyone to speak their piece. Anyone can make a site and say what they want, show what they want or sell what they want. Advertising is optional! The David’s can be heard alongside the Goliath’s! But their are plans in place to change that.

When the local telecommunication’s worker’s went on strike, their employer, Telus, blocked access to the union website for anyone using Telus. Roger’s offers a special package for users of third party VOIP giving them quality calls, but that package is not neccessary if you use Roger’s service! The list goes on.

Need further clarification? Ask a Ninja!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSKsSTX-i8[/video]

Search for the term ‘net neutrality’ using your favorite search engine to learn some more.Or visit these sites to learn more:Wikipedia article on net neutrality.Save the Internet!

This site was made possible by Net Neutrality and the letter D (for democracy).

Saturday night was the monthly Vancouver Comic Jam! It was packed with a bunch of new faces, which was really cool to see. They seemed to be animation students so there was a motivation to churn out better work since they were hemorrhaging with talent! For the most part everyone had a great vibe and a good time was had by all.
Click on the pretty image (done by someone other than myself) to have a look at the body of work for January. It’s good stuff, but probably not safe for work or the morally righteous.

The sad thing is, I can apply about half of the those statements to my own life. Which is what makes it funny in a collapse on the floor in tears of sorrow kind of way.

Found through Wendy.

The rest of the photos can be found in this Flickr set.

My place of employment did some work for the current Barenaked Ladies tour and the promotional company tossed a couple of tickets our way as a thank you. I haven’t been keeping up with BNL for their last couple of albums but one thing I can say for sure is that they have perfected the art of showmanship.

Barenaked Ladies seem to pop up as markers for a few firsts in my life. First indie band I listened to back in the early 90’s when my step brother played their Yellow Tap. First CD I ever owned. First concert I ever went to. (Gordon Tour in 1993 with Captain Tractor opening at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre if I remember correctly)

Great improv on stage (The Bald Parade - a time killer consisting of various bald crew members they insisted on pointing out as another bald crew member fixed Ed Robertson’s wireless system.) that had me almost falling out of my seat. Plus an impressive dance routine by the band that seems to be a mainstay of their live shows.

If you get the chance see them live at least once. Definitely worth the price of the ticket. Not that I paid anything…

And this is for Katie.I had no lighter but I thought this might be a suitable alternative.:

My camera’s video feature timed out! Pretend you sneezed then watch the rest!

Now I need to see about finding a bootleg of the show.

It came to me that all of the major players in the superhero world all have a female counterpart. (Unless they are one themselves. But strangely enough there are no male versions of the female leads like Wonder Woman! Shame.) Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man has Spider-Woman and Spider-Girl, Superman has Supergirl, Batman has Batgirl and so on. Which got me thinking about some of the lesser heroes and potential counterparts for them.

A trailer for Ghost Rider put me on my track:

It’ll be a great popcorn flick but back to the task at hand. A female Ghost Rider.

This’ll be a multi-parter from idea to execution, first up: Research!

Research is important. I could take the easy way out and just give Ghost Rider a pair of large breasts, but what fun is there in that? I’ll strip it down to it’s bare essence and build a new character from scratch.

Checklist:

Must be a woman.
Must ride motorcycle.
Must have skull head.
Must be badass
Must be vengeful.

Sketches come later, this is all about source material.

A strong woman would suit with a bit of a biker aesthetic, the first thing to come to mind: Suicide Girls. But the old Alberto Vargas pin up girls came to mind and they would work great for pose inspiration. Betti Page has a perfect body type.

I think in a stream of concious, flitting from one idea to the next, no matter how off beat or bizzare, the goal is to find and distill as many ideas as possible in order for the best ones to gel together and rise to the surface.

Roller Derby! Strong, athletic, beautiful, confident woman kicking ass! If this idea were to make it into a story, that would be her sport of choice. And Vancouver (the closest major metropolitan city to me) has it’s own league! How cool is that!? And the teams have their own Myspace pages!

I really need to do something to my Myspace page. Maybe a lounge theme! Yeah! Wait, back on track.

I could put her on a Harley or something but that would be the obvious choice. Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’ got me thinking about American Chopper which got me thinking about Mikey which got me thinking about scooters which got me thinking about Vespa’s which got me thinking that would be the perfect source of transport for her.

A flaming skull head may not be awesome enough. Maybe a Los Días de los Muertos theme. That’s got some of the most beautiful folk art that has a slightly creepy edge that would work perfect! Painted bike. Costumed rider. Rollerskates. It is time to get sketching.

I think the point of this post, for those who are still reading, is that ideas come from all areas. To live life experiencing it from only one view point is to miss a world or really great stuff. That last sentance was pure elegance. When fleshing out an idea, you need to find your inspiration from everywhere you can. Jump out of your personal bubble and see what there is to see!
One thing I can’t stand is someone who knocks everything that isn’t their personal taste. There’s more than one genre of music, more than one religion, more than one way to cook chicken! You owe it to yourself to look into everything and bring that experience into your work and into your life.

Sometimes an idea seems good at the time of inception. But upon delving into what was thought to be an engaging project, in reality quickly becomes a chore. So a decision needs to be made: Continue without heart and produce something of possibly dodgy quality? Or drop it for new and hopefully better ideas?

New and better it is. So there will be no more Ghost Rideress. Research was done, preliminary sketches commited to paper, but nothing was really panning out. So it’s on to brighter things! Speaking of which:

After upgrading Wordpress to the latest edition, I added a little bit of code I found after reading a Business 2.0 article on 25 Startups to Watch. meebo is an IM multi-client that’s entirely web based. Nothing too remarkable in itself, but it has a nice interface and works well, which lets me clean out some hard drive space and lets me access IM accounts from any computer.

What really caught my eye was meebo me. The results of which now sit on top of the sidebar. A simple little widget that lets me chat with anyone on the site. The visitor can stay anonymous (hopefully refraining from slinging too many insults) and offers a new level of interaction between user and provider.

So if you see that I’m online, fire off a message, or a question, or just say hello. I’m here for you.