WebRevolutionary

I’ve always been amazed by ultra-slow-motion video, it’s fascinating that such beauty can be revealed from seemingly mundane actions by looking deep at their transience. Who would have thought that I’d be staring at my monitor, mesmerized by a water balloon popping, or a piece of popcorn exploding.

The Schweppes company has just released a beautiful new television ad, as a part of the “Burst” campaign, filmed in Australia, which

[..] consists of five videos using slow motion cameras at 10,000 frames per second to capture the final moments in the trajectories of water balloons. The Schweppervescence moment is linked with the bubbles in the air moments after the pouring of Schweppes lemonade, dry ginger ale, mineral water, tonic or soda water.

Cool, huh?

I’ve said it before, I’m a real stickler for organization. For some odd reason, my Music collection must contain only full albums, with correct covers and ID3 tags. I just can’t stand having anything out of place. Even with this sort of near-OCD, I’ve for the longest time had a mass of Movies and TV Series’ on my computer in various formats (DivX, XviD, etc) and various resolutions. All sorted only by filename.

Thankfully, I discovered that iTunes serves as a downright excellent means for managing all this (the Movies and TV Shows tabs aren’t for nothing). Sure, it would take some time to convert my collection from random formats to MP4, but with great tools like Stomp (beautiful icon and interface) and VisualHub (not-so-beautiful icon and interface), but the outcome definitely worth it.
I painstakingly (over many weeks) converted all my media to H.264 at an iPod classic-compatible 640px wide resolution and a relatively high bitrate, then using the wonderful MetaX filled out the futuristic meta-data of each file, giving my movies automatic gorgeous covers and other details.

Finally, with a properly-sorted media library I can sleep soundly. Sure, it means when I download acquire new Movies and TV Shows I need to convert and tag them, but that only adds an extra few hours. It’s well worth it.

Heh, I can think of a few wonderful places to stick these Wonderful concept, let’s hope that the Design Police help win the war on bad design.

Via bblinks & Oneplusinfinity ? swissmiss

Being a keyboard under my ownership is a stressful job. Due to my chosen profession, candidates need to endure not only the constant tapping of fingers, but the onslaught of occasional clumsy spillages. Be it from water, soft drink or more likely a large mug of coffee, it’s important that in such a stressful tim, my chosen keyboard has the stamina to emerge from liquid catastrophe.

I’ve been through countless generic Microsoft keyboards, one expensive Logitech Multimedia number and more recently, one of the “old” Apple Keyboards. Yes, just as I thought I’d found the perfect keyboard, the hefty white Apple Wireless KB succumbed to a drowning from a half-full cappuccino. After trying for quite some time to resuscitate it, yanking out all the keys and cleaning like a mad thing, it remains sticky and mostly unresponsive. To the trash with it.

But all is not lost, a little while ago I purchased the “new” Apple keyboard. Yes, the one that is about as thin as keyboards can get and about as beautiful too. Now, being used to plugging my fingers down on standard keyboards, I was worried that this new-fangled one would not have the necessary tact or the same feel as the keyboards I was used to. However after using it for a few months I’m absolutely in love with it, it feels great and has even survived an accident involving water, a pizza and a mug of coffee, and it’s still going strong. And that’s all I ask for in a keyboard. Kudos, Apple… Now just fix the darn scrollball in this wireless Mighty Mouse.

It’s quite a sobering thing to notice that I have neglected to post in this blog for a month and a half. I am from this day making it my focus to kick-start this blog back into life, with many more articles, opinions, a re-design and just more attention. This blog deserves the attention, as I only recently discovered that it’s cracked the Technorati “Top 10K” which serves as great motivation to keep it alive. I apologize to those who have been looking for more frequent columns.

So what’s been going on in my textual absence? Not a whole lot. Continuing my freelance Web Design work, making design proposals to various people, just the norm. I hope to soon release a dedicated page for the ColdBlue Theme, and a proper, cohesive online portfolio design. This all should appear before your very eyes within the next couple of months, so keep a keen eye

Peace.