Daily misery

visit listenagain.org, my puny community art project.

Took me about an hour to put this up. Love it. Thanks, Erica :).

ps: I’m pretty bad at following the manual.

The Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.

I couldn’t help but clicked through all the photos. Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to find out how it feels like to be that other person’s most important person.

via yewknee.com

Back in the days when we were really poor, my uncle gave me a roller blade for my 9th birthday. It was made with a combination of discarded plywood, alligator skin and olive oil. He would teach me all these wonderful tricks which I had, over a period of a couple years, mastered well. We didn’t have the money to buy a video camera back then to record all my moves but they are pretty similar to this video. It brings back memories from those glory years of my childhood.

say what you want about post-processed photo but he takes photo like no other.

frown upon the gas mileage but great ads nevertheless.

Chris is one of my favorite etsy’s seller. His artwork is amazing.

now you know why such dream demands a beautiful mind.

more flying photos at boredstop.com

Amazing art works. Como 3 and Puglis 3 are some of my favorites. Visit blublu.org

The fifth issue of Five to Nine titled Polaroid is out. Methink it’s the best issue evar.

Five to Nine is a PDF magazine published by skwiot/smith. The latest issue is a collection of 78 polaroids from 24 designers. You can even purchase a print copy if you really like it. Yes, the online pdf is free :)

I ran upon this fascinating display of illustrative art in Rotunda Gallery today. This gigantic comic narrates the founding history of Republic Czech, a Central European country with a very rich, yet brutal history. What makes this gallery interesting is how such a dark history is portrayed in a light-hearted and funny tones, with teaspoon bits of satire and parody spices thrown into it. Like the one shown above (taken with my lousy mobile camera).

Go see it while it’s up.

visit her portfolio

Some of you are wondering where do those random images in the top header come from. They are from my flickr favorites.

Back then, one of my ex-gf loved to wear my big size soccer jersey to bed. Actually she liked wearing all my clothes and we had a couple of small fights about that because I was running out of stuff to wear! But had she known how to transform a big size soccer jersey into a sexy mini skirt, I might not have complained that much at all.

In the spirit of today’s theme, which is uhm…turtles having butt sex and whatnots, I hereby present you the ultimate Mocha Liquid Kiss.

Mortimer & Bracket is Andrew Chesworth’s senior thesis project at MCAD.

I spent over 16 months working on it, in addition to my other projects, classes, and my internship at Make, LLC (which became my full time job right after school.) I finished the project just a few months ago, before my graduation in May of 2007. A lot of sweat, blood and love went into “Mortimer & Bracket”, and I hope you enjoy their story!

I did enjoy it. A lot! Nice work.

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous points out this interesting bit:

Writer Sam Anderson maintains that the bottom of your queue of movies to rent from netflix.com is “the person you want to be - Eraserhead, the eight hour BBC Bleak House, the complete Werner Herzog - while the top is the person you actually are: wedding crashers, Scary movie 4, the bridges of Madison country….

While I don’t have a netflix account, I’m curious as to how my movies selection defines me. Luckily I keep a record of movie ratings. So assuming if the lowest ratings in the queue is ‘the person I want to be’ and the top is the person I actually am… (I know this is a flawed assumption but Sam’s hypothesis is not necessarily making sense either)

the person I want to be

the person I actually am

So we can somewhat safely assume that what I really want to be is some kind of ugly-to-the-max chainsaw-winding freakshow that is an accidental byproduct of a nuclear lab, who happens to live in another dimension (or a cave in the middle of a desert) where he can only talk to human using specific, 4th dimension channel in a short, limited timespan. That or I just want to live in a museum filled with stone age nomads.

But what I really am is a normal guy riding in a yellow mini van with magical and mystical creatures and they can fly and make colorful mini explosions with a wag of their mini fingers and they are so cute with their mini-decibel chipping sound and their mini tails and mini wings. That ugly-to-the-max, one eye, flabby creature who has no name has to sit on the back because he tries to eat all my mini fairies. Samuel Jackson is the driver and Christina Ricci is the pathfinder.

This is crazy. Never would have thought such place exists on earth.

…These are the Sea Forts, that were used to defend London in World War Two. They are off the North Kent coast in the Thames Estuary.
For full set, please visit the flickr page.

• Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All
  He got a point and he’s funny but man it would stress me out having him as a colleague. Software tester/developer with an interest in statistical analytic topics should read this.
• Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 1
  A good read. So much can be put into context here in regards to recent happenings in US foreign policy.
• Pangrams for typographers
  Good pointers on designing javascript based API
• YTMND - catonakeyboardinspace
  This cat thing is killing me….
• Some Simple SQL Rules to Live By
• Eleeno orbit watches, Artist mirrored wristwatch, with Orbital design.
  I’m getting this watch. Tech-whore me am.
• Writer Zone
  Gonna try this Microsoft Live Writer. Seems pretty cool.
• Total fuckwad
  Amen.
• flexlib - Google Code
  A bunch of really nice UI components for flex.
• Christophe Coenraets » New version of Salesbuilder Flex / AIR application
  very nice UI design

Don’t worry, he’s fine.

I am referring to this wonderful, moving photoblog chronicling the love and life story of Patrick (Taiwan) and Madi (China).

这些照片让我想要出走——没有特别目的地，只是单纯的想要为了喜欢而冲动的收拾上路…

note: Some of the photos are NSFW.

He’s a prominent player in the area of data visualization. This is one of the best talks I’ve seen on TED. Watch out for the finale.

Since I launched the wefeelfine’s mashup, a couple of users had sent over some interesting (and funny) screen shots.

I created a flickr set to collect these pictures. Send them over if you stumble across anything interesting.

it’s their commenters.

Amen to that, xkcd.

Gee, I really need to figure out a good name for this project, eh.

Anyway, I modified some of the codes to take advantage of the recently updated API on wefeelfine.org. (Thanks Sep). The whole thing should run smoother and faster now. I will be optimizing some of the codebase over time to get this baby lean and mean.

Also today, I found another practical usage for the project - love hunting. Here’s my brief and interesting chat transcript with pinkpau.

the pinkpau’s MSN nickname -> just a bit of sensitivity…
Alvin says: girl always says tthat!
Alvin says: what they really want is a lot alot more sensitivity
the pinkpau says: coz its true!
Alvin says: then come out and say you expect ‘a lot more sensitivity’ from us, not ‘a bit of’.
Alvin says: for us, there’s a huge difference

…

the pinkpau says: but even if we told u guys we expect a lot of /a bit of sensitivity, we’re not gonna get it anyway >_<
Alvin says: that’s true. so whats the point
the pinkpau says: -____________-
the pinkpau says: see u guys are such meanies
Alvin says: i am just being honest.
the pinkpau says: and there is no room for niceness?
Alvin says: well there is, if we want sex
Alvin says: sory, i just crash unrealistic realism onto your front door.
the pinkpau says: that is SO like a man!
Alvin says: i am pretty sure there’re some lovely frogs living the fairy dream out there waiting for girls like you.
the pinkpau says: all the frogs are in porridge
Alvin says: save them then.
Alvin says: some men are worth saving.
the pinkpau says: barely come across them these days
Alvin says: because they are buried under the porridge!
the pinkpau says: ok
Alvin says: here
Alvin says: link
Alvin says: all the sensitive man
Alvin says: in the world
the pinkpau says: im one of those ppl who likes to poke around the bottom of the bowl with a spoon to get all the yummy stuff
Alvin says: currently
Alvin says: poke aroundis no good. sometimes you might end up getting cockroaches on your spoon.
the pinkpau says: hahahaha thats so cool
the pinkpau says: not the cockroaches but ur map

…

Here’s a little mashup I created using wefeelfine.org’s data and Google Map. It’s interesting to see some of the result of the geodata visualization. For instance:

Most recent feelings.
Most recent ‘angry’ feelings.
Feelings on April 17th, 2007 (the day after Virginia Tech shooting).
Most recent ’suicidal’ feelings. (it can also be used to solve potential social problem :P)

A brief description from wefeelfine.org:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)…The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day…

*I haven’t test this thing extensively. Things might break.
Update: for those interested, the source is here.

each pink marker represents one person feeling ‘pretty’.

I love his dancing and how he runs into pole.

I love robots that blow up when faced with a paradox.

I love he is dorky and lame and sucks at everything and doesn’t know it.

Check out the lovelines project by the dynamic duo ~ Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar.

You know you want it. No it doesn’t make you less of a man.

Thanks to Adam Betts, you can customize the color of the famous duck. I even prepared the photoshop file for this pinky version.

Go grab it.

I can’t stop laughing.

Father and Daughter - a short animated film by Michael Dudok De Wit. Moving and sad.

Heartache alert.

For all the art fans in SF, California, you might want to go to this expo.

- by.

This is a story about my trip back to Malaysia a few months ago. Chronicled and illustrated by Karen Woon.

Oh and here’s a video of fluffy the puppy.

Story of the week:
After reading Joel on software, especially on the chapter where there was a huge exodus of Windows developers due to the ridiculous amount of work they had to put in just so they could support multiple version of Windows when Microsoft decided to break backward compatibility by going from Win API -> Win 16 bit -> Win 32 Bit - > WinFS, suddenly I feel like a crying baby for all the whines and bitchings I’ve had over the years about browsers differences / incompetence. At least on the web, browsers are actually heading to the right direction, conforming more to the web standards as they evolve (css improvement, better DHTML supports(IE 7), improved XSLT support(safari) ).

TV of the week:
Tonight Niptuck’s finale is all about the awesomeness. Great ending and the drama has matured over the years. Great finale song too. They pretty much did a free MTV for whoever the singer is.

LOL of the week:
“Tyron Honeybee would be my gay porn movie name” said Steven Colbert just now on his Report show. I need to stop watching the Report. Not healthy for the heart.

Quote of the week:

The answer to “Why doesn’t this feature exist?” is usually “By default features don’t exist. Somebody has to implement them.”

It’s not like every feature you can think of comes out of your brain fully tested and implemented, and then some PM somewhere files a bug to have your feature removed. Features start out nonexistent and somebody has to make them happen.

Raymond Chen, Microsoft senior developer
23-JUN-2005

Photo of the week:

WTF of the week:
There are two entries actually. It’s amazing how out-of-the-world some people can get these days.

The following video was done by a group of young local Malaysians from MMU (they call themselves the BURP Production). I highly recommend it.

I’m not sure what this is for, it could be a final project, a portfolio demo or they were just trying to have fun. But who cares, this is a very well done, semi-professional, kinda funny, somewhat of a parody MTV of the song ‘Operator The Line Is Dead’ by Jason Lo (another local artist I talked briefly about a couple months back).

Remember the time when you were still young and couldn’t tell the difference between colors and races and certainly couldn’t care less about what people around you were yapping about but to just chiong directly to your dream only to hit the wall so hard you asked God why for like 100 times before picking yourself up preparing for another major assault on the same dream? Sounds like a terrible cliche but God this video makes me feel at least 20 years older.

But even at the age of 44, I can still stand the chilling 30 Fahrenheit weather and line up in front of Best Buy with many others at 4am on last Friday morning. And yes while everyone is busy building up their credit balance on Black Friday Sales buying ipods, 70inch HDTV, hard drive and whatnots, I got this, and only this:

It has some very cool cutesy features. Like for example you can dye Barbie’s hair with different colors, and there are a wide selection of accessories like clippers, ear rings and etc to choose from. I also bought a new pair of dress so that Barbie can change her cloth to purple ones because my girlfriends told me Barbie looks nice in purple when she’s preparing for a party or something but if she’s going to a private date with, say Ken, then red dress is more sexy. So I can switch back and forth between red and purple, purple and red and red and….I am just so excited. *scream*

Ok ok, it’s for my youngest sister.

I had been reading Jen Wang’s journal religiously ever since I started reading Flight I/II. She’s a great storyteller with a pair of insanely art waving hands. Take the boring and ignorable pre-flight safety demo for example. I am sure most of us don’t pay much attention to it, and for the few of us who do, we are actually staring at the air hostess boobs. Sad but true.

But Jen thinks otherwise (not that she doesn’t like the male hostess butt or deep blue eyes, I’m sure).

If you like her work, go give her a pattie on the back. The more young artists in this world, the more peace will the future holds on the next fold. You can quote me on that :0).

I am really into red wine lately. Nothing feels better than a glass of tasty, thick Beringer’s merlot when the winter chill hits in. Recently, wine has also been proven (somewhat accurately :P) to be able to get that extra pounds of weight off your body. Cheers!

Say hi to Erica. She’s our associate interactive designer. This picture was taken on the day before Halloween when she came in with a colored purple hair. You couldn’t really see the ‘purple’ here due to my usual inept photography skill (stupid warm light exposure mode).

A quick look at the right hand side of my desk. There’s the pixar lamp, Kuku Kiki (the plant), vintage multi-buttons office phone, a box of tissue and a family photo. Oh and the Javascript table sheet too. As many Daily Miserys’ avid readers would know, my last office plant, Kiki Lala didn’t last very long. She died of dehydration, much to the fault of my own incurable disease - ‘lackofattention-ditis’. But Kuku Kiki has been doing well so far, in fact she’s been with me ever since I started working at UNL. That’s 8 months long! Due to this long awaited achivement, I am thinking of taking another step forward in my life by fathering a child.

I called this the No Time No Hassle Single Man Dinner Set. Living a rush life filled with stress and ladies, one can only imagine how difficult it is for me to find time to cook. The solution is fairly simple actually. Throw everything into a steamer and steam it. Organic - check. Healthy - check. No extra flavoring - check. Quick and easy - check.

Nothing much to say about this picture actually. Just me showing my ‘working’ face. I’m usually more happy looking. Must had been some bugs that pissed me off.

If you dream to become an illustrator (secretly, I have always wanted to be one) or cartoonist or comic artist, you can’t miss the Flight collection. I was so impressed with Flight 3 I ended up ordering Flight Vol 1 and 2 from Amazon. It is a collection of short stories narrated by wonderful art works from professional artists to still-in-college students.

My favorite so far are pieces from Chris Appelhans (Vol 1) and Jen Wang (vol 2).

Flight makes you float in the sky and recaptures what it was like to play around with dreams and tales.