you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

mediamixx radio contest: illustration and animation for a Flash ad on PRWeek.com in February 2006. mediamixx radio is a proprety of MWW Group, an ad agency I did some work for back in January.

The hand animation turned out better than I had hoped for. The first couple of iterations looked terrifying, like a Lego man.

From this one ad, I’ve gotten a few referrals from Adam, an account manager at PRWeek. He’s been referring clients over to me if they need a designer.

WebMacro, that’s what! It’s an obscure little language that makes Googling for it a nightmare due to its extremely generic name choice. I say “obscure little language” because I’ve never heard of it before working at Paltalk. Google “sites that use WebMacro” then google “sites that use ColdFusion” and “sites that use PHP” or any other language and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve never seen books on it at Barnes and Noble and I know of NO other site that uses it aside from us. It’s not very powerful at all because you still need Java backend code. It’s not a stand alone scripting language like ColdFusion or PHP.

Add to that to the fact that information on WebMacro is pretty scant and even the site’s documentation is utter crap. Go look up modulo yourself and see what happens. For you non-geeks, modulo is an operator that divides 2 numbers and gives you back the remainder. Example:

5 modulo 3 is 2 (5/3 = 1 remainder 2). 9 modulo 3 is 0 (9/3 = 3 with no remainder).

When is this useful? Plenty of places. I wanted to use this to determine if a database result set would make several even rows, of if the last row would have some empty cells. In the real world, it’s be like this: let’s say you had $20 in your pocket and 3 kids and it’s allowance day. You want to give each kid the same amount of money so they don’t fight, and figure out how much you would have left for yourself. 20 mod 3 = 2. You’d have $2 left… enough to get half a Starbuck’s coffee.

I eventually figured out how to do what I wanted after a few hours, but it was just annoying. So who uses WebMacro? Here’s a list from their site. This is a pretty shitty list.

I try to use free, open source software whenever I can. Why pay for a commercial product when something free works just as well, if not better. For some programs, there really are NO alternatives (Illustrator and Photoshop come to mind), but for simple tasks like transfering files or chatting, many free programs will do the job quite nicely.

No such thing as a free lunch, you say? Well, that isn’t entirely true. Fortunately, there are still a lot of people left in the computer world who want to preserve the spirit of a truly open and free internet. Open source collaboration and sharing was the original way people did things, until Microsoft came along and changed that entire model, closing their source and charging gobs of money for mediocre software.

It’s in the best interest of corporate software makers to keep releasing new versions of the software so they can get more money out of you. How many versions of Word do you need, for Pete’s sake? It’s a word processor! You type stuff and print it out.

Here’s a list of software I use. I’ll start with the most obvious:

• Mozilla Firefox (web browser): it took IE until version 7, released just a few weeks ago, to come up with tabbed browsing. Firefox has had it for years. Why bother with IE? Improved security? Tabbed browsing? No thanks. I already have that with FF.
• Filezilla (FTP): free alternative to CuteFTP which I used for years, but got sick of looking for my registration code.
• Winamp (music player): anything pre-version 3 is good. Anything after is bloated crap. Look on oldversion.com for it.
• GAIM (Instant Messaging): replaces AOL IM, MSN and Yahoo!, all in 1 program. best of all, no ads.
• VLC Media Player: THE best video player out there, in my opinion. Plays almost every format I’ve thrown at it, plus it totally bypasses the DVD region scheme DRM bullshit so I can watch the movies from any part of the world.

This has got to be the stupidest and most miserly shopping offer I have ever seen from a web store: free UPS shipping after rebate. With many major retailers offering free shipping outright, MacMall has the nerve to pretend that they’re giving you a good deal. Most people are used to sending in rebates for products, but a MIR for shipping? Sorry MacMall, free shipping after rebate is NOT an incentive for me to buy from you. I’ll stick with companies that offer genuine free shipping like Buy.com and Amazon.

They offer free shipping if you spend over $25, and most items qualify for the offer. They make me feel good being their customer and reward me with discounts and points. I like shopping with them because they don’t make me do any work. MacMall’s tactics, on the other hand, just makes them look dishonest and shady.
Free shipping for “most orders over $99… other restrictions apply.” Oh, do they ever! Limit 1 rebate per 90 day period, with a maximum of $40 rebated. Please allow 6-8 weeks to process. They do this so they can hold onto your money as long as they can. For what reason? To pad their books? To aggregate that money from thousands of customers and collect the interest on it? Possibly. The other answer is that many people forget to send in the rebate or want to deal with the hassles.
Screw you, MacMall. I’ll take my business elsewhere.

If you’re trying to load variables from an external file into Flash and seeing weird characters or your strings not showing up at all, you may be saving it in a format Flash doesn’t like.

Learned the hard way today by trying to be cute and saving it as Unicode. Flash can understand ANSI and UTF-8.

For a technology staffing company called Enable Group Inc.

This is for my dear friend, who I won’t name (partly because he’s a lawyer and can sue my ass five ways to Sunday), who asked me to help him “be cool”.

The dork is supposed to represent my friend. And the girl is supposed to represent a girl telling him to talk to the hand. The alfalfa sprout’s a nice touch, don’tcha think?

UPDATE: I was just informed by another friend that my friend’s name is written right on the CD. oops! :)

Is it me or were people feeling a touch less festive this year? I didn’t see many costumers Halloween weekend and yesterday, on the actual day of Halloween, I spotted only a handful of people dressed up on their way to afterwork parties. People on my block didn’t put out any bats and pumpkins this season. No window silhouettes, no inflatable Frankensteins, skulls or any of the other requisite tacky decorations. Nada.

Was it the weather? It certainly was a LOT colder this Halloween than last year’s. I remember going to a big costume event last year and just wearing short sleeves under my costume. These last 2 weeks felt like the dead of winter!

…Or were people in less of a mood to party it up with all that’s happening in the world? It’s quite depressing with Iraq and North Korea.. and well, just Bush and his cabinet of liars and thieves in office. New Yorkers needn’t be reminded that we’re still officially on orange terror alert. Cops are still doing random baggage searches at stations, and I don’t think most people want to wear a weird costume and draw any unnecessary attention to themselves.

It might’ve been just the damn cold weather for all I know… But it really did feel a lot less festive this year. A lot of Chinese families did move into my block while those families with young kids moved away. .. or maybe it really was festive after all and I’m just too tired to notice when I come home.