Arrgghh!! I'm Sick

I never get sick!!!


Anyway. A much needed Amorphic update programmed last night at Borders in Union Square. It's kind of a nice office space, rent costs a cup of coffee (or tea in my case), given that you can fight it out for the limited real-estate they have.



I added just a bit of glowiness to this app, but not overkill like the Yahoo! Answers cloud. The big deal was re-writing the entire textfield input box into a class (which was totally hacked together). I'm surprised it works as well as it does.


Also, check out my friends game Mob Zombies. It's looking damned good so far, probably the best game made with processing yet!! It looks like an insane person wrote this game. In fact, it is made by insane persons.

Xenoflora

As some may know... I have a distinct obsession with bizarre tadpole/sperm looking alien micro-organism/machines. These bored nights without furniture or Heroes inspires me to do some good ol fashioned artwork, via my tabby-pc that hasn't been getting much attention as of late.

Live Yahoo! Answers cloud

Something I've been working on internally for Yahoo!, for their cafeteria.
Inspired by Robert Hodgin's work. Go check his stuff out at Flight404... totally brilliant.

This gave me a chance to try out opengl blend functions and learn how to pull off neat light-like effects! Very tasty...

This application grabs Yahoo! Answers rss feed and finds the most common words and then displays them into the cloud. Words get bigger as their frequency grows, effectively showing what topics of interest is the general Answers world talking about at this very moment.

Ofcourse I had to take some artistic liberties and filter out many stop-words like "the", "and", etc.

Did I mention I only had two days to fully work on it? Yeah, kinda my fault though since I was technically given a week but only really had two days left after I finally thought of a concept worth sketching out. This is why it's not very conceptually deep, and is just mostly eye-candy thrown together at the last minute.






I've been using a Mac for a week straight now. I'm loving it. The powerbook ain't that heavy, although it is slightly heavier than my tabby even with its dvd-drive removed. I must say I love it. Everything about it is fast and easy, and the OS is fast to get used to, although I'm still trippin' over hotkeys here and there (almost lost this entire blog post doing a wrong hotkey!!).

I still love this city even though it's had its ups and downs. Got TWO parking tickets today (!!!) once while I was IN MY CAR waiting for Aaron to get our bagels. Yikes! The other was clearly a mistake and I shall contest it.

Parking woes aside, Starbucks on Union Square is open 24/7 and there is free wi-fi nearby. The Borders is open till 11pm most weeknights and plenty of people packed in there up until closing hours. And alas on Saturday nights the city is made of win to use 4chan parlance.

Oh, me linking 4chan is you visiting at your own risk. The place is definitely NSFW.

Post-it Pixel Wall

Installation costs: 28 dollars.

Find the rest at http://www.flickr.com/photos/benvoluto/sets/72157594574604881/

Chinese New Years Parade

Subsidized by your friends the American big businesses.

I'm on the fourth floor of Borders next to Union Square right now, watching the Chinese New Years parade. Roughly 10,000 people are down there at the moment.

Alas, no pictures due to lack of camera. Need to get one soon! This corner of Borders is getting mighty crowded, lots of people peeking outside the windows, lots of people across the square at Macy's packed by the windows.

Took a photo right outside borders, nothing to do with the parade but hey...









Ah.... a friendly person let me borrow her camera and SD card, images uploaded for all to see!

New city, new story.

Well, I've moved to SF, if only temporarily!

Crashing at Aaron Koblin's place at the moment, and will embark on an apartment hunt tomorrow with my little cousin who's going to school in SF (and commuting from Berkeley!).

It's a fresh start, and I'll need to be blogging this experience. More later on this adventure.