Black Cat Blog

Photo updates from Protohaus Shanghai

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:02:00 +0000

The rest of the set at Leo's Flickr.

Reel 08

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:20:00 +0000

I'll just put this here for now...

Works included:

+ Motion Theory
+ Protohaus
+ Yahoo! Design Innovation Team

Shanghai, Reel, Berimbau update.

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:47:00 +0000

I've been living in Shanghai now. It's been a blast! Perhaps an update on a later date about this whole live-in-china deal.

For now, here's an updated demo-reel, quicktime . I'll post this on youtube some day in the near future as well.

Projects shown in order:

Motion Theory - Nike One, Particle spring ball and procedural animation.
Fidg't Visualizer
Nokia zoomable interface prototype
Flickr "Viewport" prototype
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team "Bookscape" prototype.
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team "Answers Cloud" prototype.
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team "Trips" prototype.
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team "Query Bursts" prototype.
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team "Del.icio.us Jellyfish" prototype.

I didn't want to make this too public early on since there's quite a few things in there that potentially fall into some obscure NDA categories but after showing this to plenty of colleagues I feel somewhat safer in their confidence about this.

Our Berimbau team has also launched a new website under the Ninja Workshop moniker. The game went through a ton of development this summer and we're currently in the middle of redesigning the combat gameplay.

XHaus

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:32:00 +0000

Some call it XHaus, or what I personally call "Y!Fail" or internally, "Y!Bang" *smirk*. Yahoo let go of our team, and it's really -really- unfortunate. If anything, it's extremely short-sighted of Yahoo!.

As a "last word" for my fellow colleagues there, I want to thank above all Joy Mountford for starting our team and vision, and Ben Clemens for keeping everything in order and feeding us delicious lunches. They've worked many hard hours and fought to the bitter end for our team.

Every time a colleague asks me "Mike, why the hell are you working at Yahoo!?" I defended them. "Yahoo! is not about search!" I say. "They are a web portal and a nest for innovation, especially in our offices in San Francisco!" For weeks we were certain this would not affect us. I had hope, real hope, that what we believed in, what we defended, were true.

However, when push came to shove, Yahoo! fell flat on its face. This is not a criticism of Yahoo! per-se, but for the silly corporate squabble that puts finances too far above innovation.

To my colleagues in no particular order: Aaron Koblin, Aaron Meyers, Parul, Doug Fritz, Ray Mcclure, Juliana Yamashita, Daniel Massey, Carrie Burgener, Jen Lau, Jenny Chowdhury, Vaibhav Bhawsar, and Mia -- you are all by far the most professional and competent team I have ever worked with and it has been a tremendous honor working with you. My only wish leaving YHaus is to some day cross paths again and pick up where we have left off.

Shiny Happy Fits of Rage

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 11:42:00 +0000

Kupo and I started a album project called the "Shiny Happy Fits of Rage", a phrase taken from one of Kimya Dawson's songs on the Juno soundtrack.

We haven't a page for this album yet so I'll post some links here for you to listen.

The first one is our trial run called Ladybug Editor. It's sort of our thesis to the Shiny Happy Fits of Rage; to set a laid back, merry sunday afternoon feel with a twitch of video-gamerism.

The second song that I've just completed editing tonight is called Counterfeit Kitten. It's slightly more aggressive but equally as mellow. I hope you have good weed!

Works

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:58:00 +0000

List of works have now been posted in the section above. It's a bunch of links right now, the best I can do in my limited time. In addition, a ton of clients are left out because their rights aren't cleared yet. Ugh :/

Darkness, Darling

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:16:00 +0000

The songs I've been making the past couple of days have been culminating in an album of sorts, "Darkness, Darling". Go there to check out new songs, progress notes, etc.

Drums, Strings, and Piano

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:34:00 +0000

New music. Oh, I'm truly in love with sampling!!

I can't remember where I found these violin samples. I think I found them from some internet collection of violin recordings as an example of "gypsy" violin playing styles. Anyway, I threw in there the Amen Break along with a chunk of some crazy-ass drum solo. Also, the song begins with a bassline from Birdland.

I might run out of unique samples to use at this rate, as it's terribly hard to find good, free samples off the internets. Time to learn how to sample properly?

Hush, Hush

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:58:00 +0000

I made a new song. FL Studio and the discovery of free acid drum loops gave me some motivation to make music again.

Want to talk about the Open Frameworks workshop in NYC that Zach Lieberman taught but that will have to wait till tomorrow. The Viewport project has been draining me all day... :/

Vertext, a scalable typography library!

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:25:00 +0000

There's a few exciting projects going on at design.Yahoo! right now but I will talk about them at a later date. Right now I want to introduce my new library! Vertext is a scalable typography library that pipes Processing's textMode(SHAPE) into OpenGL display-lists. What a mouthful. Long story short: LARGE LARGE TEXT, fast renders!!

View site and download Vertext.

I want to avoid any long-winded technical discussion of how it's made, but if anyone's curious they can pop me an email.

So, upon being inspired by Kupo I picked up the guitar and started plucking away. Charisma +1! Gained: Bard skills! My left-hand fingers feel all leathery now. I've been learning how to play Needle in the Hay (Elliot Smith), Title and Registration (Death Cab for Cutie), I Don't Know What I Can Save You From, and Girl From Back Then (both Kings of Convenience).

I've also finished Crysis. Imagine someone telling you an amazing story, using all sorts of big words, analogies, detailed descriptions, depicting this outrageous incredible epic and suddenly stopping mid-sentence. -_-

Other stuff to rant about (paintball, videogame design, kickboxing blah blah). Basically I have way too many hobbies and projects to keep track of but I've come to accept this and just roll with it. Whatever it takes to not be bored!

Fidg't still in the news...

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:55:00 +0000

Just a quick update.

Fidg't got posted in a blog post on smashingmagazine.com on Modern Approaches to Data Visualization, along with a bunch of other projects made by friends and colleagues from around town.

Also, it's now on the Processing front page! Thanks Casey!

I won't apologize for my lack of updates, but I do feel bad about abandoning my blog for such lengthy periods of time. I'm currently in Manila, Philippines relaxing and unwinding. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera!! (which doesn't work anyway) and am forced to buy and use one of those disposable wind-ups with no zoom. Oh well, they're fun for parties :)

There's a few Berimbau updates to make too, although I might start a new blog simply for that project. Stay tuned.

Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:31:00 +0000

Yeah.. I realize how far I'm behind everyone when it comes to web technology. I don't have a Flickr account, a delicious account, or use last.fm. I don't edit Wikipedia. Hell, I don't even use AIM anymore!

After spending the last twenty minutes looking at all the blog response on the Fidg't Visualization, I've come to the realization that I'm far far behind on everyone else with what's going on. Twitter? What's that. I barely even blog. The last time I genuinely felt I was participating on the interbutts was 1996 when I made my first Geocities page when I was in middle school. Good lord.

I believe part of the reason I haven't joined the "Web 2.0" bandwagon, with all its slick AJAX (I genuinely hate that acronym, what happened to my DHTML??) was because of my god-awful experience with working on websites in the early 00s.

In 2001 I worked at a company called Pinnacle, which later became B.I.G. (Brand Integration Group) where I was tasked to crop Maxim photos and screenshot images for FX network ALL DAY LONG. That was web-design to me. It consists of blind copy-pasting and if someone screwed up some decision making process (usually a higher-up... as there was no one below me!!) you'd have to go through each and every page to change type, or layout.

Eventually one of us got clever and decided to use Dreamweaver and automate page changes. Even that was flawed, since everything breaks down if for some reason something got left out of the pipeline. We then turned to Javascript (PHP was still in its infancy then I believe), and I was the only one in the whole damn company who cared to learn it to make my living hell of a life easier. Document.write() ftw!

But the real discouragement came from slime-ball clients. I guess this is the same in any industry but it's somehow more pronounced in web design. People would come up to me and simply ask me to do a web-site for them for free, assuming I'm a stupid college kid. And I was, I was pretty stupid. I had trouble saying no. "Clients" would include anything from family, friends, family-friends, to associates, student organizers, marketing slime, etc. Yes. This project will do well for your portfolio, but we cant pay you any money! And best of all, once you join us you're our bitch!

I'm sure you've heard this all before though. In any-case, I've avoided web-technology and its growth for about five years now, and I'm quite happy to say it's matured a lot since then. Maybe it's just my luck, but the clients I get now are much more understanding, forgiving, and respect the designers that they choose. I have a feeling that this whole "Web 2.0" is somehow my long lost brother that was a complete bratty miscreant as a kid, but has now gained some sensibility and can finally hold an intelligible dialogue.

Fidg't is launched!

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:09:00 +0000

Congrats to Protohaus/Gearon for pulling it off.

Check it out!

http://fidgt.com/

also on techcrunch

"Presenting at Innovate!Europe 2007 today is Santa Monica based PROTOMOBL with a product called Fidg’t, that aims to make social network management easier.

The concept is simple: a centralized control point for social networks. Fidg’t brings together contacts from across multiple networks and platforms allowing for the easier leveraging of social networks from the one place.

Fidg’t mobile is also a fully fledged online Instant Messaging platform that provides similar functionality to Trillian and Meebo with support for AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN/ Windows Live Messenger. Media handling on the mobile version includes the ability to post directly to Flickr or stream content from Last.fm.

The Fidg’t Visualization Tool has a wow factor to it. The tech behind it might not be exciting but visually it’s stunning (the video below probably doesn’t do it full justice). It does however require a download. Windows, Mac and Linux are all supported.

Fidg’t’s current support of social networks is limited. Three chat platforms, Flickr and Last.fm means that in its current form it’s not going to appeal to everyone. Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Eventful and Upcoming support is planned, with the Fidg’t team open to further suggestions."

OMGHAX

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:50:00 +0000

So I've been avoiding blogging and generally any form of socializing on the interbutts for the past month and a half. With the exception of Facebook, I have been completely absent from instant messaging. It isn't that I'm trying to avoid my friends. I find it refreshing to disconnect every once in a while, and get to know people in real life. Making myself inaccessible from the internet forces others to interact with me in the real world.

Or, they just ignore me altogether.

Just kidding. I love my friends. You know who you are, you're awesome!

So this Yahoo Brickhouse open house shindig went down on April 27th. I likened it to a sort of Processing orgy. All of the projects that were shown, save for one, had somewhere somehow been written with Processing. I'm sure Fry and Casey never wanted this kind of a monoculture to develop with the tool, however I'm constantly amazed by my peers with the things they're able to pull off with it.

Without rambling on too much more ("give us the damned pictures already!!" I hear) I want to give thanks to Jeff and Moto for renting us their hot hot hot multi-touch display. And for those who made it: Daniell Hebert, Daniel Massey, Tom Carden, The Nimoys (all the way from LA.. who performed for us! yay!), and our awesome DJs, event planners, technicians for making it happen.

Oh yeah, and Joy, Larry, and Ben.

These photos are taken by Ben Clemens. You can find the entire set on his flickr page.

I'm assuming these are okay to publish publicly since.... well they ARE on flickr.

The... "storm before the storm". Quick, finish that function!

Very PO'd Moto people for making them wait all day.

What will soon become the front of a hot bar.

Looks like some kind of mission control center...

Yep. Definitely a control center.

And a rave.

Flickr images are called out from the location you touch, on the planet.

I'm a bit confused why there were Taiko drummers there.

The big boss. The princess is in nother castle. Sry.

Life Drawing

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 05:26:00 +0000

Carrie kindly invited me to go do some life drawing with her at a local studio. Being slightly progressive, I bring my tablet PC there instead of any real media (not that I have any after my move anyway). Here's what came of it. The low-detail ones are quick one or two minute sessions. The stuff further down are more detailed and are ten or twenty minutes.

Arrgghh!! I'm Sick

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:09:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:16:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 07:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:37:00 +0000

Installation costs: 28 dollars.

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

Chinese New Years Parade

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:52:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:40:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 07:15:00 +0000

Hello! this is a post. I am showing David how to post. Blog post is posted.

draft is a draft

DJing woes

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 11:27:00 +0000

Sweet

See, what everyone's missing COMPLETELY here is the unwritten rules of how to run every nightclub on Earth:

There are no "types" of nightclub. If there is a place that has a bar, and a sound system, and someone to play records, they are obliged to play Top 40 records (otherwise known as "dance music" ) and possibly the occasional power ballad.

The only exception to this rule is for nightclubs that play popular hip-hop/R+B. In this case, the DJ is obliged to play only songs currently in top rotation on local top 40 and urban radio, with the occasional "underground" remixes of said songs for variety's sake.

Any DJ caught violating these guidelines is either uninformed as to how to run a nightclub, or is simply being a total dick for his/her own ego-gratification. Symptoms of this syndrome include any and all varieties of house, trance, drum and bass, breakbeats above 110 BPM (collectively known as "techno" or "rave music" ) or reggae/dancehall not currently in radio rotation.

Any patron who finds a DJ violating these guidelines is obliged, nay, REQUIRED, to sit the DJ down, explain the rules and get the party started properly. Exemptions may be made for "techno" remixes of Top 40 songs; however, any patron wishing instead to hear the "real" version of said song may demand that the DJ stop the remixed record and play the original version in its stead.

Any patron found DANCING to music which does not fall within these guidelines is clearly on drugs, and should be removed from the venue posthaste, so as to make room on the dancefloor for those wishing to dance to "regular" music.

Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

Speaking of which, I will be DJing and VJing tomorrow at the Newport Film Festival afterparty.

http://www.newportbeachfilmfest.com/Email/outreach_2006/youth.htm

New sketch

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:51:00 +0000

This time, for the girls.

I'm definitely going for a more "casual future" style. A lot of "Mr Fusion" references. Still huge influence by HTK, I can't seem to shake him. I've noticed that his stuff is very "medieval future", where he mixes archaic dress and rennaisance era styles with very future tech and angles. I think that's what gives him his look. I'm not sure if I want to approach that rennaisance angle much... I don't think I can pull it off right.

The power mod

noreply@blogger.com (Flux) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 05:57:00 +0000

A non-clothing-design post:

You know, desperation can be a great asset, especially when you lack the means and knowhow to fix something, however you MUST GET IT FIXED.

My Toshiba tablet PC has been victim to a poorly built power adapter cable. When symptoms first appeared, I thought there were problems with my batteries or with (heaven forbid) the laptop power connection, since it stopped charging altogether for a brief period of time.

This symptom came and went, and I just ignored it for the most part, thinking it might be some kind of glitch with my laptop.

Unfortunately for the past few weeks, the problem surfaced more and more often, so much so any slight shift in the power cable's position caused recharging to stop. My intuition suggested that something in the wire was being mangled or worse yet, crossing.

This morning was the day that it finally gave out, and decided to not charge my laptop indefinitely. That was a big problem, since my only source of internet was this laptop, not to mention my project files. I shut off the laptop just as a precaution (in case I need emergency power to boot it up and transfer something off of it), and began fiddling with the wire for half a day.

By 7:30pm I've already pondered all the possible ways I could rectify the situation. I could go online with the remaining power and order a replacement. This was such a poor option, since delivery to my apartment is problematic, and that the replacement adapter itself is 75 bucks (!!!).

Inspired by Nimoy's power adapter contraption, and self-assured that my waranty had gave out long ago, I decided to "man-up" and let the wire under the knife.

So, about four hours later, this is the result. And yes, it works!

Since I had no proper tools to perform this operation, I was forced to improvise. My tools were: nail clipper (does wonders for wire stripping!) a butter knife, and some pins. At one point I also used a vegetable knife, but it didn't help too much.

Here are the remains of the original power plug head, chewed to bits by my nails and my nail-clippers. Some form of irony to be found, there? I don't know.

What happened was, deep in the core of the plug head, where the hot wire gets near the ground to meet with the plug head, the hot wire's coating had been pulled back, revealing it to the other wire and causing a short. There were burn marks on the wires as well as the plastic/rubbery material surrounding it. When a short happens, a tiny beeping noise comes out of the power adapter. Interesting.

So the fix was simple. I stripped the entire plug head down, as well as enough wire from the end. I seperated the wires from each other (the ground was wrapped in a cork-screw shape around the main, seperated by a layer of wire skin whatever you call it). Then I wrapped each with electrical wire so they don't have a chance of crossing. Easy enough. The hardest part was digging through that plug head, which was hard as rock (hence me pulling out the vegetable knife!)

Alas, I might as well make it into a mod. I'm considering sewing stuff around it and making it 'decor'. Yomsain?