Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

A Peek Inside

During my travels last week I came across the derelict Columbia Hotel in Alvinston, Ontario.

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There was a hole in the front door but it was too dark to see inside, so I stuck the camera in to see what I could get.

In back of the hotel.

A little chunk of another era also in ruin.

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Zack Obessed

Zack's obessed with this nerf football.

It helped him discover another obsession: blowing bubbles.

Even when he's wearing the feather boa, he's still thinking about that football.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Games Unfinished!

Ack! I had unfinished Scrabulous games when Facebook finally pulled the plug. And, as expected, the official version's secret power is lameness.

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Freelancers

101 Reasons Freelancers Do it Better

Here are a few good ones:

5. Meetings about nothing: Corporate workers are often required to attend time-wasting meetings

12. Following your heart is easier: You can choose to eliminate working with organizations that conflict with your ethics.

21. You can get rid of your car altogether

33. Your dog loves you more

74. Rocking out is OK: You can listen to music or watch TV in the background without worrying about bothering a cube neighbor.

And I few that aren't really true:

25. Better pay: Freelancers generally earn more because employers don't have to deal with the overhead of keeping a full-time employee.

I dunno, most freelancers I know of make less overall than the average worker when you factor everything in. I know I'd be making more $$$ if I had a 'real job'.

27. Control over your hourly rate

Well ... sort of. You can charge what people will pay you and they will always try to talk you down.

But overall, it's a pretty accurate list.

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Monday, July 21, 2008

Robot Johnny Timelapse

Time-Lapsed Illustration from John Martz on Vimeo.

See how Robot Johnny constructs a cartoon at high speed!

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Friday, July 18, 2008

The Man is Hard of Steel

Now cancelled, Return to Supermans was one of the best of the recent Channel101 shows.

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Iron Sky Teaser Trailer 1

It's the first teaser trailer for Iron Sky, an original sci-fi comedy from the makers of Star Wreck!

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Few Seconds Later and It Was Gone

This is what happens to sandwiches.

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My Pen!

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

View from SF

Over at Spacing,Toronto from a San Franciscan's perspective:

Metro Central YMCA is open until 11PM! The pool is designed as a postmodernist church. There are children at this YMCA, and they’re in the pool after 10PM on Wednesday night.

....

Restaurants post that they close at 11 PM and still seat people at 11:30.

And most notable:

Elevated expressway must come down.

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[ via B3TA ]

2:21 PM , # , |

Politics Makes You Stupid

Drawn! had a post in support of the Obama cartoon and a link to a great post on the subject of satire and why it's important.

Nobody seems to have noted that Michelle Obama, more than anyone, likely feels the New Yorker's pain:

Mrs. Obama has also had to learn to tamp down her sometimes biting humor because it too often leaves Mr. Obama as the punch line. (It has been a long time since she has talked publicly about her husband of 15 years being smelly in the morning, as she told Glamour magazine, or forgetting to put away the butter.)

"What I've learned is that my humor doesn't translate to print all the time," she said in the interview. "But usually when I'm speaking to a group, people understand what I'm trying to say, they get the humor, they understand the sarcasm, they get the joke."

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

[ found at Sally McKay's ]

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Monday, July 14, 2008

Oh, Those Cartoons!

I may have told this story before ...

When I was at university, I was editor of a small college newspaper and in one issue we printed a story in the sports section accusing a team from another college of cheating in intramural sports.

The day the paper hit the stands, we were sitting around in front of the computer (a 286 with an amber monochrome monitor running Pagemaker 2.0, printing on a Hewlett-Packard Laserjet Series 2) and the head of college sports came running in, full of drama and panic, complaining that the sports rep from the other college was upset about the article and chewed him out.

Our sports editor replied, "Did you tell her to fuck off?"

And that was the slap in the face the sports guy needed. Sometimes people get all wound up over stupid things and need a jolt to get some perspective.

Obama's "offended" supporters need that; they're not offended, they're concerned about the cartoon because of how it might be interpreted by the patrons of the Creation Museum. Art Speigelman was offended by that:

"They sound so elitist," Spiegelman told The Chronicle. "The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it."

Tom Tomorrow wondered:

Personally I'm not sure why the conversation about this goes any further than, "Oh yes, that was a mildly amusing reference to those crazy right wing emails everyone has heard about," before moving on to other topics. But it's appalling that a piece of artwork clearly mocking the delusions of the right is being excoriated as if it presents those delusions approvingly.

Rueben Bolling asked:

Do cartoonists really have to worry about how the images they create could be misapporpriated by bad people? Every time I draw a picture, for whatever purpose, should I pause and wonder whether the forces of evil could possibly use it out of context in a nefarious scheme, thus saving the $250 it would cost to hire an illustrator to draw exactly they want?

I'm sure Dan Bailey over at istockphoto is asking himself that very question right now. Over in Ireland, the Orange Order splurged -- SPLURGED! -- and paid about ten bucks for an image of a cartoon superhero and adopted him as their new mascot, Diamond Dan (I am not making that up):

Orange Order education officer David Scott said the character, developed to appeal to young people, was meant to represent the true values of the Order.

"Diamond Dan will be the kind of person who offers his seat on a crowded bus to an elderly lady. He won't drop litter and he will be keen on recycling," he said.

That image has been downloaded almost four hundred times, so he should be keen on recycling.

Fortunately for all concerned, my ancestors left Ireland many generations ago, otherwise the mascot may have ended up being something more like this guy. His name is Diamond McPenisheadman! He recycles and smokes pot because he's proud of his Dutch heritage!

As for Diamond Dan, they're likely violating the terms of the license in some way, so expect an update later. Stock is useful for some things, but using a stock image for your organization's mascot makes you a dick. Pay an artist and get it done right.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

Silhouette Stock

I'm always looking for uses of my stock city silhouettes and thought I'd found one when I saw this ad in the weekend Globe & Mail. It looked like they used this pic of Nathan Phillips Square and this skyline of Chicago ( for some reason, everything to the right of New City Hall is Chicago, including the Sears Tower).

But a close check revealed that they weren't my files ... the images are taken from slightly different positions. And so, the hunt continues ...

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Friday, July 11, 2008

Melancholy Footloose

Great cover of the Footloose soundtrack:

When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's.
....
I asked my friend Thomas to cover the album, which, sheltered as he is, he had never heard before. I was clear that I wanted to him to cover the whole album - the point wasn't to rework any one song, but to re-imagine the picture they made together. With a new Footloose we could reply to the past, tell our own story about being young.

[ via Coverville ]

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Return of the Sandwich

I haven't posted a sandwich pic since there was snow on the ground. Here's one ... with smooth almond butter.

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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

CBC: Bell's internet throttling illegal, Google says

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Summer Rerun

Canadian History Moment (originally posted July 3, 2006)

On this Canada Day weekend, in light of the CBC pulling a docu-drama about Tommy Douglas because of historical inaccuracies, we present this factually-correct story:

The True Tommy Douglas Story, 1962
As relayed by Woodrow Llyod

Even though I'd taken over from Douglas as premiere of Saskatchewan, on that cold winter night I knew I needed Tommy. I needed his his magic. It was a bad one, the worst yet.

LLOYD: They came back! They thought that because you were gone, it was safe.

DOUGLAS: It's good that you brought me.

LLOYD: We should call the mounties, too.

DOUGLAS: NO. I will face them. You stay here.

Douglas set out and walked towards the glowing hanger. Mad laughter and other sounds echoed from the place. He got closer. And closer.

Figures darted around Douglas in the night. He fought them. He struggled forward, towards the hangar. And vanished inside. Howls and screams rang out. I wanted to run, I wanted to rush to help Tommy. But I just stood in my place, frozen with fear.

I waited for hours. I didn't know what to do. I must have nodded off at one point because when I awoke, Tommy was standing over me.

LLOYD: Tommy?

TOMMY: Yes.

He was exhausted. His face weary. He looked as though he bore the burden of a thousand centuries.

TOMMY: That's the thing I hate about Saskatchewan ....

LLOYD: What, Tommy?

TOMMY: All the damn vampires.

Other moments in Canadian history:

Mutant Bear Attack in Upper Canada, 1852

Emily Carr vs. The Group of 7 Mutoid Dwarfs

The Biomechanical Insectoid Dionne Quintuplets

Trudeau's Long Walk in the Snow, 1984

Hit Song in Winnipeg 1991

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Summer Rerun

from July 2005

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Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Official Versions

An "official" version of Scrabble is coming to Facebook for US and Canadian users. But will it equal or be better than Scrabulous?

Official versions don't always work out as well as you'd expect; for example, Atari 2600 Pac Man was a bizarre adaptation of the original. But the worst official/unofficial conflict in gaming was the NES Tetris battle.

Tengen Tetris was the first version of the game available for the NES and it was a playable, faithful version of the original (and fortunately, we had that version). But after a complicated legal battle:

June 21, 1989 - Tengen's version of Tetris is taken off the shelves, and manufacture of the Tengen version is ceased. Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen Tetris, sitting in their boxes, lie in a warehouse.

Nintendo's "official" version of Tetris, which was released the following month, was garbage. It sold a lot of copies because of the name, but it was a very poor version of the game.

Click here to play Tengen Tetris.

12:49 PM , # , |

Poppin' Up

My mom rescued this 30th Anniversary Commemorative trek pop-up book from certain doom:

The Enterprise ... now in 3D.

Cover features a "hologram" but no opportunity to have a simulated romance with a member of the Theoretical Propulsion Group.

Enterprise-D faces off against the Borg cube. Shapes Borg like: cubes, spheres, diamonds ... hearts, green clover ...

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Monday, July 07, 2008

MOO!

My Moo business cards arrived in the mail.

The cards feature 50 images from my istock portfolio. Also, I'm still mucking around with my thumbspage.

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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Vista = XP

I've had the unfortunate dumb luck of experiencing Windows Vista from the very beginning and at this point it's no longer necessary to cling to XP:

Dell has taken a leading position in continuing to offer Windows XP.

Vista's bad reputation began because companies like Dell forced it on people and hardware that weren't ready for it. That's what happened to us: we wound up with a laptop loaded with Vista but not powerful enough to run it properly (at the time, Dell had discontinued the XP option). On a recent service call to Dell, they had the gall to tell us that the laptop -- the one they sold us -- wasn't powerful enough to run Vista properly. Gee, thanks ... idiots.

But I've been using Vista and running Adobe CS3 on a new desktop for the past two months and it's just fine. As a garden-variety user, I would say that Vista is about equivalent to XP; every improvement is countered by something annoying. The main irritant are those constant pop-ups. Vista can't do a thing without asking your permission and there's never a "don't ask again" option to save your preferences. It wears you down after giving permission to the same process for the gazillionth time.

One of the main "features" was the transparent glass effect on the windows. Even though my system is powerful enough to run the effects, I found it distracting and disabled it after a few weeks. Here's the benefit of having frosted glass windows: there is no benefit to having frosted glass windows.

But Vista looks better than XP. XP's chunky, colourful interface made it look too much like a kid's toy. Vsta also seems to do a much better job of recovering from crashed and hanging programs.

So now it's mostly a lateral move from XP to Vista. There's nothing to fear anymore ... but nothing all that great, either.

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