Blackhevadotcom » General Tech

Muxtape

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:32:52 +0000

So I found this pretty rad site called Muxtape, that uses Amazon S3 for file storage, and allows you to upload 12 songs into a web based mixtape. I already made mine, you can see it here. It’s very clean, very easy, and very very fast.

If you’re an old fart like me, you’ll enjoy the nod to an older generation in a fresh new format.

http://www.muxtape.com

Testing cellphone blogging…

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:02:14 +0000

So, I’m testing out moblogging from my cellphone using a program I found called Traveling Blogger. Let’s see how it works out.

Jpeg is dead, Long live Jpeg?

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:05:41 +0000

Via Gizmodo

Microsoft’s HD Photo standard is now officially tapped to become JPEG’s successor by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, but it’ll be known as JPEG XR. XR stands for extended range, given the wider color palette and finer gradations it can show. Other benefits include in-camera imaging processing support and, supposedly, better compression. Besides losing its Windows-y name (in a former life, it was Windows Media Photo) it’s dropping proprietary control by Microsoft to become as neutral as JPEG is now. Though support’s already built-in to Windows Vista, it’ll take a year to get standardized, at which point large-scale adoption will probably start picking up steam. [Cnet via Electronista]

Messenger Bag Fetish.

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:50:37 +0000

Mmm so I have a messenger bag fetish I think. I <3 them. Yeah people joke about them being man purses and what not, but I don’t care. I like being able to have all my stuff with me. And on that note, I’m posting this:

I need it. Buy it now.

This week.

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:03:27 +0000

Well I’ve got a meeting with Beau and Miah about the Knowledgebase this Friday. I’m hoping for good things. I’m not incredibly thrilled about it being based on Sharepoint, but if it works, and it won’t cost extra cash then I guess it’s going to be the best option.

My last experience with Sharepoint consisted of setting it up, creating some test pages, leaving work for the day and the next day the entire server had crashed. So yeah, not much faith in it. I guess there’s the possibility that I may have done something wrong on the setup, but nothing was logged

The next few days are going to be busy what with Mother’s Day this weekend, Floyd’s 50th, cookouts and such.

That’s about it for now, I’m off to write some code.

Geek Squad

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:15:01 +0000

I just listened to a kick ass speech by Robert Stephens. It’s pretty inspiring.

[audio:Geek_Squad_Speech_Miami.mp3]

Oh and be sure to check out the newly designed site. Most of the Agents featured are actually from Geek Squad City. If you’d like to have a sort of sneak peek into the City, check this out.. click on all of the tiles and just let it sit idle.

Handcrafting Optical Lenses

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:54:58 +0000

Adam Savage Interview

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:24:53 +0000

One of my favorite sites has an interview with Adam Savage from Mythbusters. Check it out:

It broke!

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:25:00 +0000

Mmm so my webserver has vamoosed. I’m working on getting a replacement by Monday. Until then I’ve got my url redirected to a VMware virtual machine hosted on my XP/Media Center box. It works well in a pinch. Justin’s in for a suprise when he gets his DNS records switched to the appropriate IP .

I’ve been doing some work with Quartz Composer. Wow. I mean, fuck it’s cool. It’s along the lines of Max/MSP and Processing. It’s got a visual programming interface, ie. you literally plug one operation into another. I’m attempting to create an animated head of Robert Stephens, ala Max Headroom. This animated cube/head will spew out random stats pulled from an internal site that we use via XML. I might throw a reference to New Coke. At any rate, it’s a neat project, specifically challenging myself in a few different areas (technical, artistic, etc).

I’ve got a pretty good opportunity cooking right now at the Squad with some very important people. I’m hoping it comes through. I don’t think I Can last very long as a cog.

I bought Ashley an Xbox 360 for her birthday, and I’ve got it networked to the mini and my media center. It’s pretty neat being able to pull video and audio to the 360.

Computer Camp

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:14:00 +0000

Originally published at BlackhevaDotCom. You can comment here or there.

There’s a great article over on Textfiles.com by Jason Scott about computer camp in the 1980’s, more specifically the site author’s experiences. He’s also the gentleman responsible for the documentary that I drool over every time I see a mention of it online, BBS: The Documentary. He touches on a few things that I can relate to in growing up which may seem unrelated to most people but all seem to correlate some how in my brain. I always knew Santa Claus wasn’t real, have always managed to keep a detached viewpoint on matters, intuitively understood how most things work, or even what the problem with them is without really knowing the operation of it. He mentions “…I was actually the keeper of a sort of intelligence fog, a general sense of understanding things well but with no focus…”. This is generally how I feel. I really could not name the number of times that I’ve been approached with a question, or a problem and I’ve known what the issue is without quite understanding how. It all seems very wishy-washy and magic crystal sounding I know, but it’s something I’m observing with more and more frequency.

Is it just my attitude when I approach new things? I don’t fear climbing into a million dollar press made by 3M, to change out the exposure bulb for a solvent ink based print head. Or I’m handed a server with an OS I’ve never touched (much less heard of) and expected to just make it work. I think my real gift isn’t so much intelligence as it is coherence. I connect things together in my brain without even realizing I’m doing it. It’s hard to step back and try to pick apart my brain process, but I distinctly remember, when focusing on a task of getting tunnel vision, and the feeling of.. well.. like two giant disparate lenses floating in space suddenly converging, a flash of light… and I suddenly understand the problem. Or rather how to fix it. It seems to vary from issue to issue. I feel like I have a distributed application running in my brain.
I know this all seems pretty wierd. But Jason’s blog entry sparked all of that in a matter of a couple seconds.

It’s interesting though thinking about the particularly analytical side of my personality and comparing it to when I create art. It’s fairly similar in feeling, yet my results (style?) are different every time. I think that is/was my biggest weakness as an artist. Consistency.

So now, how to I temper my art, with these giant lenses? And will it burn out like a boy cooking ants with a magnifying glass?