Blackhevadotcom » Projects

Popeye’s!

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:16:37 +0000

There’s a great post that I picked up from Waxy.org from Clapclap.org, with the title of “It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. I remember hearing John Cale’s version back in ’96 when I saw “Basquiat”, and it struck me pretty hard then. It’s an incredibly emotional song. You can listen to even more covers over on My Old Kentucky Blog. Apparently this song is a cultural phenomenon.

This brings me round about to Hype Machine. Hype Machine has been my dirty secret for a pretty long time, it’s fairly popular now I think, but I’ve been using since right after it’s launch in December of ’06 for finding new and remixed stuff. I highly recommend it.

So I’m working on this project for our PR company, to automatically read email to you in your car. I’m using Quartz Composer to build the interface, and a little bit of programming in Xcode. It’s shaping up nicely. I got the first proof of concept done in about 5 hours using QC, with some help from the super nice guys at Kineme.net. They develop some pretty awesome patches, filling in parts where QC is lacking. Anyways, I’ll post some development screenshots soon, but unfortunately I don’t think I can post the source. /shrug

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.

Ch-ch-changes…

Matthew Gotth-Olsen — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 22:20:54 +0000

Mmm I think I need to tweak the design of this blog a bit. It’s starting to feel a little incomplete. Well, I guess it’s always been that way, but I never paid that much attention.

So my new diet is going well, it’s hard getting used to not eating what I want. It’s a bit depressing. There is a definite difference in consciously choosing to not eat something, and not being able to. Although while technically I’m able to, I’ll pay for it at 4 in the morning, screaming in pain.

Work is going well, I’ve been chomping at the bit so to speak to get going on some projects. Flow has been down a little bit this week, mostly due to the summer. I’ve been really pushing hard on a lot of different fronts, trying to improve myself at work. It’s odd being in an environment where people give you good, solid feedback on the progress you’ve made. None of the places I’ve worked at have done that.

At any rate, I’m going to go. Gotta wander around on the internets for awhile.

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.