Catching Zebra

New blog

I’ve started a new blog and I don’t plan on posting here anymore; however, this will remain live for posterity.

The new site simply lives at http://andytaylor.me, as I’m combining my personal ‘about site’ and blog into one.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I highlighted so many great parts of this biography, that it’s hard to pick just one to share. But this—from the day he resigned as CEO—is quite salient:

When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought that they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.”

Me too.

iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison by Robino Films

Here’s a “fair” test between the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D MK II. I made a little rig that allowed me to shoot both cameras at the same time side by side. All scenes are perfectly synced together so you can pause and scrutinize the frames!

Now I really want one.

via Jordan Halvorsen

The Vasco Era — Rock and Roll Is the Only Thing That Makes Me Feel Good

It’s not often that I really like a song the first time I hear it. When they played this at the Corner Hotel gig a month or so ago I knew this new album was going to be very good. It is.

First verse:

I tried transcendental meditation.
I tried transatlantic vacation.
I tried driving all night with the windows down where the hiss of the tarmac was the only sound.
I tried psy-trance festivals.
I took as many nangs as I could.
I tried taking some biblical precautions. Always wore my robe and never had an abortion.
Rock and roll is the only thing that makes me feel good.

Killer.

The New Value of Text

James Bridle:

We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.

via Craig Mod

And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

Biggy Smalls VS Thomas the tank engine

Posting this purely for the top rated YouTube comment (even if the reference is totally wrong):

smoke coal erry day

SEO for Non-dicks

Matt Legend Gemmell:

I fully acknowledge the value of, and need for, actual SEO; I just think that in many cases, the tactics employed under that title would better be described as Search Engine Manipulation or even Abuse.

I agree with absolutely everything in this article. Make good shit, people will want to look at said good shit. Nuff said.

Do users change their settings?

Jared Spool:

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

Turns out pretty much only programmers and designers change settings. Granted the study was based on Microsoft Word. But it’s still very interesting and worth keeping in mind.

It also showed that most people trusted Microsoft to choose good default settings — Which they hadn’t.

The takeaway: If you’re going to add settings, don’t add too many. And make the defaults as good as possible.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Straight Up And Down

The Coatwolf Model II & Bellflower

Evan Glodell invented a camera; the Coatwolf Model II. Then made a film with it.

…Glodell wanted cinematic looks that he didn’t think he could get with standard-issue gear. Glodell knew that Bellflower’s wacko plot – which follows “two friends who spend their time building flamethrowers and other weapons in the hope that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang,” according to the press kit – would require highly stylized visuals, so he decided to push his camera-tinkering skills to the limit.

The trailer for Bellflower looks brilliant.