For the past couple months I’ve been working freelancing on a number of different projects through my personal LLC, Mandril Design.

Recently, one of the most gorgeous endeavors and massive undertakings I’ve ever worked on was for Number Sleuth. Through Killer Infographics, my cousin’s amazing infographic shop here in Seattle and with Science is Beautiful, we created a pair of infographics to help illustrate just how big the universe is. One is a static infographic which is a staggering 1000px wide by 20,000px tall showing the relative scale of over a hundred objects within the observable universe (infographic here).

The graphics used in the static version were individually rendered out into high res versions and paired up with an XML file which dictates their scale as well as 10xE position and some descriptive text. Some fancy math and a bunch of tweening with the help of my favorite tweening engine, TweenLite’s AS3 classes, and you have an opportunity to zoom all the way from the observable universe down to a hydrogen atom’s nucleus. All in all, that’s a zoom of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x … not something I think they carry at REI or your neighborhood science gadget store.

You’re going to want to blow this up full screen by the way. It’s infinitely better than in the tiny box below.

The Universe made possible by Number Sleuth

Today I did a quick search in Google and found that the infographic was spreading like wildfire. Guy Kawasaki tweeted about it, somehow it made it’s way to Alltop and Digg and I think most inspiring thus far, it was in National Geographic’s blog. As a long time science lover, it’s truly an honor to have my work anywhere on the pages of National Geographic … and apropos that it’s on their site given my love of the web.

Between these sites and a few others, it’s already garnered over a thousand likes, has been tweeted a few hundred times and pinned to a number of boards on Pinterest. I can’t wait to see how viral it goes over the next few weeks. Definitely look forward to the next endeavor with Number Sleuth, Killer Infographics and Science is Beautiful. There’s a whole universe of gorgeous out there that needs to be shared. Definitely an honor to illustrate it in this way for people to get a good understanding of really just how tiny we are in relationship to so many other things.

Please let me know what you think and definitely share with your friends and family so that they can be inspired as well. I can only imagine if I would have seen something like this when I was a kid. Boom … mind blown.

This morning was epic. Pristine skies. So much sin I thought we woke up somewhere other than Seattle. I get into the office and go to fire up my trusty 17″ MacBook Pro from early 2008 who’s seen it all.

Nothing.

After 20 min of trying this and that I decide to head home to work on Spun’s. Unfortunately, my PSDs are gone and the ones I do have don’t play very nicely with Photoshop CS3.

Fast forward 6+ hours and the deadline I had, comes and goes. An hour and a half more go by making Franken-mocks essentially stealing pieces from prior comps, splicing them together as best I can.

What a clusterf*ck.

Tomorrow, my calm little Saturday will be spent diagnosing the problem and perhaps plopping in a solid state drive, as I think that’s the failure point.

Time to celebrate a friend’s birthday and the end of a terrible work day.

The day itself may still en up being pretty awesome. Only time will tell.

Kudos to Apple for making iPhoto for the iPhone and iPad. Seriously well done. The ease in which you can manipulate images, boosting saturation, adding effects, etc is pretty impressive. The brushes menu is gorgeous and I love the swatches as well.

Some downfalls exist though … every time you go back to the photo library, it seems to update. Boooooo. I have over 4000 photos on my phone. This is painful. PAINFUL. Also, why would you make such an amazing positionable vignette if you can only apply it to black and white photos? It’d be great to burn in color photos as well. Lastly, it seems like some of the filters don’t play nice with others. Why can’t you layer all things available? Why restrict creativity?

I am thoroughly impressed by this initial version and can’t wait to see what the future ones have in store for the blog as well as other photo enthusiasts. Once I switch from .mac I mean MobileMe to iCloud I’ll likely do another post about that integration with journals.

Yoda makes my inner geek happy. Graffiti Yoda tickles my art side too. Add in the thought of heading to Belize and I’m giddy.

For years now I’ve been seeing these Blink stickers around. They’re everywhere around Seattle. They seem to be nestled into spots that you generally wouldn’t look as well which is somewhat like a bit of a reward. I feel like I should be getting some sort of achievement or bonus prize for “collecting all six.” Perhaps I’ll snap a few more in the coming weeks as I see them so that they can be documented around town.

The Macy’s star shines brightly over Westlake Plaza, downtown Seattle.

How did I get this shot with my iPhone? Thanks for asking, here’s how.

I used an app called Slow Shutter with a fisheye lens from Photojojo on my iPhone 4, leaving the lens open for 15 seconds to get the photo.

Afterwards, I fired up Photoshop Express, bumped the exposure up fully 2x and saved a “lighter version.” Opened up the original again in Photoshop Express and dropped the exposure by about half. Saved that “darker version.”

Next app up, Pro HDR. Brought in both images and made an HDR composite, fine tuning saturation and brightness a bit.

Last up? Pxlr-o-matic for a bit more color correction and border. This app is the money maker. There are quite literally thousands of different combos to with through. So many great filters, borders, and additional bits of texture and flair. Really one of the best apps out there for tweaking iPhone photography.

Now I’m using WordPress for iPhone to make the post. Shortly hereafter I’ll fire up Short Url to get my bitly address to throw in to, you guessed it, Facebook mobile.

That’s the standard run through on photos that show up in the blog. More often than not, they’re touched up here and there. The iPhone photography applications above are the usual suspects … those and Best Camera which has some phenomenal super easy effects. Just be sure to get into the options and add in all the “half-step” filters so you can do 50% candy or 50% gray. Works out so much better.

There goes another hundred bucks at the Apple Store. At least I figured out why my track pad button was completely locked in place. A cell in my 3.5 year old laptop battery exploded. Fun!

As I’ve been coding all day I’ve been watching a handful of hummingbirds frequent the newly refilled feeder. I find it amazing how vicious they are with each other. Swooping this way and that, always keeping their heads on a swivel. So fragile, so fierce, so colorful. The brilliant green and magenta is simply stunning when the light catches them right.

I love these window treatments. Whereas a lot of folks will spend good money on life size cutouts of Samus Aran from Metroid, Space Invaders, or other old school notables, this office space made them on their own out of post it notes. Supremely done.

Media evolves. This is fact. Often, there is one company who draws a line in the sand and forces America to shake off the old and embrace the new. This is not easy and many more companies fail at this than those who succeed. I will concede this one point to Hastings from his open post to members. AOL, Real, Classmates, Starbucks Hear Music (personally a sad one for me), IBM, Amway (oh wait, they’re Quixtar now … even worse than Netflix’s Quickster name ), dare I say GM, and yes hundreds of other businesses have fallen on their faces because they chose to (in the spirit of making movie references) hold the line one moment longer than Mel Gibson would have in Braveheart or jumped too early. Hell, even the mothership took a detour for a stint before getting Steve Jobs back on board to point them in the right direction. They could be going off to … ahem … a galaxy far far away for all we know with his recent decision to step down. But I digress, this is about Netflix, not the primordial soup of mutated, deceased, thriving or soon to be consumed companies around them.

Netflix, you’ve had something that very few companies have and all companies dream of … a loyal following who love being your marketing arm. I’d even go so far as to say they’re evangelists for your cause. We love movies. We love convenience. We loved Netflix.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty for a quick second here, shall we? This more or less shakes down to a few things: evolution of media, arrogance, poor communication, and entitlement. Like I said before, media evolves. When I was at Starbucks we fought to create a CD burning kiosk that was on the downward slope of the CD industry. It was great technology, worked seamlessly, etc, but iTunes Music Store killed the business model. The Concorde met the same fate due to video chat, email, higher gas prices and a more connected world. Technology dies so that new technology can live. [ can you hear Elton John's Circle of Life now? ] There is a natural order to this, one that requires the public to be generally ok with having things change. When change is imposed and the waters are overly disturbed … bad things happen. Nothing is clearer than seeing more than twenty three thousand comments to a post about this imposed change. Which brings us to arrogance. You have a business model that has some secret sauce the layperson isn’t privy to. Fine, that’s why we all don’t have our own Netflix companies. We can’t always know what you have up your sleeve (clearly), but we have grown accustomed to a standard display of reciprocal trust. We pay you for movies we love. You provide a service for said movies … be it physical media or streaming. This has gone really well for some time now. You grossly underestimated the public’s temperature when it came to digital vs physical media. This saddens me for a number of reasons; the largest being that we loved you and you didn’t listen. Girly, I know, but hey, I’m that dude in that role for this instance. A ton of us were ok with the price hike, not all, but we backed you up. We’re getting more now than we were before and we rationalized paying for it. But this? This shows you really don’t know your customers at all … and furthermore, that we don’t really know you Netflix. [ insert scene in movie where the jilted lover sends a friend to go get their DVDs back from his ex's house ] I’m ok with shelling out a few extra bucks for a service that works seamlessly across the board. As far as the frustration of having two accounts, or two payments, or two queues, or any of that crap … I’m going to let Bryan Thompson say it, because he said it best:

This is great news! My dentist just did the same thing. It’s so much better. Now when I have cavities on my top row of teeth I go to one dentist, and when I have cavities on the bottom row, I go to the other dentist across town. Sure it’s frustrating that sometimes they can’t access my dental records that used to all be in one place, and yes I admit that it seems strange that they now charge me almost twice as much for the exact same dental care I received six months ago…but they are innovators! Besides, what choice do I have? They’re the only two dentists around. Well done Netflix! If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Simply hike the price, alienate your customer base and complicate your user interface under the guise of “progress”. Kudos.

Your arrogance shows a one sided approach and poor business understanding. Your customers make your business. Now when they see a red envelope, they see red. We will not just perpetually take your antics with a spoonful of sugar to help this “medicine” go down. However, moving on to entitlement, we really don’t have any say as to what you want to do with your business. This is the hardest part and likely where my metaphors will start getting really mixed up. [ queue sappy music where the guy realizes that she needs to be free, remixed with a soundtrack for a baby walking for the first time and that scene where Scar kills Mufasa in the wildebeest stampede ] You need to sow your seeds apparently. You’re young and naïve. You’re going to fall on your face. I am your father… [ man the wheels are falling off ... wrap it up, wrap it up ] We feel entitled to this service, but we aren’t. We just pay for it. It’s a give/take relationship and you can choose to exit it on your own accord. Which it seems like, for some reason or another, you’re choosing to do. We’ll be pissed. We’ll eat chocolate cake and cry a tear or two as we sit in front of our VHS player we found in the garage or Hulu Plus. But we’ll always remember the good times where we all got along.

We await your next move Netflix. Like a magician, had better be a good prestige or I fear you’ll watch your theatre clear faster than if someone yelled “fire.” Don’t screw this next step up Netflix. [ queue Inception massive horn sound or crickets ... it can be your movie too ]

For all intents and purposes, this should be a rant right now. It is, however, somewhat of a reflection on what I love to do and how that sometimes works out poorly.

Last night, around 10pm I started upgrading to iOS 5.0 Beta. I knew that I should have been climbing into bed momentarily, but the temptation for shininess was too great. I had to get it onto my iPhone 4 and iPad. Four hours later, I was crawling into bed with a bricked iPhone and an iPad that was still going through a restoration process. The main culprit, from what I could gather, was not the installation process of the new iOS. It was, instead our internet dropping out RIGHT at a critical moment when iTunes and xCode needed to talk with some Apple server and couldn’t. Thus a communication meltdown led to a late night and early morning breakdown that rivaled … well the last time I tried to do the exact same thing for my iPhone 3Gs.

So it’s my own damn fault that I stayed up late and am exhausted today. No mistake about that one. Spun and I now have a rule that no major technological endeavors will begin after 10pm. This love, hate relationship I have with staying on the cusp of Apple technology is good to a point. However, there comes a time when I need to break free from the chains that tether me to this aging love-affair and do things that are actually important … like snuggle with my wife and sleep a full eight hours. Thankfully, iOS 5 is one step ahead of me by making updates wireless to the cloud. Perhaps we can work a clause into the new rule for unless working from a pillowtop mattress on iCloud tasks. I’m sure she’ll go for it.

As an aside, yes, this photo was one that was somewhat similar ages ago, which was intentional. My phone was in a weird limbo zone where it hadn’t fully been restored as I was walking in. It was half alive, half dead still. As a result, I figured a photo of a former life for the iPhone would be fitting. Also, this is the corner where I laid into a canvasser yesterday for running towards me as I was running up the hill with my skateboard. Cancel, cancel. Love, love.