Pixels from the Edge

Favorite Stones

Richie — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:39:12 +0000

I heard Under My Thumb on the radio the other day and thought to myself what a fuckin great song! I dunno about the lyrics or the meaning or whatever, just how it made me feel right then to hear it. Then I remembered years ago at one of my first jobs someone asked me if I was a Rolling Stones or a Beatles guy? I guess he thought that was a quick way to size someone up or thought it was a good ice breaker or whatever. I answered the Stones without hesitation. I had no doubt about how epic the Beatles were and the quantity and quality of the work they produced in such a short period of time and the greatness of their musical compositions, I just liked the Stones more. So it turns into a little debate in the office and it happened that everyone was for the Beatles and I was kind of branded as being disloyal to the purity of music by not picking them.

My thoughts wandered to Jackson, last year when he first started talking to the point I could actually have these cool little conversations with him. I’d ask him what his favorite color was and he’d answer blue, or I’d ask him what his favorite animal was and he’d say giraffe, or who his best friend was and it’d be Diego. And I’d think how cool it was that he was growing up and making decisions, retaining choices. But the thing was I’d ask him like ten minutes later and suddenly his favorite color was green, his favorite animal was a lion, and Elmo was now his goto wingman. I remember thinking bollocks, he’s just saying whatever first pops into his head so I leave him alone and he can get back to bouncing off the walls.

I realized that with him being only two it’d be one hell of a boring road ahead if he’d already formed opinions on any of these things. Suddenly the idea of having a favorite anything became kinda stupid to me, restricting and unnecessary. Why do we need to have favorite anythings anyways? It’s so childish (Um…) It must be something I picked up when I was younger and have since been trained to have favorites of things, somethings, anythings, everythings – bands, movies, actors, restaurants, brands, just some examples. Endless lists of favorites of everything, perhaps for no other reason than to fire off quick answers when asked my opinion on something. I realized it about myself and I didn’t much like it, besides everyone knows that only the Sith deal in absolutes. Take patriotism – people get so hardcore about a country just cos they happen to slide out their mother within its borders. USA USA USA, you know the drill. We English do it too – everyone knows England is the center of the world. And look at Spain – 22% unemployment and every single Spaniard will argue you to the death about how their country is the greatest there ever was, and with good reason too. I imagine its a global phenomenon – we all look at our countries with blinders, similar to the mother of a murderer, our love blinding us from seeing the ugly truth. It’s gonna be good practice for me to not get behind things so hardcore, just play it way cooler all around.

Anyways the Beatles or the Stones? There was no wrong answer, and there wasn’t a debate to be had, I guess I’ve always preferred a little more rock to my roll. Plus I’m from Richmond.

Here’s five of my favorite songs by the Stones. In no particular order, and they might not be.

Under My Thumb

Street Fighting Man

Wild Horses

Sympathy For The Devil

Fuck it I only wanna pick four.

Minimum wage maximizes unemployment

Richie — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:40:00 +0000

I’m gonna say this in as few words as possible because it’s a super simple concept. If a country has a minimum wage that is above what someone is worth then that person has no chance of employment – they’re worth less than what the employer is required to pay them. The only option they are left with is to do something illegal to put food on the table. That’s basically the whole concept and I am pretty sure that a society with no minimum wage would create an economy where there is zero unemployment.

But then everyone will become less valuable right? No because the free market is controlled by supply and demand – the cost of every single product and service on this planet is priced by what the market is willing to pay for it – so not only will there be zero unemployment but the cost of products and services will be reduced. The average salary will inevitably reduce itself across the board but the value of the money we already have saved will increase. So salaries will go down but the ratio of the cost of products and services will remain the same, and what you already have in the bank will increase.

Everyone will have the freedom to earn their own money and not be forced to live off welfare, and the money we all earn will not be taxed by the government to pay for welfare, so we’ll get to keep the money we’ve worked for.

It’s a super win. Make sense?

Matchmaking the voting process

Richie — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:59:25 +0000

For years I’ve been frustrated by watching the democratic process as politically uneducated citizens voted for whichever presidential candidate they were told to by their party, their religion, the media, or better yet they just went for whomever looked the “most presidential”. It costs a shitton of money to run and candidates get their money from corporations with self interests so in turn the public gets their information from the biased corrupt media. Maybe the system worked okay before the emergence of the global media complex so the candidates didn’t have the ability to brainwash us en masse, but it’s no longer the case. The system is broken and needs to be revolutionized. I’m looking at it like this – Should citizens that are politically clueless be allowed to vote? Yes. Would the country get a stronger leader if they didn’t vote? I think the answer to that question is also a great big fat YES. Obviously it’s the constitutional right of every American citizen to vote (sort of) and I would never suggest any attempt to remove the most precious of our freedoms. But doesn’t it make a lot of sense to somehow filter out the clueless noise of those votes that were steered by the corrupt media or just plain ignorance? Thus allowing the true voice of a country to emerge and follow the path of those who care enough to know. I’m not suggesting we take away anyone’s right to vote, just that I believe that freedom comes at a price, and in this case it’s nothing more than spending some time educating yourself on the candidates platform and record.

At first I thought the solution could be to have voters take a test along with their vote, failure to pass would negate their vote. I know it’s harsh but I’m not talking about the test being super tough or anything, just stuff about the current political landscape or questions on some of the candidates platforms (you know, stuff that most people currently wouldn’t know the answers to). And it’s not unreasonable, there’s a reason we have a minimum voting age and minimum ages to run for office (35 for president), because until we reach those ages we haven’t lived long enough to be capable of handling such things. This is sort of a solution but unfortunately it is also our constitutional right to be dumbasses so implementing this system would impede on our liberties, which doesn’t really fly with me.

My new idea is to play matchmaker with the voting process. It’s exactly like a matchmaking dating service in that it asks you your stance on several different topics – specifically where you stand on the issues that the candidates are running on, and about their past voting records (the candidates themselves are never mentioned in the questions). The numbers are crunched and it matches you with whichever candidate actually best serves your interests, and they get your vote. This means that everyone’s vote counts, and instead of the current system where the winning candidate is the one who raises the most money from special interest groups (who then own them and their decisions in the White House), we get to actually elect a candidate that represents our direction of choice as a nation.

What you think? It’s cool right? It could actually work. Or some form of it. Like I say – everyone’s vote counts and each vote is put towards the candidate that actually most closely represents them. I think it’s important that we understand, and admit that, this is not what’s happening in the current system. The other advantage is that it would completely take the ego out of the race. We would no longer vote for a person, rather we would now be voting for a platform. It would take a lot of the money and the bullshit out of the election process and, well hell, maybe it would take us to the point where our noses didn’t grow a little longer every time we called this elephant and donkey show a democratic process.

Hacker Attitude

Richie — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:35:28 +0000

This post is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothing, to all the people that worked in the buildings that I was coding in that called the managers on me when I was just trying to make some badass websites. And all the techno-creatives in the struggle, you know what I’m saying?

I’m thinking hacker is an attitude, maybe even a way of life. It’s a way of thinking and being – we see a problem and we move to fix it, nothing else makes sense to us. I guess I’ve kind of shied away from labeling myself as a hacker throughout my career because of the way it’s negatively portrayed. But Mark Zuckerberg recently enlightened me with his open letter to his investors. I now see a that a hacker doesn’t break into corporate systems to steal or deface stuff, a thief or a vandal does. You can be those things and be a hacker at the same time, in fact it’s a pretty powerful combination of bad, but for the most part hackers are good people doing great things.

I won’t comment on the letter as a whole, or the IPO itself, but I will say that I thought his section titled The Hacker Way was spot on and brilliant, and especially inspiring to me. Not just to the me now and what it will lead me to do next, but to the me from years past in my career. The me berated by my managers for walking up to a “problem” and banging it with a hammer to instantly fix it, instead of following their weeks of procedure. The me that was frowned upon for having the passion to push the boundaries of what can be achieved, requiring the rest of the team to step up instead of basking in the comfort of the status quo. The me that got the stink-eye from my colleagues for having the courage to point out the flaws in their ideas, forcing them to go back to the drawing board and concept something viable. The me that struggled with the adjustment of jumping departments as I sought out where I could make the biggest difference. To that me, everything makes a bit more sense now. And the future me is just plain old psyched.

So here’s the excerpt from Zuckerberg’s letter:

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

BTW a hacker is not the same as a hack. A hack is a very bad thing – stay away from them!

Seeing Bukowski’s Bluebird

Richie — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:14:15 +0000

I don’t want to say a bunch about this, you know I could blab forever, but this is about beautiful words that a brilliant artist converted into an amazing visual piece. So you get two for the price of one today and anything I say can only cheapen it. But I’ll quickly mention that I was really excited to come across this animation, as a lifelong fan of Bukowski’s work I love being given the opportunity to view his work through the eyes of another, we’re really lucky to live in a world with so many talented people that take the time to share their creations with us. Bukowski’s work can heavily lean towards the depressive side but I think that he always tries to relay the need to self-love versus self-loathe, even though it can seem blurred at times, his words give hope to the clinically depressed, alcohol and gambling addicted low-lifes amongst us! And within his words he always passes on a sound message of empathy towards others. Enjoy!

The Bluebird

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

By Charles Bukowski

Social Badge Widget

Richie — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:01:52 +0000

Ford and Team Detroit came up with a great way of connecting with their fans by creating this neat widget. With over 60 badges and counting there’s something for everyone – from the brand of car you have, to the work you do, to how you play on the weekends. The campaign has proven to be immensely popular and successful across the multiple social channels it spans. The widget appears on every page of the ford.com website, as well as others. I was excited to not only have the opportunity to be a part of such a strong strategy, but also to continue working with the evolution of Ford’s presence within the Social Media space, something I have been involved with since the start.

My role here was a little more humble as I was just called in to help with the effects and transitions. Using the jQuery library I animated the transitions using techniques such as move, grow, shrink, slide, and the shifting of opacity levels, amongst others. As this widget is cloud-based and can effectively be dropped into any third party website the code needed to be backwards compatible down to the lowest common denominator browser.

The widget appears on every page of the Ford Website. In its open state the user can navigate the badges by category to browse over 60 badges.

Once the user selects a badge they are able to download the badge in various formats as well as share it with their friends.

Jack Daniels Holiday 2011

Richie — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:00:43 +0000

Jack Daniel’s pledged to donate $101,000 to help soldiers with travel expenses reunite with their families for the holidays, and as the vendor assigned to producing this exciting project it was my honor to lead my group in contributing to such a noble cause. The project challenged several facets of my groups talents – as well as creating the lifelike CG assets to introduce the experience we then had to seamlessly incorporate them into a Flash UI to allow visitors to explore and engage with the amazing vision. The visitor was able to login anonymously via age verification or by using the Facebook Graph API. Once immersed the user could explore around the tree and open barrels left by others containing their personal holiday greetings, or add a barrel themselves by creating a new greeting. The experience was setup to take full advantage of social amplification and instantly pushed new messages out to Facebook.

To add to the fun we built a second version that was projected at holiday events in over 25 locations nationwide during the month of December. Users would be able to text a unique code along with their message which would make it appear instantly into the projection at that location!

Even the best lesbians go to hell

Richie — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:52:53 +0000

Sorry y’all but here we go. Someone’s gotta quit tiptoeing around the edges during this showdown at the Old Corral and take a shot at the bad guy. That’s me. The bad guy that is. But I’m the one taking the first shot because I’m only the bad guy in your minds – religious people. Beautiful, caring, loving, charitable religious people. I’m tired of getting sucked into the debate about gay marriage. You won’t budge, you won’t listen to reason, you are brainwashed into believing that black is white on this subject and there’s just no point discussing it. But more than that you guys are really being assholes about the whole thing, wasting my time talking about marriage rights, you’re full of shit. In reality it has nothing to do with marriage rights. You believe gays are sinners. You think they are possessed by Satan and they need to be exorcised to release their demons. And become good straight god-fearers. Let’s just admit that the conversation here is about whether or not the LGBT community needs to be rounded up and put into concentration camps. You’re no better than the Nazi’s on this subject. No better than the sexists or the racists or the geneticists.

Quit the bullshit gottit?

Quit talking marriage and start talking about your sexualist beliefs and your pure contempt and disdain for your fellow human beings. Your brothers and your sisters. Children of your same god. Descendents of your same Adam and Eve. The same people your messiah gave his life for.

I’m annoyed because I have friends who are gay. And family. Some of my heroes are gay. And even if I had none of that in my life I like to think I’d still be decent and reasonable enough to feel the same way.

And I don’t know why I’m even using the term “gay”. There is no gay there’s only human. There are gays out there that are evil assholes, just like straights, and whites, and blacks, and yellows. The human race is a mix of cool people and cunts and it’s (mostly) unrelated to what sexual preference or skin color they are given at conception.

I’m not a religious person myself, but I am a spiritual person. I don’t subscribe to ancient man-made laws when it comes to living a happy life in the modern world. I believe in karma. I believe in pay it forward. I believe in “Be excellent to each other”. There you go. That’s my religion, a line by a stoner in an eighties movie. My whole bible is five words.

If that’s your god then good luck to you. I don’t want anywhere near your asshole god.

I’m looking forward to hanging with the lesbians in hell.

Mismatched Shoes

Richie — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:42:35 +0000

Jackson dresses himself for the most part. And actually does a great job for a little tyke. Sometimes we’ll get some funky choices – head-to-toe in pull-ups or his hair covered in bamb-aids. But whatever we just roll with it, mostly he’s styling.

Today we go to leave the house so I can drive him to daycare, like I do every morning, and there he stands in mismatched shoes. It’s not even peculiar to him, he’s always up to mischief but this wasn’t like that, he just looked at his shoes that morning and decided today it would be nice to wear this combination. Who does that? And more importantly who doesn’t? I mean that’s a pretty cool thing to do right?

I’m big into sneakers. It’s a weird thing. I want so many, but at the same time I only wanna wear one pair of sneakers. I don’t wanna be the guy that shows up every time in a different pair of sneakers. Is that weird?

Anyways I guess I’ll save that that wild ride into my inner psyche for another time.

At first I shrugged it off, but the seed was planted and by the end of the day I couldn’t get it out of my head. Is there a movement or a subculture out there that wear mismatched shoes? Past or present. Or even future. The Bohemiams of the New York scene circa the 1960′s? Or the Hip-Hop community emerging from the Bronx in the early 80′s? The Hipsters of today? I’m just trying to think of avant-garde movements with extreme fashion statements. Punks from every era obviously have, but that’s just cos they’re too fuckin broke to buy a matching pair! And the future part I guess is science fiction movies, but none sticks out where I remember them using that as a technique to distinguish a future us.

I remembered I own these Pumas and I realized they sort of are mismatched shoes, even though they came like that each shoe has different colors. How mismatched do we have to go? Is different shoelaces enough (cos that’s definitely been around). It has to maintain a definite sense of style. Obviously it’s been done in the way that Lady Gaga has worn a dress with one pork chop covering her left tittie and a filet mignot covering the other. I mean for us, the real people, the regular folk down here on planet earth.

What are the rules? Can we cross brands? Just how far can we take this thing before all life as we know it stops instantaneously and every molecule in our bodies explode at the speed of light? It’s simple to buy one white pair and one black pair of the same sneaker and switch them up. Especially if they have complimenting accents. I found this article pretty quickly and decided it had all the answers – it’s by a woman (whose gender knows everything about shoes) and it’s on a moms website (who know everything about everything). So no further research was required. Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker often did it on her horrific show that my wife made me watch for god knows how many seasons. But the originator was our good ol’ pal Punky Brewster. Case closed. It’s been done but not overdone. It doesn’t seem to have been mass adopted or exploited yet. And possibly not really by men at all.

Let’s see what I can pull off in about 2 minutes:

Hmmm not bad, I think we’re onto something here, switch over the laces and it could just about work. Hey I did say 2 minutes! Give me an afternoon and I could rustle up some mismatched wonders.

Of course I don’t wanna be know as that weird guy who walks around wearing mismatched shoes.

I’ll always be happy to be his dad though!

Blog or Die

Richie — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:03:11 +0000

So it’s really come to this? It’s 1:30am on a Sunday night and I should be in bed asleep so I can start the week fresh, or be ready to get up should the kid have a midnight freakout. But I’m not, I’m here at my my desk staring at my laptop for the past hour, wondering what the fuck I can write about? How the fuck I can get back on the blogging train? It’s been six months and I haven’t posted shit. I like blogging. It’s soothing. It’s therapeutic. It’s a creative outlet that frankly at this point in my life I don’t necessarily have. I’m a director now. I’m a big idea man. I get to come up with great big wacky strategies but I don’t have the luxury of rolling my sleeves up and getting down and dirty with their creation. That’s what my team does for me. Lucky fuckers. This might be my last shot. This blog. Keep it going. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep it personal. Make it myself, for myself, and for anyone who cares to listen. Especially for my kids. So one day they’ll know who I am, or who I was. Not like I’ll be dead, but I won’t be me now then, I’ll be me then then. It sounds desperate cos it is. I was onto a good thing with my blog. It was fun and it was a creative outlet that I desperately needed. But like the asshole that I am and the curse that I was given I over analyze everything, to the point of not being able to hit publish. When you blog you gotta hit publish. You gotta say enough is enough and just put it out there. There’s some stat about how artists are unable to finish most of their work, and when they die their estate finds hundreds of unfinished paintings. Same with words I guess. I read dozens of awesome blogs everyday and they’re so inspiring, and you know what they just have one or two lines, a paragraph at most, accompanied with an image. They just say ‘hey world how ya doing? Check out this sweet image I came across, this is what makes me happy today, this is what inspires me’. I need to be more like that. Less analyzing. Less words. More inspiration and less perspiration as they say. Sometimes I’ll write some deep shit, but most times I’ll just throw up a picture and say this makes me happy, this inspires me, this keeps me keeping on. We’ll see.