The Pixel Sky

National Museum Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:51:00 +0000

Saturday, in case you didn't know, was Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day, during which participating museums offered free admittance. Quite roaring, I know.

Anyhow, I decided that since I had the day free, I'd go to the Eastman House (where the founder of Kodak lived and died), and the U of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery. Normally, these museums cost $8 and 10 respectively, but not for me, bitches! I printed my free pass at work 3 days ago! (Seriously, if you're at work, check that work link out.)

So, I wake up at about noon, and eat, and generally lolligag while waiting for the rain to pass, and by the time I'm showered and out the door it's about 2. They both close at 5, so I decide to hit the Eastman House first, because I really wanted to see this lavish house. It's amazing, but more on that later.

I'm riding my bike along East Ave, when all of a sudden, a car pulls out 8 feet in front of me. I hit my brakes, and to no avail, because the next thing I know, I'd nailed this guy's front quarterpanel. And I am not making this up, I flipped over the handlebars, hit the hood with my back, rounded off, and landed on my feet, facing the car. My sunglasses didn't even come off.

The driver just looks at me, and the first thing out of his mouth is, "Are you kidding me?"

He was really cool about the whole thing. I think he was just happy he wasn't getting sued. I was okay, but mostly dumbfounded; plus it would've been my fault, as I was riding on the sidewalk. What? East Ave's scary on a bike! It was hilarious in hindsight, but that's not counting where the whole encounter left my bicycle's front fork broken. That's still kind of hilarious.

Eastman House! This place was incredible. It was the way I'd picture Hemingway's house, actually, if I thought Hemingway could tend a garden and had any class. Animal skins everywhere - apparently, he was a prolific hunter, and they even did a whole room on his outdoor adventures.

They managed to tuck the fact that he committed suicide at age 73 back into a hallway in the elaborate labyrinth of the 2nd floor, but I found it. To his credit, he was suffering from spinal stenosis, and his note (they had the original on display, which kinda shocked me) said "To my friends, my work is done. Why wait? GE."

So, now they have tours through there. Yay! But they also have some of the very first cameras and camera equipment ever made (back to the 1840's), as well as several photographic exhibits from modern artists, and his extensive garden that they keep up as his memorial. Also, they have a café on the first floor that serves gelato, which I'm sure George Eastman was a huge ... fan ... of? Then again, they did have a wax lemon pie next to a quote placard that read "I enjoy lemon pie as much as any man alive."

As far as museums go, I'd give this one four and a half Louvres out of five. The man was pretty interesting, and had lots of great ideas. Plus, his estate is as gorgeous as any house I'll ever be in. The half off is for keeping me from getting to go to the Memorial Art Gallery, they took my printed pass there and kept it. And the whole hitting a car thing. But yay helmets and ninja skills!

And then I got a haircut.

Here's where it all went down:

View Larger Map

It works now!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:09:00 +0000

Okay, thanks to everyone who wanted to see this. I've figured out how to make a start button now, so i can start posting things that don't auto-blare Weezer.

So, for everyone that's late, this is the second animation I've ever made in Flash, and also the second animation I've ever done, period. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - now I just hope my professor is as well.

This is the rough draft, I still have some fleshing out to do.
Learning Flash is fun. Thanks, Adobe!

In case you don't make it through all 45 seconds, and don't recognize the song, it's "Holiday" by Weezer, from their 1994 self-titled album. It's not my favorite Weezer song per se, but it was the mood I was in when I was picking text to animate.

New Art Wednesday!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:17:00 +0000

"Escher's Landing"

Civic Center Hyatt, Lexington, KY
September 2007

Original Size: 3264px by 2448 px

Prints Available: Up to 36" x 27"

New Art Wednesday #2! This one's a bonus, and I'm trying out "framing" options.

Nick Smith
+1 859 396 6070
novemberalphasierra@gmail.com

New Art Wednesday!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:57:00 +0000

"Awake!"

Corner of Vine and Rose, Lexington, KY
September 2007

Original Size: 3264px by 2448px
Sample Size: 1280px by 960px

Prints Available: Up to 36" x 27"

Nick Smith
+1 859 396 6070
novemberalphasierra@gmail.com

The Red Album

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:20:00 +0000

So, this will constitute my first use of Adobe Contribute ... and likely my first palpable "blog entry."

I'm officially back on the Adobe wagon. I've been hanging out with my boy Photoshop the last couple of nights, and getting back into my Dreamweaver books.

That said, I hope I don't get all strung out on blogging about myself. I'll try to keep this as professional as possible. I'm hoping to get picked up by companies later on, not underage girls.

Anyhow, this is my foot dipped in blogging's waters, and with that, I'm finished. (Everything after this is edits:)

Weezer's third new self-titled album ("the Red Album") came out today. If you heard about it here, let me know, because no kidding, I'm the only person that reads this. It's practically impossible that I'm not.

This is simply the only place where a true Weezer fan (read: "nerd") can come to celebrate by publishing his first his first blog release.

New Art Wednesday!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:34:00 +0000

"Spring Sensation"

Raven Run Nature Sanctuary
April 2008

Original Size: 3264px by 2448px
Sample Size: 1280px by 960px

Prints Available: Up to 36" x 27"

Nick Smith
+1 859 396 6070
novemberalphasierra@gmail.com

AjaxDaddy Adds Slick Applets to Your Web Site [Web Publishing]

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:33:00 +0000

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AjaxDaddy Adds Slick Applets to Your Web Site [Web Publishing]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 5/25/08

Need to give your blog or personal site a more modern look? AjaxBuddy, a free repository of Web 2.0-style site tools, is great for site owners who don't have time to learn an entire programming language, or just need a starter block of code to get building. Grab free, easy-to-modify code for Flickr-like editing fields, quick-loading slideshows and tabbed galleries, instant graphs, date-choosing calendars, and dozens more examples. Many require replacing just a few values to get working, but even the more complex tools are great learning tools.

AjaxDaddy [via Online Tech Tips]

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MIT & RIT Creating a 3-D "Super RoadMap" to the Solar System

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:52:00 +0000

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MIT & RIT Creating a 3-D "Super RoadMap" to the Solar System

via The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond by Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff on 5/19/08

Think of it as a GoogleMaps to the Solar System: a 3-D "super roadmaps" of other planets and moons that will provide robots, astronauts and engineers with the details about atmospheric composition, biohazards, wind speed and temperature -information that could help land future spacecraft and more effectively navigate roving cameras across a Martian or lunar terrain. Manned and robotic missions navigating on other bodies in our solar system will have the ability to find landmarks and destinations to point them in the right direction.

RIT scientist Donald Figer and his team are developing a new type of detector that uses LIDAR (LIght Detection and Ranging), a technique similar to radar, but which uses light instead of radio waves to measure distances. The project will deliver a new generation of optical/ultraviolet imaging LIDAR detectors that will significantly extend NASA science capabilities for planetary applications by providing 3-D location information for planetary surfaces and a wider range of coverage than the single-pixel detectors currently combined with LIDAR.

The LIDAR imaging detector will be able to distinguish topographical details that differ in height by as little as one centimeter. This is an improvement in a technology that conflates objects less than one meter in relative height. LIDAR used today could confuse a boulder for a pebble, an important detail when landing a spacecraft.

"The imaging LIDAR detector could become a workhorse for a wide range of NASA missions," says Figer, professor in RIT's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and director of the RIDL. "It could support NASA's planetary missions like Europa Geophysical Orbiter or a Mars High-resolution Spatial Mapper."

LIDAR works by measuring the time it takes for light to travel from a laser beam to an object and back into a light detector. The new detector can be used to measure distance, speed and rotation. It will provide high-spatial resolution topography as well as measurements of planetary atmospheric properties--pressure, temperature, chemical composition and ground-layer properties. The device can also be used to probe the environments of comets, asteroids and moons to determine composition, physical processes and chemical variability.

Working with Figer are Zoran Ninkov and Stefi Baum from RIT and Brian Aull and Robert Reich from Lincoln Laboratory. The team will apply LIDAR techniques to design and fabricate a Geiger-Mode Avalanche Photodiode array detector. The device will consist of an array of sensors hybridized to a high-speed readout circuit to enable robust performance in space. The radiation-hard detector will capture high-resolution images and consume low amounts of power.

The imaging component of the new detector will capture swaths of entire scenes where the laser beam travels. In contrast, today's LIDAR systems rely upon a single pixel design, limiting how much and how fast information can be captured.

"You would have to move your one pixel across a scene to build up an image," Figer says. "That's the state of the art of LIDAR right now. That's what is flying on spacecraft now, looking down on Earth to get topographical information and on instruments flying around other planets."

"You can have your pixel correspond to a few feet by a few feet spatial resolution instead of kilometer by kilometer," Figer says. "And now you can take LIDAR pictures at fine resolutions and build up a map in hours instead of taking years at comparable resolution with a single image."

The imaging LIDAR detector will be tested at RIDL in environments that mimic aspects of operations in NASA space missions.

In addition to planetary mapping, imaging LIDAR detectors will have uses on Earth, including remote sensing of the atmosphere for both climate studies and weather forecasting, topographical mapping, biohazard detection, autonomous vehicle navigation, battlefield friend/foe identification and missile tracking, to name a few.

"There is an increasing demand for highly accurate three-dimensional data to both map and monitor the changing natural and manmade environment," says Ninkov, professor of imaging science at RIT. "As well as spaceborne applications there are terrestrial applications for LIDAR systems such as determining bridge heights, the condition of highways and mapping coastal erosion as sea heights rise."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Source Links:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.rss.spacewire.html?pid=25451

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Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV Is Way Better Than Cable or Satellite [Microsoft IPTV]

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sat, 17 May 2008 19:16:00 +0000

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Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV Is Way Better Than Cable or Satellite [Microsoft IPTV]

via Gizmodo by Jason Chen on 5/17/08

Microsoft's Mediaroom is the company's IPTV solution that brings TV into to your house (much like cable and satellite) over the internets. You might be familiar with it in its commercially released service forms such as AT&T U-Verse here in the US or BT Fusion in the UK. The features out now—quick channel changing, multiple channel records simultaneously without a hardware (CableCard) limit, multi-room viewing, multiple picture-in-picture—are pretty fantastic, but we had a visit with Microsoft earlier this week and learned that what's coming soon is even better.

First, let's go over the features that Mediaroom offers now. With a simple set-top-box, you can grab high quality HDTV that's better quality (seeing as Comcast has been compressing their HDTV shows like mad) than what you'd otherwise get on cable. If you've got two set-top-boxes, you can stream shows off of each other so you don't have to record a program twice to be able to watch it in your living room and bedroom. You can even watch the same TV broadcast or recorded shows on your Windows PC or Xbox 360, a feature that's been announced since CES by Microsoft, but is up to the actual service provider (AT&T, BT) to roll out. In AT&T's case, it won't be available until the second-half of 2008.

This leads us to the new feature Microsoft showed off: Applications. Since IPTV is a two-way street, your Mediaroom set-top-boxes are able to pull down information from the net, leading to very interesting interactive programs that people can code up for shows. For example:

• During a boxing match, you can pull up different mics, view fighter stats, and even view/vote in polls.

• Nascar races will let you bring up the cockpit cams of your favorite driver (as long as the driver is being tracked by TNT), or listen to the pit crew shout directions.

• During a primary event, CNN allows you to bring up voting results, bios, and other information about each candidate.

And so on. These apps are coded by the shows' producers, then sold to the provider in order to enhance your viewing experience. You could even code up your own app, tack it onto Lost, and try and sell it.

No service provider currently has applications in place now, but they're lightweight and should be able to be run on set top boxes out there today. It's just a matter of your local provider getting these features from Microsoft and integrating it into their service plans. [MeidaRoom]

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04/18/08 triunfa Tracklist! | News

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:16:00 +0000

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04/18/08 triunfa Tracklist! | News

via Weezer RSS Feed by Karl Koch on 4/19/08

"Weezer" (2008) Tracklist is as follows:

Regular Edition (CD; digital):

1. Troublemaker
2. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)
3. Pork and Beans
4. Heart Songs
5. Everybody Get Dangerous
6. Dreamin'
7. Thought I Knew
8. Cold Dark World
9. Automatic
10. The Angel and the One

Deluxe Edition (CD with special packaging; iTunes):

1. Troublemaker
2. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)
3. Pork and Beans
4. Heart Songs
5. Everybody Get Dangerous
6. Dreamin'
7. Thought I Knew
8. Cold Dark World
9. Automatic
10. The Angel and the One
11. Miss Sweeney
12. Pig
13. The Spider
14. King

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Phun physics program

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:13:00 +0000

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Phun physics program

via MAKE Magazine by Gareth Branwyn on 5/16/08

Phun is a 2D "physics sandbox," a program created by a Swedish CompSci major as his Master of Science thesis. It's way cool; a great way for kids (of all ages) to learn physics concepts. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Phun

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What the future holds ...

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:52:00 +0000

I'm currently undergoing a restructuring in my efforts to become a world-class designer.

Hold tight, and we'll see what information we can squeeze out of all this.

This weekend ...

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Smith) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:45:00 +0000

Hi all!

Just a quick post to let you know that The Pixel Sky will be featured in two places this coming weekend:

First, as part of the Artists for Peace exhibit with the KY Domestic Violence Association. This exhibit will be in the City Gallery in the Downtown Arts Center on Main Street, and runs through the rest of the year.

Three pieces, Lucere, What Did You Mean, and Long Side of the Tracks, will be featured as part of an ongoing, traveling show, culminating in an auction with proceeds going to the KDVA.

This is not my first artistic donation to charity, as my very first show was an auction in Charleston, SC for the Christel House, an international charity dedicated to "helping children break the cycle of poverty."

Secondly, I will have 20+ pieces featured at the 2nd Annual BuyART! Market, taking place this year at Victorian Square Shoppes, at the corner of Main Street and Broadway. The market, featuring 19 artists from in and around Central Kentucky, is being put on for the second year by the Lexington Arts and Cultural Council.

The hours are Friday 10-7, Saturday 10-6, and Sunday 12-6. Come by, and see some of Kentucky's most exciting artists! I'll be there all day each day, so stop by booth 10 and visit. :)