In logolounge

Logolounge publishes an annual selection of 2000 logos. My logo for front range vista got in from over 33,000 submissions. So next summer, unless disaster strikes, I'll be able to head down to Barnes and Noble and find my logo on the shelf. I could pretend I don't like to toot my own horn, but we all know that's BS.

Palin's Speech

8:37 - Sounds gracious, and enthused about McCain (of course).

8:38 - Painting McCain as maverick. Making pollsters and pundits (media) the enemy.

8:40 - McCain military service - tied to success in Iraq. Makes mother of soldier connection ("I'm one of you" moment). Makes her own family's service record known.

8:41 - almost angry "USA" chants.

8:42 - Calls out her kids, and references her current family challenges.

8:43 - Uses her husband to establish blue collar credentials, and her wholesome life choices.

8:44 - Acknowledges women's rights.

8:45 - Connects her "heartland" upbringing to Harry Truman (former Vice President).

8:45 - Hockey mom/Pitbull joke - insinuates her toughness.

8:46 - Rips on Obama as community organizer. "Guns and Religion" comment. Accusing Obama of flip flopping, and apparently that "Rookie" Obama is also an elite insider.

8:48 - Why are these speeches about getting people to boo.

8:49 - Now she's teeing up on the press.

8:50 - Challenge the status quo? With four more years of republicans in the white house?

8:52 - She is reaffirming her commitment, and referencing her history as reformer. It's unsettling that she sees the executive branch is in need of reform. I can agree with her on that.

8:54 - Power of veto. Her record showing vetos to save half a billion dollars. Claiming her fiscal acumen. "Bridge to Nowhere"; she opposed it, (but she didn't mention than when she was running for governor, she supported it)

8:56 - Fighting for offshore drilling. These guys are all ready to stoke the coals of the Cold War. Because that's what we need right now. Will she acknowledge that it doesn't make any short term difference? I guess not. How is that energy dependence? Apparently not drilling is "doing nothing at all".

8:59 - Rips Obama on not authoring laws. Rips him for not referring to Iraq with the term "victory". Rips on the Democratic set (okay, we deserve that one.) Associates him with unsafe relations to terrorists. Rips Obama for wanting human rights accorded to enemy combatants. Associating him with Big Government and money. Here comes the "TAX Attack" - don't polls show that Americans are more worried about benefits right now? "A massive tax burden".

9:04 - "Change to Promote Career" = Obama; "Career to Promote Change" McCain. Getting nasty again. People keep promoting McCain as bipartisan, but then the speaker makes incrediblly partisan statements. Wow - really natsy, and painting legislature as weak, do nothing. "path to Presidency is not supposed to be journey of personal discovery". I can't even keep up with the shots being taken.

9:06 - There was any fear that she was going to be all smiles, she's dispelled that. I think she's succeeded in eliminating any question from the minds of Hillary supporters. Pretty nasty - not as bad as Rudi.

9:10 - It's pretty hard to take positive statements and negative statements, alternating so rapid fire...

Wow.

Watching the convention... Rudy Giuliani is really getting nasty and personal. He's also objecting to statements that the press, not the Obama campaign, made, yet the latter the credit for making them. That's pretty disappointing. Mrs. Jones just got in, heard the speech on the radio, and had a similar reaction. Policy aside, that's wasn't a very classy move as a convention speaker. Rovian politics, here we come...

Problems with Palin & Abstinence Training

The McCain camp is coming out swinging hard. I understand (if I don't totally agree) that the personal lives of candidates should be off limits. But what I've seen is journalists asking questions about her lack of experience are getting snapped back at. If she is the reformer, outsider - journalists should have the right ascertain if the label "neophyte" is also applicable.

The next issue is her daughter. Look, early pregnancies happen all the time - I'm not going to judge that actions of teenagers. What I will be critical of is Palin's staunch pro-abstinence education stance. It didn't work here, and it doesn't work in most places. In 3rd world countries, its even less relevant. Children can be a blessing for the right people, but if they aren't, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. And I haven't heard of people who are applauded for deciding to keep their STDs.

Abstinence is lifestyle decision. You can't enforce it - I was listening to NPR this morning and a female delegate interviewed was quoted as defending Palin's stance, saying essentially: Look you can teach it, but kids go off and make their own decisions. Exactly; but then what is the point? So that you have the moral self satisfaction of leading the horse to water, and then be blase about the fact that it died of thirst in front of the trough? Bravo.

As a parent, if you want to impart those values, fine (although that didn't seem to stick here), but in terms of education, protection is what is going to work. It accommodates not just choices - like abstinence - but people who are born homosexual. A christian, right-wing diatribe on abstinence is going to fall on deaf ears if gay and lesbian students feel ostracized already. of course, there is the latent insinuation that whatever happens to homosexuals not practicing abstinence is their own fault. Or what if your parents don't share the same values as a school with a right-wing agenda. Certainly the parents can fill that void with proper education - but then the school is doing a disservice to its students.

I'm getting a little tangential here, but the main point is this: the right to teach value-based abstinence is questionable, but its failure is not: In the past 8 years, money to fund abstinence has gone from 60 million to over 176 million (source - Advocates for Youth). Mathematica Policy Research Inc., a non-partisan group found that abstinence does not lower the rate of teen sexual activity. If supporters are going to fight for the right to teach it, shouldn't they be held accountable for both its failure as a program, and the money that's been tossed down the drain. Of course, that money is probably spent every 3 days fighting the war in Iraq, but one rant at a time.

If teens are going to ignore or fundamentally disagree with abstinence training, to engage in sexual activity without understanding the importance and logistics of protection - then we're just punishing them. It's the equivalent of telling your teens not to drink and drive, but when they call you drunk from a party at 1AM, you decide not to pick up the phone. Roll over and go back to sleep good parent: they can get home some way - and you've done your part; any trouble they into is their own fault for not listening. Maybe some kindly date rapist with abstinence education under his belt will give your daughter a lift home.

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Bringing this back to my original beef with Palin - I respect that she may have been picked in part for her conservative views, to appeal to moral conservatives and the Christian Right. What I don't respect is this shell game that the McCain camp is playing, expecting Hillary supporters who were enthused to elect a female to the white house to suddenly drop their values and IQs, by voting for somebody who's policies couldn't be more different. The gender card is definitely being played here, to the detriment of everybody, including the McCain campaign.

The liberals get slammed as being intellectual elitists - I'll wear that badge with pride as a smart, smug asshat. But being a moral elitist? A holier than though hypocrite who believes the only help needed to be given by the government is in the form of morality brainwashing, and that services shouldn't be funded that can benefit those who haven't fully adopted those values? A sink or swim mentality to your own constituents?

Yeah, I'll take the intellectual elitism, thanks. Not that the past 8 years haven't been fun.

Snap Judgements: Don't hide the bromance, bro.

At first this looked like the back of any X-Games watching, pseudo counterculture participating meathead's truck.


But wait a minute... what's that in the window?


That's so cute!

IE 8

I've made little secret of my disdain for internet explorer - From how it handles padding to rendering fonts, web sites just look uglier on IE.

I had to laugh when I about the IE 8 beta, and tech pundits making hay about its new "porn mode" - a mode that hides it from cookies and site tracking.

I don't love Safari (Firefox man myself), but Safari has had this feature for a while now.

LAX?

The Game finally released his "I'm going into retirement after this album", LAX.

I feel like he and 50 Cent are manifesting their beef, by seeing who can put out a worse album. I like "The Documentary" - any album that gets heavy production support from Dr. Dre is going to be bangin'. And "The Doctor's Advocate" actually improved on his debut. Despite not having Dr. Dre at the soundboard, Scott Storch and others helped make a classic west coast gangsta rap album. It actually sounded like his flossing was deserved. He was free from having to hawk G-Unit garbage, and his estranged status from Dr. Dre as a result of his beef with 50 Cent almost made it a concept album - he was a Ronin rapper, torturing himself over losing the hand of his mentor. Honestly, after Ghostface, Doctor's Advocate single handedly makes The Game the second most listened to rapper in my iPod (sorry Snoop, Meth and T.I.).

So WTF happened to LAX? Scott Storch makes a single, unimpressive appearance. The production is disjointed, and worse - just bad. So are the guests. I love Raekwon - but he's got no business trading lines with the Game. Ice Cube? Talk about irrelevant. I'm probably more authentic than Cube these days. And then we're not even going into the R&B heavy garbage.

Technically, The Game improves his flow with every album. He even double times his flow on the opening track. But he spends so much time canceling out righteous desperation with nihilistic flossing that he makes DMX and Snoop Dogg look like should be honored by the NAACP. Gone is the lost son of Dr. Dre (my thoughts and sympathies go out to Dr. Dre, whose 20 year old son was found dead the other day) - and we just have a guy who is los tin his personas.

Rappers retire the way Michael Jordan and Brett Favre do. But when the Game comes back, Dre or no Dre, I hope he gets his head back on.

I'll say one thing - LAX is so bad, I actually just put on Fiddy's last album, Curtis - and its actually not bad in comparison. At least 50 is focused - even what he's focused on is making ends while shitting on the hand that pays.

Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution:
If you want a better west coast album - Keak Da Sneak's "Deified". The king of hyphy is back, his warbling graveling caterwauling fights with production that's been called "too bombastic". I think it kicks major domo ass. Best West coast album of the year so far.

Stuff this white guy likes

I posted a link to the well circulated stuff white people like blog a ways back, and picked up the paperback for my vacation in July. The author, Christian Lander, has an interview on the AV CLub, and buried in it was statement that beautifully articulated my own criticism with white hipness, and my own complicity.

"But you're just as guilty of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses' mentality as your parents or grandparents. It's not a display of wealth. It's about a display of authenticity and taste. And so it's just my anger about that competition. And what I'm angry about is, I just can't stop myself from doing it."

Taking the dive into Blu-Ray

Well, after going through 3 dvd players in as many years, I decided instead of buying another value priced DVD player, to bite the bullet and go blu-ray. My rationale is that according to articles, the electronics cartel aren't going to allow the price of leading blu-ray players go down to 300 dollars until well into 2009. So If I were to buy another DVD player, I probably would still wind up behind when I eventually did buy a blu-ray player. I'm also guessing there will be a media conversion to blu ray in 2010, at which point new releases will be harder to come by. I'm a traditionalist in the sense I don't like to steal movies or music - so I think the a digital medium being connected to the home theatre is still a few years out, and a few years more before its acceptably turnkey that Mrs. Jones could use it while I'm out. So for the time being, blu-ray is the new medium, and probably the last hard medium for watching movies before downloads finally replace the existing model.

So I picked up one Blu-Ray disc to see how much better it was. Even on my 32 inch 780p, it looked noticeably better to me. The contextual UI is a lot more user friendly, and I put in Batman Begins on DVD to see the up conversion. Also - much improved. It didn't look as good as the blu-ray disc, but much better than when it was played on a traditional DVD player.

Tiger walking on water

touche, EA sports, touche...

The battle continues

This is a sequel to the previous post. If you actually read this whole thing - I'll make a check for 25 bucks. You'll have to pass a quiz proving you are a literary masochist.



REBUTTAL
"smooveluv, so anyone who has no interest in the movie and thinks it's garbage and is tired of hearing the same, worn out insults, etc must be a Bush supporter??"

No, but if I was a gambling man, I'd say it's likely in your case - and your comments certainly present you at least as a Bush defender or apologist, whether you are aware of that perception or not.

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"we have not been attacked one time since 9/11, contrary to the liberal promoted propaganda"

I suppose if you consider the soliders in Iraq not part of the collective "we" you could assert that. If you are talking about attacks on American soil, I'm not aware of any liberal propaganda asserting that we have been attacked. Please provide some documentation - I'd be very curious to read about these faux attacks. I also fail to see where this fits into the argument. It could just as easily be argued that we have not been attacked despite the administration, not because of it. I'd also be knocking on wood right about now.

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"Iraq has achieved many great things since we first went over there--this is based on what friends and family members who have served in the military have personally witnessed and observed while over there."

I'm sure that there have been some gains, but the net effect is destabilization to the country, and to the region. I'm sure it could be argued that in a sense we've "taken the fight to the enemy" but I'm not that comfortable with that argument, as it essentially says we are using our soldiers as bait to lure Al Q into a one geographical area. I'm sure some people don't have an issue with that, its just my opinion.

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"It's funny you ridicule the comment made about the WMDs being moved to Syria, because it's actually true, believe it or not."

I have no choice but NOT to believe it, because neither you, nor anybody else has been able to produce them. Either that's a fiction you are stating as fact, or our military intelligence is so poor that we bungled that operation as well. Are you stating that we should accept your word, without clear unverifiable proof, regarding something so important? If the government did find it, and is hiding it, then its consistent with their habit of keeping the American public in the dark. If we had found this material, wouldn't they be hoisting it up over our heads? Given everything that's gone on in this administration, I feel that the burden of proof falls on your side of the argument. Show me the money, or stop claiming that they are there. If the premise was to stop production and get our hands on those weapons, why isn't that argument being used to steamroll into Syria, and get the weapons that we know are there? And not in Lebanon. Or Iran. Or any number of other countries disenfranchised with our foreign policy.


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"Are people ever going to wake up and live in the real world?"

Clearly you are on another realm of reality above ours, one that we can't possibly hope to attain. Interesting that our paths intersect at a web site dedicated to movie gossip. If you are sensing sarcasm, your detector is not malfunctioning. Methinks you perceive an intellectual chasm between yourself and the plebiscites, that is less wide than you think it is. But I could be wrong, and Morpheus will come a knocking on my feeding chamber, to awaken me from my slumber.

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"CNN is bullshit. FOX is bullshit. It's all propaganda. The American public who view such news sources are being fooled by those who are paid to show you what the person behind the curtains wants you to see."

That's your opinion, but hardly relevant - I made no reference to CNN as a primary news source for me, unless you are interpreting my reference to Glenn Beck as such, which would be an incorrect conclusion. Perhaps you'd like to be part of the solution, rather than content to point out the problem, and provide us with your credible news sources. Or do you simply avoid the news media entirely, on principal? Of course, there is an alternative to avoiding "all propoganda" - take in as much news as possible, aggregate and parse it down, and use your own critical faculties to come to the most rational conclusion. Or I could just get my facts made up for me by conservative talk radio or Bill Maher. It's ironic that your criticism of the news media can be just as easily be made against the administration itself.

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"You don't have to be a Bush supporter or an absolute conservative to know this or to feel the way I do about it. "

That's true, but its not your paranoia of the news that makes me think you are either A: a conservative pretending not to be, in order to wear a pretend mantle of objectivity, or B: you are unaware of your own bias. It's mostly just everything else you are saying that makes me think that.

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"What one does for a living and how much money they make has absolutely NOTHING to do with their credibility."

True, but income strata have everything to do with what policies benefit voters, and recognizing what groups oppose or advocate those programs. Simply going back as recently as 1935, Republicans have serially voted against public assistance programs, using McCarthyism, the specter of death by taxation, and ideological fiery rhetoric to persuade the economically depressed to vote against programs that would directly benefit them. Social Security, Medicaid, Bilingual Education, Universal Healthcare, and Head Start are all programs that the financially distressed would benefit from - so when they vote according to party dogma, it's unintelligent. I'm not critiquing the lower class, I'm critiquing people of that group who vote for Republicans, without considering voting for programs that benefit them. I'd similarly accuse affluent people of voting against their economic interests by voting Democratic - but they have the benefit of expendable income and no threat to their standard of living, which makes such idiosyncratic behavior less self damaging. And they have nice "stuff" - so they must be smart.

Lest you accuse me of part of the machine that fuels the propaganda dissemination conspiracy, I'd be happy to produce source citation from several volumes that include direct quotes from politicians on both sides of the aisle to back this claim up.

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"Most of America is so Goddamn doped up anyway on anti-depressants and other such poisons that they're incapable of logical and rational thoughts."

Certainly I hope that's just a broad, insulting generalization (substitute "American" with any social minority group, and you'll see what that statement reads like) and not a direct accusation. Still the insinuation that anyone who doesn't share your opinion must somehow be hallucinating is troublesome - I suppose by trivializing the opposition saves you the trouble of questioning your own beliefs. I feel I am well served by my grasp of logic, and I've found several holes in yours. Incapable of rational thought? That's hyperbole. Make that a literal statement, and we'd find ourselves in some post-apocalyptic wasteland. If that's the case, I'm definitely canceling my last check to the Home Owner's Association.

EDIT: This statement, which is basically taking a dumping on "most" Americans directly contradicts your earlier defense of the common man, when you stated: "What one does for a living and how much money they make has absolutely NOTHING to do with their credibility." Or are you saying regardless of occupation or income bracket, we are all just equally lacking in our mental faculties? And I'm sure I've got my share of typos, but you might want to spell check and examine grammar before you throw the collective minds of "most of America" under a bus.

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"But as far as the subject at hand goes, there is no point to this movie. "


So you've seen it? Capital. Do tell. Where does Stone lose his point? Or did I misunderstand you? Maybe you were just saying that premise of this movie doesn't interest you, or that you are incapable of seeing anything new being brought to the table.

To the contrary, there is a great deal of point to the premise of making the film, in my opinion. Stone is unapologetically liberal, and a conspiracy nut to top it off. He's rushing to have it filmed, and he wants to persuade voters to vote democratic. It's manipulative, ballsy, and insulting to most Americans by thinking they are dumb enough to be so easily brainwashed. That's pretty descriptive of the tone of your argument, so in hindsight, your opposition to this film now confuses me.

My rant from a movie site against bush supporters who don't want to see Oliver Stone's mockumentary W

From James: "I've spent hours defending Bush's presidency... Although, not like I care at all, or know anything about politics" You've established yourself as a credible expert on current politics - those sound like hours well spent, with tangible results.

From Balboa6: "Enough Bush bashing already... Everyone needs to drop the subject and move on." Yeah, Americans shouldn't care about the job the president is doing. It's not important or anything. Not risking saying something that could potentially bore Balboa6 - that's what we need to focus on. But people who feel that Bush is the worst president of the past century, they should just move on to something more topical.

And I don't think anyone would make a stink about an anti-Obama movie, because it would never get made in liberal hollywood. Unless you mean a movie that was filmed in Anne Coulter's basement, with Glenn Beck manning a super-8, with Rush Limbaugh in black face. That movie is probably already on youtube. Otherwise, your argument condemning liberals for their reaction to an Obama film, is as foolish as it is unfair, seeing as its based on a hypothetical situation.

99% of the time, I feel people are entitled to their opinion, but after 8 years, an unnecessary war based on false premises with thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, an administration that made a mockery of the Attorney General's office, a non-enemy combatant policy that Bush's own appointed supreme court puked all over, and after an economy that briefly popped out of a cesspool, and the flushed back in - after all that, I think Bush supporters can shut the hell up. We've heard enough of this incompetent whacker - and he deserves every cheap shot that's made at him, whether its boring or cliche to you. We've been listening, and enduring his inarticulate speeches and damaging foreign policy for 8 years. People can shut the hell up and listen to a 2+ hour movie that calls him on it - or skip it.

For your tuesday afternoon

Courtesy Leslie Feist

The Grind

A checklist might give you some idea of what some more of my more mundane tasks are like:

Package Dimensions for Swift 3D - In Pixels

F# Package
Width: 389
Height: 459
Depth: 196
Back Flap Height: 544
Box Panels: DONE
Assembled Panels Into Box:
Graphics Panels:
F8W:
F8C:
F5W:
F5C:
F2CW:
F2CC:
Render Boxes:
JPG:
PNG:
TIF:
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R8 Single Package
Width: 171
Height: 284
Depth: 175
Center Flap Height: 68
Box Panels:
Assembled Panels Into Box:
Graphics Panels:
R8W:
R8C:
Render Boxes:
JPG:
PNG:
TIF:
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R# Single
Width: 162
Height: 230
Depth: 160
Center Flap Height: 72
Box Panels:
Assembled Panels Into Box:
Graphics Panels:
R7:
R5:
R2:
Render Boxes:
JPG:
PNG:
TIF:
_________________________________
R# Double
Width: 162
Height: 459
Depth: 160
Center Flap Height: 72
Box Panels:
Assembled Panels Into Box:
Graphics Panels:
Render Boxes:
JPG:
PNG:
TIF:

_________________________________
R2 Quad
Width: 313
Height: 459
Depth: 158
Back Flap Height: 522
Box Panels:
Assembled Panels Into Box:
Graphics Panels:


Steps for Each:
Create shapes with the dimensions above
Create Blank 3D models, with established lighting and camera angles (5 boxes)
Test Lighting
Export High Res Filters and Die lines
Crop Panels according to blank panels
Apply graphics to Swift box panels, and create product versions of each box (12 total packages)
Export to jpg, png, and tiff

A new shirt!

And it's not even call of duty. It's just wack, yo.

Things I've yelled at someone from within the confines of my car

"Come on, hurry up and cross ya pear-shaped bastard!"

And don't forget the REAL cyberthreat

U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say

Yeah, uh, no kidding.

For Your Monday Morning

Courtesy Phil Collins

woo-hoo!

A stranger bought a couple of shirts! I'm psyched, and glad I wasted 3 hours making those damn things. Of course, Eaton was a bro and bought a shirt for himself and JR, and I ordered a couple for myself - but this is the first time some random DutyHead bought the shirts. And he's from Australia. Kind of neat to think that something I designed will be worn down under.

I am going to keep designing some non-CoD4 shirts and swag. I figure if I create enough of this stuff, and I can maybe earn some mad money.

EDIT: Sold a few more - I might actually break even.