If only world political disputes could be solved by rubbing Vaporub on the noses of opposing armies. Read this fantastic BBC article.

One of those tools is faveup, which is, by their own description, “A Gallery of Inspirational Design.” They collect examples of slick and inspiring business cards and logos as well as Flash and HTML websites. All this is wrapped together in a really beautiful and easy to navigate package. If you really like the site, help raise awareness by digging it.

Hey folks,

So for all the geeks out there who are constantly called upon to fix this or set up that, check out this link. It’s a list containing the default password for hundreds upon hundreds of wireless routers. So if you’re helping someone with their LG LAM200E and they don’t know the pw, you can bet it’ll be “epicrouter” or your money back (provided they didn’t put in their own password back when it was set up).

I got this from Digg a few weeks back, but I thought I’d point it out for the non-Digg-obsessed.

Ta ta!

Ok, so a few days have passed and I can now collect my thoughts on two movies I have recently seen: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Ratatouille. Great films, both of them. I woke up thinking about Ratatouille and it got me wanting to write a bit of a review.

So the gist of the film is as follows (I won’t give away any spoilers, just repeat what you can already find out from the trailers). Remy, a rat in Paris, aspires to be a great cook (and he’s got the talent). He teams up with Linguini who, tragically, has similar ambitions but doesn’t have the stuff. The two team up, hoping to become the greatest cook in all of Paris.

This movie is brilliant.

For years, Pixar has produced films that, while for children, have great appeal to adults. They are smart, funny, endearing, and brilliantly animated. I maintain that there is not another major studio that can come close to their artistry in computer animation and storytelling. Dreamworks pales in comparison to Pixar time and time again, always playing catchup and never scoring a point. The thing that makes Ratatouille stand out from the rest of Pixar’s library is that this film is not for children, but rather, for adults. It’s a sophisticated story—not because of an incredibly complicated plot, but because of the story and it’s treatment. This is a film about self-identity, the understanding and acceptance of change, and of course, food! Some of the most brilliant moments come when Remy is closing his eyes, trying to contemplate the subtleties of a flavor. Pixar animates taste like Kandinsky could paint music. These visualization sequences are positively wonderful.

My hopes for Ratatouille and Pixar are grand. The fact is that animation in America, despite some breakouts, is generally considered a bit juvenile. I think people still have Disney and Saturday morning cartoons stuck in their head when someone says, “it’s animated.” The Simpsons did a lot to break the mold (though it’s been a pile of snot for the last 10 seasons), and the full length rotoscoped features Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, both directed by Richard Linklater, have changed our perception of animation. However, I think the power lies in Pixar’s hands, because of their mainstream popularity and consistently grade-A work, to make Americans view animation the way the Japanese do: as a medium fully capable of conveying adult material and themes (while flexible enough to handle children’s entertainment), just like live action.

We’ll see! As you can expect, I am chomping at the bit for Pixar’s next feature, WALL-E. Take care, all.

So we’re halfway through the year now (Well, month-wise. February fucks the whole thing up day-wise). I haven’t blogged in some time, but I thought a sort of “New Year” post would do. I’m up to a lot now. The Summer started slowly – I found it incredibly difficult to get anything done at home, despite my long list of goals. After a fantastic visit to Boston and Baltimore, my batteries are fully charged and I’ve been a machine! Well, I’ve gotten more efficient anyway.

As some of you may know, color is not my strong suit. Gimme a pen, I’ll give ye’ a line, but give me some color and it won’t look too fine… (don’t give me poetry, either.) I’m just now learning about the magic of lifting color palettes from the images and environments around me. I bought a fantastic book called Cartoon Modern (blog & amazon), half because I love fifties animation and want to learn how to incorporate the styling into my work, and half to steal the color combinations. Well I just stumbled upon a fantastic resource from Adobe Labs.

It’s called kuler. I’m not sure how long it’s been available, but it’s new to me! It’s a site where people can upload and tag color palettes, and likewise, search for and download them. You can even subscribe via RSS to feeds of the most popular, highest rated, and most recent submissions. Better yet, when you’ve found that perfect set of tones, you can download the color theme as a set for CS 2 (and 3, I’d imagine), and apply the colors to your files.

For you Tiger users out there, there’s even a kuler Dashboard widget, where you can pretty much navigate the basic functionality of the site from your desktop.

Enjoy!

Ok, so I found a great piece of software for the Mac that you’re all bound to love, because it’s not a total geek-out niche product, it’s incredibly useful, and best of all, it’s free! It’s a plugin for Sarari called Inquisitor. David Watanabe, the fellow who wrote the software, describes it best on the site:

Inquisitor… it’s like Spotlight for the web.

Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search.

It’ll autocomplete your words (is it reading your mind?) and you can add more search engines to Safari with customized keyboard shortcuts.

It really is amazing how well it predicts what you want to type. I find that it’s incredibly useful when I don’t quite know the spelling of something. Inquisitor figures it out and gives me what I’m looking for. You can set up hot-keys to automatically jump to the results in a particular browser or site, say yahoo, amazon, or wikipedia. Perhaps the feature is that it’s totally transparent. It’s woven right into the Safari interface, replacing the standard Google search field.

So check out Inquisitor. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s incredibly useful.

Mark

The cover/jacket art for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been released to the wide world of the internet today! Check it out…whaddya think?



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