When Kelly and I were looking for a stupid holiday tie for me to wear to a party tonight, we came across the motherlode: Kohl’s had a huge supply of marginally silly ties that had the added bonus of actually playing christmas carols in dinky little beeps. I can’t believe they’re still making these, seems like they’d be up to little mp3 players in them by now.
Anyway, after getting all of them playing simultaneously and making a bit of a scene, I realized one of the ties was marching to the beat of its own drummer, struggling with the song it was programmed to sing. So, in the spirit of the holidays, I provide to those of you I won’t see before christmas, the following bit of yuletide cheer:
I was hoping for for something that looked over-the-top xmasy, but I couldn’t leave this little guy in the store. Hopefully he’ll hold up through the party tonight.
I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I finished helping my computer recover from a long semester of incredibly disorganized use, and spent some time playing around with photos. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about animated gifs… seems like people are sick enough of them that we oughta bring them back. I heard someone making a joke about them recently, and everyone laughed on cue like it was a joke about the president (don’t get me wrong, I’ve been known to drop an animated gif bit or two myself).
The punchline of this and similar jokes concerned, of course, how obviously unsophisticated the people who use them must be. Animated gifs are certainly the unofficial seal of crappy clipart web design, but, can they be anything more? Tom Moody’s done some interesting things with them, as have others, I’m sure. Here’s my attempt…
This one is composed of three images, one from Iceland, one from Austin, and one of a Flavin piece at MOMA in NYC, which I haven’t altered other than to play with the transparency. See if you get hypnotized or irritated (you can also view the huge [11mb!], slow-loading version, but give it a second to get its rhythm). It’ll be interesting to see what flickr thinks of it, or maybe my cellphone.
I really like the pebbly effect, and think that the jerky animation has lots of potential. I think I’ll try a few more, perhaps attempting less smoothed-out transitions. Fun!
I’d be Jason Freeman’s iTunes Music Signature Maker (via createdigitalmusic.com). When you run this application, it goes into your library, figures out what you’ve been listening to, and creates a short collage to represent your taste.
This is the same person responsible for the Network Aurlization for Gnutella that I posted about a couple of years ago. iTSM is great, a kind of hyperlocal, meaning-loaded version of that, with much more fun results.
Here’re two signatures from my iTunes Library, one w/ the defaults, one messing with the settings a little.
You’ll notice this is better than any of the songs by themselves. Please make one of your own.
More interesting stuff:
from the post at createdigitalmusic:
…uses an FFT to merge spectrally similar audio, mixing down your audio smoother than a baby’s bottom.
from the application documentation:
Maybe you’ll load your iTunes signature onto your iPod, e-mail it to some friends, share it in our signature gallery, or stick it on your home page. Maybe it will help you gauge your compatibility with your next blind date: "She seems nice enough, but her iTunes signature is just so atonal! Should I go with my heart or with my ear?" Or maybe an iTunes signature will figure prominently into a political attack ad: "If you’re mad at him for raising your taxes, polluting our environment, and cutting the education budget, just wait until you hear the music he listens to…"
![the huge [11mb!], slow-loading version](http://activitycast.com/images/3peater.gif){kind=link}