ricardocabellov5.5

I sent an email (by mistake, as I was going to do it on Friday) to the Spring designers with this image, well, it wasn't actually a file called "byebye" without extension. So they had to figure out that it was a GIF, then they had to learn a bit about the format and find the text inside it and ready it. It's a message for them. One of them saw the text but was because a Irfanview bug (?). I've amended the image so irfanview doesn't show it. By now, nobody was able to read the text, even the Dev guys :/



I guess some of the readers of this blog already know what it is, as it's an old pixelling scene trick :D

Let's face it! do you think that there is any REAL improvement? Is still the same window-based enviroment, with the same Start button, single and static desktop. Evolution? Where?!

Can you believe there are almost 15 years of difference between the screenshot above and the screenshot below?



Let's talk about real evolution!

Today Madgoblin sent me a link to a video of Luis Von Ahn Speech at Google engEDU. The speech is quite interesting, it shows how sometimes you can solve big technical problems using bored humans minds (which there are billions!). He explains the concept of all of his games: ESP game, PeekaBoom, ... And hey, what a clever guy! Now I can't stop my mind trying to see how to apply this concept to other areas.

Also, looks like Google liked the concept and 'ripped' the ESP game for his brand new Google Image Labeler.

Hmm...

 .Net Manazine has a section called "Makeover" where people running some business can sent to the magazine a brief and the magazine contact different web design agencies to offer them do to the brief. Free creative project where everyone ends up getting something. Also a clever idea for .Net guys as it's some free content that they don't have to write. So they chosed Spring Digital, and they wanted me to do it.

So my part on this project was to redesign the clients website, and well to be honest I'm not too proud of the result. I don' think the colours are the good ones, and well, as usual however had to do make the section didn't really cared about some bits. We sent them a .PNG and you can see JPEG artifacts very easily on the laptop screen, and also I said that I could expand the background so they could fit it properly on the laptop screen, even they could do it, even add a browser or something. Well, they didn't bother and they just put the image on the top of the laptop image, greeeat.

Also, the text this time are not my words, coworkers at Spring did all of it. But again, whoever built the article on the magazine selected the most gay sentence in all the article:

"A design started to form in my mind of a simple home page, well-designed, but with clear navigation elements"

Eu... Oh dear.. Well let's be positive!! Atleast they spelt my name properly this time! ;)

Check out (or something) the article here.

Oh god... Last Wednesday I slept 3hours, on Thursday 3hours more, Friday 5 hours, Saturday 3hours and yesterday (Sunday) 1hour on the plane and 5hours more.. In addition, the nights of Friday and Saturday were on a crappy airmattress with the extra addition of people talking and a fucking fly going around. So yeah.. I'm completelly naked now. However, now I have a little lunch break, so I'll try to expose my opinions about how the party was and what needs to be improved for the next edition (tho there were some rumours about having another edition or not, but I guess that happens always in any party).

Sleep?
The fact that now I'm naked makes me think that the idea of having the sleeping room on the other side of the dance floor wasn't really a good one! Sleeping with people dancing around you (sunday morning), with people chatting (sunday morning again!)... Well, it makes you think if you're enjoying the party or not. So, definitelly there were some bad decissions there.

Weather
The weather didn't help at all either. Having a very warm summer produced the creation of a LOT of bees and flys that were VERY annoying if you wanted to chill or eat. Even talking with the people you had the bees trying to foots! But that would be alright if atleast the day were hot and sunny enough just to go inside the pool and play with your scenepals (Which was the main point of latest edition of pmp imho). So this time having that -special- fun wasn't able because uncontrollable issues :_( Fucking weather!

Inside or Outsite?
Also, having the djs an visuals outside was much cooler last year, probably we moved inside the house because we probably fucked up the grass the last year... but being inside the house was very claustrophobic and having the people smoking there and ovbiosly having the sleep room on the other side, was simply nasty. Sorry :(

Demoscene - productivity
Oh well.. This time we had only 1prod. It was an xplsv+dust inc collaboration. I was going to do fast prod for atleast having xplsv releasing a prod, but as I saw that Shine already did that I decided to chill. What's going on!? Why nobody else did anything?

Demoscene - international
Again, I don't think there is too much you can do. But I'm sure that Shifter, PS and Melwyn didn't have the great time that the other international sceners had the last year. This time I think we were even more closed, and Shifter appeared to be quite a lot of times very irritated because the language issue.

Demoscene - killing it or what?
As a proud member ot TDSB (The demoscene savers brigade) I've to say that the fact that some new sceners were not invited to the party, even some ones that did more for the demoscene that people attending the party makes me sad. Is this a sect or what? If it will keep being like that the only thing that will happen is that the ones that get tired of it just don't go and we're going to be less people and less people. It will end up like a madrid friends house party with some music on there. I wonder if people like... slack, merlucin, madgoblin, silenci, stage7, bixo guys, nocturns guys... were 'invited'.

Conga DJ sesion
Great concept, but I'm from another generation I guess. Those musics were not that great to me, so I guess it was fun for 25-35 people. During that event I prefered to go to my 'bed' and read a tutorial done by kile ;)

THAT guy
The guy that was wearing that blue tshirt really pissed me off. It was being very annoying with everyone. Screaming in the VJs face ISN'T funny. Jumping to the DJ stage ISN'T funny. Moving the projectors ISN'T funny. Saying that the VJ is doing crap after telling him to don't touch the projectors ISN'T funny. Pushing you ISN'T funny. Talking crap ISN'T funny. Who the hell was that guy anyway? A new scener? And.. what kind of mushrooms did he ate?

VJing
Melwyn had a really good idea for his VJsession. However the implementation wasn't that great imho. That showed us that VJing is not just a 3dscene with a layer on the top. We all need to work on that. Threepixels visuals were nice, but guys, fix your tool! ;)

Schranz
It was quite funny to see that now the people -kind of likes- all that music that I've been listening for years :D That means thar r08028 and r08080 are going to be cool now? ;) I guess it's just a trend.

Obviously, there are a lot of good things there, like the food, drinks, sound system and all that, sushi (kind of) provided by limp ninja+xplsv and good vibes, but I think we should think a bit about what are we doing.

I'll certainly miss working in the offices, I decided to leave a couple of weeks ago as I had some ideas in mind that I wanted to develop and to do that I need to be fulltime working on them. Also, a break in your life is always needed. After all I've been working there for 3 years now, (full time since 2'5 years). When I started we were more or less 3 guys, and now we're 25+ now... So I can say that I've learnt as much as the company has. In my case I've learnt a lot about managing clients, design process, some softwares, AS, English, slang (hello Mike!), accents, and even culture :D

So, after deciding it, I went to see the big guys, said the news and they got it quite well, so I'll still do freelance stuff when needed for them and some extra things which sound quite interesting... I'll like to see how it works out. So, after informing the big guys it took 1 week to let the rest know. It has been a very hard week, because anytime anyone were saying somthing like "and you will have to do that later on...", I was like.. eu.. uhm.. yeah! And it's kind of hard situation really.

The pain is over and the new was spread today... And well, it was quite emotional, I've never felt that needed/loved in a company, looks like everyone was shocked (some of them extremely more than others :P). I better don't mention how hypocritical was on the other Spanish companies I work for. Oh well.. I'll miss all that.

So well, my last day is September 8th, but I already want to thank to all the Spring'ers for all the help and the support they gave me, and just for staying there and be as they're! (that sounds really gay!). I'll see you every wednesday that the weather let us play football anyway ;)

The good news for whoever reads this blogs are that I'll probably write more, about cool projects that I may work on, i'll probably improve much more/faster xplsv.tv, and do some new sites I got in mind. And for the other companies/individuals is that from now on I'm again available for doing freelance jobs. So if you think I could help in anything, just drop me a line.

Believe it or not, yeah, i own a iBook now. As now the airports doesn't let you go in the plane with a big-size laptop, I had to buy this one just for PMP... just kidding...

I'm not really a fan of the OS, but I like the size of the machine and I also like the machine technology-wise. I was waiting for a intel one, but looks like Apple will still take a bit of time to release a 12" one with a proper 3dgfx card. So by now i'll play with this one and see what can I do with it. Got to see how, Photoshop, Flash8, Reason and Traktor runs on it... :)

For the ones that doesn't know, I'm talking about 1995 by Kewlers & MFX. If you go to the profile in pouet, you'll find that 154 users liked this production and even 5 of them think is one of the best prods ever.

Ok, first of all, I think there is a lot of hype here, A LOT! But that's not what made me to thumb down the prod. Kewlers is one ot the demoscene groups that has been innovating in style in almost every prod they were trying. MFX also tried to innovate, and after his awesome last prod Deitie the last thing you will expect is having abstract objects rotating while moving in a tunel or something. Homage to the oldschool art?! Well, the style of the website doesn't remind me at all the oldschool style, really. Also, apart from the kind of raytraced balls that are done by particles and then explode, there is nothing else new in the demo.

Anyway, if the demoscene needs something now is start moving to new visual styles. Right now, if you see a new demo, you may feel a deja vu. They design demos to look like other demos, and that's something that doesn't work anymore (atleast for me). There are always exceptions (like Aesterozoa) which is still one abstract object on the middle of the screen, but everything creates such a great experience, mood, that in a way the the concept makes sense.

Luckilly the guys at Fairlight now this, and they always try to do demos that doesn't look like demos everytime (getting some inspiration from xplsv.tv if needed ;D) Do you want an example? Check out Track One by Fairlight!

Ok.. My laptop is now obsolete :( Looks like a Radeon X300 now is not good enough... well.. that's how it is...

Anyway.. here are my favorites prods released at Assembly this year in order of preference...

Starstruck by The Black Lotus
Aesterozoa by Kewlers
Track one by Fairlight
Bombman by Matt Curren

Any other one? Well, i'm just not too sure about the other ones :_(

Since I've been in London, I've experienced a lot of interesting things related to movies.

The first one was when a movie I saw (which unfortunatelly I forgot the name right now) was filmed in a pub down the road of the first place I was working in London. It took me a while to recognise it because they changed the colour of the pub, but it was that one. I'll try to remember the name...

Edit: The movie was Intimacy.

The second one would be when I realised that a bus stop that is below a highway I used to walk trough was where one of the last scenes of Sexy Beast was filmed (A couple scenes were filmed in the same area in fact).

The third one would be when we realised that we were living in the same road that where the shop of the movie Notting Hill is, tho at some point it changes the name. We used to walk a lot looking for that shop, but it was just in the same street. We weren't able to find the park tho.

The fourth one was when in the cathedral that we got in front of our actual building they were filming a movie, and one of the actors there was Jordi Molla (which is from Barcelona, as I am). But no.. I didn't saw him.

And the last one was today, when I was walking (instead of taking the bus) from Spring to home because the day was great. After having a quick stop at Foxtons I went to a cinema I like to see if there were any interesting movies and just when I was arriving I was hearing people screaming, I thought they just were complaining about something. I arrived there, and stopped in the middle of the road, then I saw that there were lots of photographers, and people on the other side screaming. Oh right.. it was a premiere.. a small one as the cinema isn't too big and the road was quite small (it's not like Odeon or Empire ones). So I looked for the poster of the movie.. "Volver", uh? tried to recognise the girl in the poster, I wasn't able to, readed the name.. "Penelope Cruz", uh?! Then I turned my head to the right and I had "Pe" just on my side, looking at me, she was just walking a bit so the people could take some pictures of her. And she was at the end of the road at that point. Then I tried to see who was the director, oh! Almodovar!! turned my head again and saw him at 3meters of me. Hehehhe.. By then a policeman just pushed me away of the street, as I was kind of the middle.

I had more experiences like that, but these are the ones I remember right now. It's funny how many movie sets you can see in the city in very random places.