All my life, I've been a fan of Roadside America, but I got an email from my folks last night about the amazing Miniatur Wunderland in Germany — the largest model railway in the world. Really makes me want to visit Hamburg:

 

May Your Holidays be Occupied with Good Cheer!

2011 brought great changes to the world around us: the overthrow of tyrants, economic chaos, even the unusual combination of earthquake, hurricane and tornados within the same month near our home. Fortunately, our family is healthy and doing well. But greed and injustice, always too big to fail, have inspired sustained protests all over the world.

Our card depicts the #occupytheoven movement complete with a gingerbread policeman employing non-lethal frosting spray on the protesters. Don't worry, they'll be OK—although we eventually did have to use force to get them all out of the oven. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I love this short by Nick Scott and Michael Berliner!

Wednesday night, I attended the Washington Printmaker's talk at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. My friend Andrea Way has a beautiful piece called Cicada in their current show of prints called "Multiplicity" curated by Joann Moser.

CICADA, Andrea Way -  Silksreen Print 30"x42"

Twenty years ago, I worked hard to bring that print to life when I was the masterprinter at the Hand Print Workshop directed by Dennis O'Neil. Cicada is fairly large for hand-pulled silkscreen and has about 22 layers of color thus making it a challenge in terms of registration and printing. Andrea explains the creation of Cicada at around the 22:00 minute mark of the video on the American Art Museums webpage for the evening's discussion. She doesn't go into too much detail about her process, but suffice it to say that in many ways, her drawing style, comraderie with us printmakers and willingness to explore the possibilities of printmaking techniques made her someone we really enjoyed working with at the studio. Be sure to listen carefully around the 23:38 mark for some serious name-dropping ;) Andrea and I had fallen out of touch over the years,but it was great to reconnect with her and her friends. Please visit her blog and check out her work.

The reception in the courtyard during the evening looked amazing.

I enjoyed the show and the panel discussion with Andrea, Joann, Michael Platt, Linn Meyers and Lou Stovall. They touched on a number of interesitng topics. One in particular: "digital printmking" is something I'm going to talk about in my next post.

TEH AWESOME!!!

via Waxy

In early August, one of my colleagues forwarded me an article on Read Write Web heralding Adobe's open beta of Edge: a tool for creating animated web content in HTML, CSS and javascript. At the time I wrote:

I’ve been following Edge for the last year when teaser footage of it showed up on Adobe Labs. I’m sure it will eventually be pretty cool, but any talk of Flash’s death is greatly exaggerated. I have Edge on my (personal) laptop as well as Tumult’s Hype and used to have Sencha Animator. I don’t think there’s any danger of any of these replacing Flash for its breadth of mature programming capability, workflow or file I/O in the next few years. I do think that a vast majority of Flash banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics will be replaced by HTML5/CSS3 alternatives. But deep stuff like games, applications and specialized front-end interfaces will require more than basic web technologies alone can deliver - at least until a competitively-priced robust, easy-to-author framework comes along.

FWIW, Adobe doesn’t have a spotless record when it comes to championing software… Anyone remember PageMaker, TypeManager, Dimensions, Framemaker, AuthorWare, LiveMotion or GoLive?

Yesterday, Adobe officially announced they were euphemistically "focusing" Flash on "PC Browsing and Mobile Apps." In other words, they're abandoning further development of the Flash Mobile plugin. The very same product that many said was Apple iOS's biggest failing and the intractable Steve Jobs' personal bugbear. Now many are saying perhaps he was right.

I stand by my assertion that Flash isn’t going away soon. The news about  Adobe abandoning Flash Mobile isn’t surprising – as far as I can tell they never got much traction with it anyway. But in line with what I said: as more “banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics” are built in HTML/CSS rather than relying on plug-ins, Flash’s web usage will ebb. It’s not just Flash Mobile that will be affected. This change will affect PC browsing and hasten Flash’s obsolescence. Just browse the comments.

Besides the kneejerk overreactions, there’s so much anger and apprehension. Too bad Adobe can’t simply state that they want to make the best software available rather compromise on shoddy initiatives or all that ambiguous mumbo-jumbo about ‘increasing investment in HTML5’ and ‘delivering compelling web and application experiences.’ Flash may not be dead, but this will be seen as an epic fail.

Now is much like ten years ago when Flash became ubiquitous. The state of the web was shifting from static pages to interactive ones; from CD-ROMS to streaming media. Flash had a decent authoring environment and adapted to the programming challenges well enough, but never could keep up with the shift toward simple standards-based accessible content. Even now, the best it can do is act as a browser or mediator for such content. We don’t need that anymore. What we need are tools that help us take advantage of the advanced capabilities inherent in HTML and CSS. I don’t think it will be one of our current crop of word processors, page layout applications or IDEs. Whoever builds a scalable, efficient, capable authoring tool for HTML5 web applications may rule the next decade.

Oh and Silverlight, watch your back…

 

I came across a fascinating post on graphing the value social networks today and fell in love with part of it. I think it neatly summarizes everything I feel about big social enclaves like Facebook. The marketing department I work within places a great deal of faith that the effort they spend using services like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will increase business through curiosity and brand awareness. I remain unconvinced. I think people usually know the difference between being solicited and being enlightened or at least being included in the conversation.

I have often had a tough time articulating all the issues I have with Facebook, but chief among them is the join-or-be-excluded aspect. And to join, you must agree to their terms which have long-reaching implications. At least when we post things on our personal webpage or blog, we are utterly responsible from our effort. The benefits are ours (or our audiences') and can't be co-opted for someone else's gain. Our presence goes away when we decide to cancel, not when the site changes business strategy or someone decides we have violated the terms of service.

Just like how network television is made of entertaining content to keep you watching the commercials, I feel the primary motive of big social networks is ulterior to what most of us think we use them for. Stephen Fry said this:

It's hard to explain. I mention hives and it really is like an allergy. Every aspect of design and every decision in terms of connection and privacy is like a loaf of bread to a coeliac or a haunch of venison to a vegetarian ... I wish I could give you a rational explanation. I am quite prepared to have my loathing dismissed as prejudice and "motiveless malignity", as Coleridge said of Iago. Doubtless it's all my fault.

I've tried out a number of other things like Quora, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Dribbble, Google+, etc… That's why I've stuck with Twitter. It's pretty transparent and you don't need to agree to anything to follow anyone. Nor do you need do anything special to share with the general public. You can follow me @burblebeep if you wish - no obligation. But none of those have yet generated the enthusiasm I've felt as much as the organically-grown grassroots bulletin boards, blogs and online communities founded on mutually-shared interests that I discovered through my own research and effort.

Anyway, back to the main point of this message: yesterday, maciej, a developer at Pinboard posted this brilliantly-reasoned argument that I love:

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It's as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

[…] Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.