It’s been a great nine years here in BC.

Really, just top notch.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since I came here from Edmonton and I actually can’t remember if I ever intended to stay in BC this long. I’ve met and befriended some truly awesome people (@justinlove, @xer0x, @adamtindale, @rossangus just to name a few) and as I’m preparing to hit the road for life 3.0 in Calgary I thought it would be a good idea to recap a bit of the last few years to see what got me here in the first place…

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My workflow is constantly evolving as new technologies become available. I think it’s common for heavy computer users to change it up regularly, but the willingness to always try out and be curious about new tools is essential to anyone who is passionate about interaction design and usability.

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This past Tuesday Love&Olson played at Cantos in Calgary with Steve Gibson and Adam Tindale. This was the 9th Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable and that makes our upcoming show at Computational Aesthetics EPI’s 10th show. For the performance we used video and audio samples from the Cantos synth collection and we rocked out pretty hard. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on some of the video documentation that was shot. Love&Olson will also be playing next weekend with Jackson 2bears at the Vancouver Island School of Art in Victoria on the night of the Art Crawl and the closing for Assume Nothing. Don’t be fooled, just because we’re not listed on the AGGV page doesn’t mean it ain’t so.

But Cantos was just the start of the week — we went on to open Grand Theft Bicycle at the Stride Gallery on Friday night. I have some shots of the opening up on flickr, but they’re not the best quality. Hopefully some one will share their pictures on facebook or something. GTB will be showing at Stride until June 20th so if you live in Calgary get your ass off the couch and go try it out.

Upcoming Shows

May 22, 2009 – Art Crawl at VISA with Jackson 2bears
May 30, 2009 – Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable at Computational Aesthetics (the ‘Large Room’ at the  Delta Victoria Ocean Pointe hotel in Victoria)

Stride Gallery
http://www.stride.ab.ca

Cantos Foundation
http://www.cantos.ca

A few things have me tremendously excited lately. (more…)

What a wild, wild week.

First the really big news – Grand Theft Bicycle has been accepted for a show at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. We don’t know when it will happen yet but I’d guess it will probably be within the next 6 months.

Then this morning I got an email telling me that this is box/this is machine has been accepted into the Bearded Child Film Festival (Minneapolis/Grand Rapids) and will play not just once but twice – how sweet is that?

And last but not least, Love&Olson are playing a semi-private gig next Tuesday Thursday evening at Discovery Coffee with our old friends i send data live. You can watch a blip from my preparations below or on Vimeo.

QC test from robotoverlord on Vimeo.

Nice little article about the adoption of Open Source by the finance sector, great news for advocates of OSS.

The Finance Sector: Open Source Rising | OStatic

Though the average user is unaware of the change, the web has been revolutionized in the last decade by the mass adoption and maturation of open source technology. Publishers, programmers, corporations and even governments have embraced open source as a reliable and elegant development methodology for projects of all shapes and sizes.

I’ve just finished hacking my ipod touch using touchfree3. It is pretty much the greatest thing ever. I also found great info on enabling the iphone apps on ipodtouchfans.com. If you have an ipod touch you have GOT to do it.

I’ve had access to Adobe CS3 for some time, but initially was too busy doing practical stuff to experiment with any of it’s new features. Here’s a list of 5 things I’ve found useful so far.

Import .psd’s into Flash
Finally I can make a mock-up in photoshop or illustrator and import it directly into flash. Why’d that take so long. Oh yeah.

Easy 3d [Photoshop]
Photoshop now allows you to import 3d objects into your workspace. You can then rotate those objects to suit your purpose render them into 2d images. This is a great feature for designers that have to continuously freshen ads but don’t have the time/resources to create/find/scavenge new materials every time. Just rotate and recolor and you’ve got something fresh.

Layer Comps [Photoshop]
The new layer comps feature is kick-ass because you can basically create endless snapshots of compositions and revert back to them at will. I used to accomplish this by saving different versions of a file but it’s a nightmare to manage and completely unnecessary for smaller jobs.

Text Layout Tools [Illustrator]
I like InDesign, it’s just great. But for smaller projects (as in one page) I’ve always preferred to stay in Illustrator. Now Illustrator comes with some of my favorite InDesign features like text threads, paragraph/character style palettes and much more, making it easier to scale your project resources appropriately.

Import InDesign into InDesign
I always hated Quark and I’ve always loved InDesign. However it was frustrating placing multiple objects on the same page for printing because you couldn’t re-import your project into another project. Well, they fixed it. There are a lot of workflow improvements to InDesign that bring us much closer to the mythic single source publishing.

I just uploaded my first model into Sketchup. I’m trying to get it to place properly in Google Earth though… might need to read a manual or something.