I’m thinking about getting new glasses soon and because my brain’s a little slow lately, I looked in the Verizon SuperPages (Yellow Pages) for ‘Glasses’. I knew this wasn’t going to be the right word, but they usually have a handy ‘for glasses, see optical-retail’ listing. I find the Glass-Golf page and look!, there’s an illustration of a pair of glasses in the leftover design space. I look over the page and there is no listing for glasses. Huh. I look back at the illustration and the text actually states it’s easy to find glasses or whatever you’re looking for in the SuperPages. No mention of ‘optical’, ‘eyeglasses’ or anything. I found this to be really hilarious. You can see all of Page 412 GLASS-GOLF and see for yourself.

That was two days ago. Last night (and this morning again) I called Verizon to set-up a disconnect service date. I got the automatic messaging system. Pressed 1 for English. “Verizon is here to… blah blah blah. This menu has five options. Please choose the one that best meets your needs.”…”This menu has five options. Please choose the one that best meets your needs.”…”This menu has five options. Please choose the one that best meets your needs.” Over and over. I just press a number. It takes me to another menu that tells me options 1 and 2 and gets caught on telling me about option 2, over and over again. This made me extremely mad at the time, but afterwards I could appreciate the distinctly technological glitch.

And finally, while not known for excellent customer service, I had an unusually pleasant experience on the phone with an operator at Verizon (once I found a human-attended phone number). She was so nice, asking me about going to school and all that as we waited for the system to do its things. I left feeling decent. How bizarre.

I was looking at the Design Observer website today and saw the link for texone’s html tree visualization. I’m quite fond of seeing how many different ways people can take HTML and parse it into something visual. So, above is three shots of my website as the input for visualization. From left to right, the index page, about 10 pages of the site, and letting it go for about a half an hour. Like all HTML visualizations confined to the space of the screen, it ends up becoming a jumbled mess when you let it sit and run for a good amount of time.

I do like this project, though it does have some areas that I find irksome. For starters, it doesn’t try to show the relationship between pages, just randomly puts a tree (page) in the space. The coloring leaves something to be desired. I really would love to be able to move within the space and see the trees up close. I realize that as the forest gets more and more dense, this becomes very processor intensive. It also runs into a lot of the same problems I had to work through in my own HTML visualization project, Where It Went From… (and how it got there). Things like pages that have a different random string in their URL each time you visit, managing slashes in the URLs, javascript links and the like. But solving all these problems would be like writing a full-fledged browser, a daunting amount of work.

It’s been exactly two months since the last update to The Daily Photo Project. It’s up to date to 2005 July 06. Who knows how long it’ll take me to update again.

For those of you who don’t know, I was accepted into the graduate 2D Design program at The Cranbrook Academy of Art. That means I’ll be leaving my beloved Pittsburgh at the end of August and moving to Detroit Rock City (I’m making the heavy metal hand). It’s going to be an intense 2 years, and I’m looking forward to it majorly. I’ll be updating the site regularly with new project experiments and whatnot, so I hope you’ll come back and visit. I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I’ll be pulling out soon too…web-wise.

Most of my time (outside of work of course) in the past month was spent cutting, folding and gluing paper houses together for the installation I created for Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Media Tonic 2 event. This is what it looked like with the lights on. All the paper is junk mail that Pittsburgh Filmmakers received between my proposal’s acceptance and the exhibition. The video projected on top of the houses (which were mounted on the wall) was made up of the spam e-mail that they received during that period as well.

I’ve also made a few more shirts this past month. Waiting for people to receive the new ones before I post some poor photos. Oooooh, can you feel the anticipation???

My bitmap to vector typeface creator will be making its debut at Alphabet: An Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering and Experimental Typography in Baltimore. The poster being displayed is of ‘PostMapped [Courier New [Regular] [12]]’, which is my typeface filter’s attempt at extracting an original outline font from the 12pt bitmapped version of Courier New Regular.

It’s been over a month since my last post. I’ve been busy with quite a few projects and other things. More posts very soon.