Interesting people.

I don’t often feature or plug people here at the AV Club. Here’s one fella I think you should know about.

Stephen Grey is one of our directors of the main service at NewSpring. I’ve known him for a long time, since way back when we met at Anderson College. He was a student at Clemson, and I’m not really sure how he ended up serving on Production with me. Anyway, you should know that this fella is bought in to the vision of this church, and he really gets why we do things. I love serving with him. He’s always energetic (sometime frighteningly… we have a rule that he doesn’t get coffee). He’s always excellent, and he continually strives for more. I could go on, but here’s is an excerpt (posted entirely without permission) from Stephen’s blog:

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Church is over and it is always exciting to go and serve in an area that I can have such passion in. It is also a great comfort to know that the team i serve doesn’t hold me back and in general gives free rein on the extent i wish to serve the Production team. It is actually very odd, because during the week i am fairly laid back with only spurts of excitement. People at work tend to see me as a mature adult but know that I can kick back and have a good time. However, when Sunday morning comes around I pop out of bed like I am a bagel in a toaster. Unlike most mornings I have to drag myself out of bed kicking and screaming (thats a funny mental picture). Most mornings my wife will kick me and say, aren’t you suppose to be getting ready?! Sunday is different. I have have an uncanny amount of energy that is not encouraged by any narcotics or caffeine supplements. I just radiate energy and just get so excited about serving in Production at Newspring. People at church must think i am bat crazy…well I wont deny that. Today was a special day, as it was my last day serving from sun up to sun down. I will always remember coming into the Henderson building with a book bag full of homework and a zeal to serve. Even after graduation, i enjoyed being there all the time. However, times change and the needs of the team change. I welcome these changes as I am excited as to what God has in plan for our church and the crazy things the Production team gets to be apart off.

And just for fun, I finally convinced Stephen to try Twitter this week. This could be interesting. Get his feed here.

(Random of Stephen and his wife photographing the helicopter at our last Baptism)
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Game Time Open

A little tardy, here’s the Game Time Open for our current series. I tried compressing it at a bit higher resolution. Let me know how this one works for you. The flashes look a bit dinky on a computer web browser, but we’re projecting this open across four screens in the auditorium. Much more impact. The audio track is Filter’s “Welcome to the Fold.”

Game Time Open (Quicktime, 2.4MB)

All family

It’s been an “all family” weekend for the Wilsons. Yesterday, we had G’s 3 year picture made at The Picture People. Then we shopped for kids’ clothes. We then went to my parent’s house for a birthday party and spent time with everyone.

This morning, it was family pancake cooking extravaganza (complete with a home made syrup that I’ll share with you later). We went yard saling. To cap it off, we ended up at the Garrison Arena to watch, of all things, a horse show. Meg’s cousin competes and we went out to support her. So, that explains my vacancy from digital world for a few days. It’s all worth it.

card case

This is a great gift idea. Professional, slightly unnecessary, and extremely classy. Gents Business Card Case by Blomus at Lumens Light + Living

design my room

I love online tools like this. I remember back in the day, you’d pay $100 at Best Buy for a whimpy little application that would do a fraction of this.

www.designmyroom.com

Tech items of interest

I don’t blog a lot of heavily tech related things these days unless it refers to (1) Apple or (2) creative design. But there are two things out there deserving of your attention.

First, my favorite free FTP client (I use Transmit on the Mac, normally), Filezilla, is releasing a new version which is Mac compatible. I’ll probably stick to my paid copy of Transmit, but if you’re looking for a freebie, this one is worth a look.

Second, there are some mock ups of Firefox 3.0 running around out there on the internet. Too bad the grabs are from Vista, but I’ll be interested to see what comes of it.

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Stripemania.

Create cool stripe gradient backgrounds quickly and easily. You better believe I’ll bookmark this one. www.stripemania.com/. Remember, it’s not having the tool but how you use it…

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Small wonder

I was trotting around the office singing the theme from this show yesterday. No one seemed to remember it, until we pulled it up on youtube then it was an instant “oh yeah I remember THAT.”

Please enjoy with me.

Iron Man

I agree with Shua that this looks promising.

No and Yes

I’m thinking of starting a new feature here called No and Yes. Two links, one an absolutely horribly terrible NO, and the other the utmost coolest absolute YES.

Today’s NO
Today’s YES

MTV VMAs… the internets will rule us

I was watching bits and pieces of the MTV VMAs tonight. Not quite as flashy as in previous years, but still interesting. I love the glitchy visuals… the analoguesque look. I’m impressed by their site. After an hour or so, I’ve retired to my bed with my laptop and was pleased to find that MTV is showing the entire show live online. You can even clip and embed their videos on your site. Here’s one of my favorites, the Foo Fighters.

Watch the Foo

View the rest of the show here.

I usually really appreciate the VMAs. It’s live, and live performance shows are near and dear to my heart. They always find a way to break free from what’s normal and expected. I remember the first year they did away with a central forward facing stage in lieu of small artist groupings all around the room. Genius. I’m hoping to snag some visual inspiration.

Ooh, they just put a Linkin Park song up… great lighting.

Watch Linkin Park

UPDATE:
I should have stayed up later. Our very own such as Miss Teen USA South Carolina made an appearance last night at the VMAs as well.

Graphic blogging / web 3.0

I’d like to pioneer the new trend of paper blogging. Here’s my first post.

View it full size here.

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I’d be interested in your thoughts. I know it’s not easy to meta-data-tag-file-sort-shuffle, but there are some advantages.

Obvious benefits:
- you can blog when the power goes out. I know you have a laptop, but the battery will die sometime
- easier to sketch your ideas
- good use of the Behance Dot Grid Book
- sweat resistant
- doubles as fly swatter
- flexible storage capacity (dependent upon the size of your handwriting)
- you can write diagonally. try that in TextEdit.
- also doubles as airplane material (paper)

Sure, the UNDO function is slightly harmful to the environment, but the pros do outweigh the cons. What am I missing?

Priceless

Priceless

Originally uploaded by avclub.

This photo says it all… if all you’re saying is “man, that helicopter is loud.” Afterward, you should know that G requested to follow the helicopter to its home.

Energy & Photography

Nice photo exposition on light. I heart this type of photography.

GT in progress

For you mograph fellas out there, here’s what my Lightwave screen looks like on the 15″ Macbook Pro. I’ve have more space, but surprisingly it works pretty well. Come back Sunday night for the full / final piece.

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Branson and crew

The other night, Meg and I took the kids to hang with their (now 2.5 week old) cousin, Branson. Fun.

Here I am trying to get a nice close shot with my phone cam.

Noble + Stumble = what?

Last week, I was linked by Perry. In my circle, what that does to your site stats is called the “Noble Effect.” I’ve coined that term at the AV Club. I usually hover around 200 or so visitors on a daily basis. After Perry linked my cat post from last week, it also got picked up by Stumble Upon. This is what happened:

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We’re starting to settle down to a normal number of visitors to the AV Club. For those of you who are new and decide to linger around, welcome.

GTD for creative work

Nice article on implementing GTD (productivity system) for creative work.

Nikon RIP.

My Nikon Cool Pix L11 camera is dead. The LCD screen broke after just 2 months of use. They offered to fix it for $99, which is just $40 less than a new camera. I’m disappointed, as I didn’t abuse the camera. It was carried in my bag, inside a small silk case. It wasn’t a hard case, which is to blame for the lack of protection.

However, I hold that the camera is weakly designed if it broke that easily. I’ve carried my wife’s Canon A510 in the same bag, in the same manner, for several years with no trouble. Nikon, I’m disappointed in you.

And the fact that they want to charge me $13 to ship my broken camera back to me (when I shipped it to them on my own dime… and it only cost $5) is just pretty lame.

Nikon, if you’re out there reading, take a note from Behance, a company who goes above and beyond (and in turn, has my loyalty).

iPod touch

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t drooling just a little bit. iPod touch has the makings of the device I’ve always wanted… iPod meets PDA with wireless. That’s been the hook all along, the wireless. I’m intrigued. I will also watch and see what the hackers over at Make do with the little guy. I’m sure they’ll squeeze out all of the other functions I’d like it to include that aren’t already there.

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