What does your pet do all day?

What does your pet do all day? We did a little experiment to find out. Read about it on Meg’s review site (and enter a contest or two while you’re there).

No Perfect People Allowed open

Series opener for “No Perfect People Allowed.”

No Perfect People Allowed open from Ken Wilson on Vimeo.

NewSpring Anderson

NewSpring Anderson 11:15

Originally uploaded by avclub

So, we were a little cozy at the Anderson campus today. Link to the photoset.

Gadget Orchestra with RockStar

Does this look like something I might try. You betcha.

NIN does it again

Trent Reznor released a post today linking to this (or here). I’ve got your crowd-sourcing right here. He’s releasing 405 GB of HD video content from the past NIN tour. It’s out there free to the community to download, edit, compile, and make him one heck of a great concert DVD.

Yes and no

Yes and no.

Audi Q5

*UPDATE: Link fixed

This piece by 1st Ave Machine and Passion pictures for Audi is darn near perfect, especially down to the soundtrack.

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Design feeds?

Part of this year’s goal was to reduce my RSS / Blog reading by 40%. I did just that a week ago and while I’m glad to not be weighed down by the excess reading, I’m finding myself in need of some fresh design / artistic blog reads.

What sites do you guys recommend I begin reading? A few criteria, I like a site with good pictures in the RSS feed, full posts are preferred (though notcot.org still sits high on my list), and my preferred posting frequency is in the 1-20 posts per day (for a design / art news site). Current sites I’m reading; Shape + Color, Motionographer, and Abduzeedo.

So, what’s it going to be?

New Year’s Resolution and the app to get you there (pt3)

Next in my series of applications to help you achieve your New Year’s Resolution is the topic of blogging. I love blogging. I’ve committed to in (personally) and have kept the avclub.us going for nearly 4 years. Lately, though, even getting to my laptop becomes a bit of a challenge. Maybe it’s because an idea hits me late at night and I don’t want to wake my lady with the laptop, maybe I’m on the go, maybe I get the blogging idea when I’m in line at a restaurant… it’s those 5-10 minute gaps in my day that are best utilized to capture a nugget of blog insight. And that’s why I’m more often employing the WordPress app (free, download here) for blogging.

If you have a wordpress blog (self hosted or wordpress.com) you can use this app to write, draft, and publish articles. You do have access to the past 10 posts (or so) that you can clean up as well.

The upside is that it costs you nothing, it handles text and pictures (from your iPhone) very very well. At the beginning I had some bugs with it but those are now gone. What it doesn’t do well is linking. As the iPhone doesn’t elegantly support copy and paste there isn’t a good way to link something shy of manually keying in the

New Year’s Resolution 2 – get more organized (and the iPhone app to get you there)

To get more organized is a multi-tiered conversation. Here’s a little hint: if you want to be less frustrated adhere to this little rule, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” This translates to tools, gadgets (where IS my phone), and information. For me I’ve explored every system under the sun and have landed on Evernote for my digital notebook needs.

Why does this work for me? One, it’s free. Two, it gives me multiple in-out options. I use the iPhone app to have it with me, the desktop app on my Mac (or PC) to organize there, and on the web if I’m anywhere else that doesn’t have the first two options. I make it a personal discipline to take down all information into this format. Now I don’t stress over trying to remember something 6 months from now. What are some practical applications?

(1) Preparing for an upcoming event. I’m already putting info into an Evernote file for my Unleash 2009 breakout.
(2) Kid’s medical calls. When I call the pediatrician about a sick child I take notes in Evernote about dosage information. Then the next time my daughter gets car sick (and I’m 100 miles from the house) I can pull up the info on my iPhone that tells me how much medicine to give her.
(3) Keeping a call record when I drop Charter TV and sign up for DirecTV. I put all relevant cost info, phone numbers, and account numbers into this file. Then when something doesn’t go right (say, Charter continues to bill me after I have them disconnect service) I have an exact record of our conversation.
(4) Because Evernote allows me to sync a PDF with it, I uploaded the manual to the Korg Electribe EA-1 that I’m trying to learn.

Sure, it takes discipline. But I’ve found it to be worth it. Even if you’re not on the iPhone give the desktop client or web version a try. Knowing all my information is contained in one place (and tagged, and indexed for search, etc.) is well worth it.

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Paper animation

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

New Year’s Resolution and the app to get you there (pt1)

This is the first of a few posts about iPhone apps (something we all know I’m passionate about) and New Year’s Resolutions, something I do every year. I know NYR’s get a little cliched, but go with me on this. I’m not necessarily going to discuss my NYR’s, though I may touch on them… but hopefully I can highlight an app that may help you reach one of these goals.

Resolution 1, lose weight. You can’t change what you can’t see, or some phrase like that, will tell you that if you monitor it it’s easier to spot trends and hold yourself accountable. This year, I’m installing Weighbot, an iPhone weight tracking app. I’ve used others but they (1) are lackluster in appearance and (2) don’t back themselves up easily. Weightbot does both of these things *well. At $0.99 it’s not a bad deal.

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* maybe I’m getting finicky in my years, but I just don’t have time to look at a shoddy interface. Sheer beautiful design just begs me to use an app.

Photos and sound

I love how this piece makes me feel like I know the subjects. And also it feels a little like Cloverfield.

1704 (clean) from Ryan Aylsworth on Vimeo.

Test Your GTD-IQ

I’m a huge proponent of Dave Allen’s GTD
(“Getting Things Done”) system. I’ve always been interested in productivity and have come to live-and-die rely on it. It’s become crucial to keeping everything in check.

This is a passion of mine, sometimes to the point of infatuating me with helping others learn about becoming more effecitve.

I came across this GTD-IQ test and thought “hm, that won’t really be that useful to me. Those sorts of questions are usually loaded.” Wrong, was I (says Ken-Yoda, apparently). It pegged me surprisingly accurate. I would urge you to take the quiz.

I would venture to guess that someone’s New Year’s Resolution includes becoming more organized and in control. If it’s not, why not? Now go take to quiz, then report back here. How did you score? What can you improve on? What are you doing well? How can I help?