One of the pitfalls of being a freelancer is that, on occasion, you run into situations where it’s necessary to do some work to get some work.

By that I mean, you have to attend meetings, prepare design sketches and present them to a client all before being paid a penny. Some times this pays off and some times it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you find yourself in possession of “orphans”, designs that are doomed to walk the earth, never fully realized and unattached to a project.

This is the story of just such a scenario and the designs that resulted.

The Meeting

Nearly a year ago I was contacted by a fellow I went to high school with.  He had finished editing his first feature film and he claimed he wanted to update the film’s website to generate buzz about the movie’s imminent release.  We had coffee, threw some ideas around but mainly, we discussed my former film and television career (I used to work as an assistant director).

When the afternoon had come to a close he informed me that he was about to embark on a clandestine endeavor that would keep him unreachable for several weeks.  He would contact me afterwards.  He also revealed that he was severely in debt because of the film, a revelation that left me feeling skeptical.

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MIRROR CHECK

Day One:

• Nose hair under control!
• Eyebrows lookin’ good!
• Ears lookin’ good!

Day Two:

• Nose hair under control
• Eyebrows lookin’ good
• Ears lookin’ good
• A few more white hairs in beard than yesterday.  How?

Day Three:

• Long coarse hairs protruding from nose
• Eyebrows have joined in the middle
• Ear hair moves when head turns

Panicky search for scissors ensues.

Repeat

My sister had a baby last year and immediately caught the photography bug.  She’s taken some amazing photos with her digital SLR camera and has decided that she wants a serious venue to display her shots.

She’s found a number of photoblogs she admires and has ask me to design one for her.  The sites she likes are all wide, one column designs and she wants to have a nice animated flash box in the header.

The flash content should be fairly easy so the main challenge for me will be getting WordPress to bend to my will.   I’ve never done a one column blog before but WordPress is rather flexible so I think I should be able to accomplish my goal with a minimum of hair pulling.  My plan, at the moment, is to use CSS to place three sidebars in the “footer’ which will allow my sister some degree of customization using widgets.

I’ve come up with three designs for her to choose from. Each of these has variations using different colours or design elements. For brevity, I’ve chosen one example of each design to display here. The actual size of the content will be 990px across.

“Modern”

The main contenders for the final design appear to be this and the following one. I like this design as it’s clean and simple but still incorporates a few unusual elements to set it apart from an out-of-the-box blog theme. I’ll have to employ some flash text replacement for the entry headings as well as adding a gradient.

The look is attractive, uncluttered and classy.
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Anyone who uses Facebook has probably noticed and if you’re like me, been annoyed by the rash of lists that keep cropping up. They have titles like “20 random things about me” or “20 Albums”. To further irritate my inner curmudgeon the trend has recently been exacerbated by livingsocial’s “Pick Your 5″ which clogs the newsfeed with list after relentless list documenting every category imaginable from “My top five albums from my college days” to “Five worst movies ever”.

In fact, the number of “Pick Your 5″ entries, coupled with the overwhelming popularity of inane quizzes, that clutter the facebook newsfeed has me contemplating leaving facebook forever. But then I’d have to face the social isolation inherent in working from home and being the parent of a young child (but I suppose that’s content for an entirely different entry).

I avoided jumping onto the list bandwagon thinking that it was too self-promotional and oozed with, as my wife put it, “Oh, look at me! I have such interesting and eclectic tastes!” Until a friend from my OCA days tagged me on her 15 Albums list and I found I agreed with an astonishing number of her choices. Despite my misgivings, I started to ruminate on albums that somehow made a difference in my life. As luck would have it, this blog has been sitting here begging me for content for some time now so I’ve decided to just start writing about music in my life and see where it goes. I should be able to avoid appearing “interesting and eclectic” as there are some records that had profound effects on me but which I would hardly classify as artistic masterpieces or even listen to today. Having said that, these albums were once important to me and shaped my growth as a wannabe rock star.

One example of this is Supertramp’s 1979 album Breakfast In America

This is the first full length album that I remember buying with my own money. Up until this point I’d been a regular purchaser of 45′s and I already owned two singles from Breakfast in America: Goodbye Stranger and The Logical Song. By purchasing the album I was securing Take the Long Way Home the only single left on the album at that time (they would later release the song Breakfast in America as a single).

I was eleven years old and my family and I were in Bracebridge, Ontario visiting my brother’s godparents when I spotted the record in a store window. It was $5.99 and I decided then and there that I wanted more than just singles in my life! I wanted the whole kit and caboodle! I forked out the cash and hastily removed the shrink wrap. I was immediately fascinated by how the outer and inner sleeves were cleverly designed to look like a menu from a traditional 1950′s diner. I listened to the album often and having pulled it out recently I’d say it still sounds like well crafted pop, although to my modern ears, it edges a little too close to “easy listening”. It’s definitely the kind of music you might hear at the dentist’s office.

The Monkees Collection Incident

One particular album from my childhood was important to me but for reasons other than musical. The K-Tel double LP The Monkees Collection taught me a lesson about responsibility and was the beginning of my uncanny ability, perfected some years later, to hide unpleasant thoughts and feelings deep in the pit of my stomach.

When I was seven years old, for days I begged my parents to order The Monkees’ Collection. They were reluctant at first, citing the unreliability of the post office and the uncertain trustworthiness of K-Tel. But I would not be dissuaded. I explained that this was the ultimate Monkees collection! It contained two records! Two records! K-Tel was a major player! They could trust K-Tel!
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Just for fun I ran the Russian text of the spam in my last entry through Google Translate to see if I could get a better idea of what it read.  The result was much more natural in tone but I still don’t know what the spammer was trying to achieve.  The Google translation was as follows:

“Beware of moshennitsa!
It steals your money!
Pashkulskaya Elena
Date of Birth 12.11.1984
Place of Birth: City of Anthracite, Ukraine
Lives in St. Petersburg.
Under the guise of a customs broker engaged in financial fraud
intentionally delaying растаможку goods, bring your goods to forfeiture.
Be careful!”

This arrived in my inbox a few minutes ago. The text is in Russian so I had it translated with Babel Fish.  The results made me chuckle.

As translated the subject says:  “Carefully, [moshennitsa]!”
Just over the picture it says: “It steals your money!”
And the main text reads:  ”[Pashkulskaya] Helen Nikolaevna Date of generation 12.11.1984 g. Place of the generation: g. anthracite, the Ukraine It lives in Saint Petersburg. Under the guise customs broker it is occupied by financial machinations, [umyshlenno] involving the custom fee of loads, leads your goods to the confiscation. You be careful!”

It looks like translation software still has a way to go.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m preoccupied by financial machinations.

I just put the final touches on my most recent job.  

A company called In Post hired me to build this site for a handbag and wallet company called BE.  I was handed a pdf file from the designer as well as a handful of reference sites and built the site from that, using flash and actionscript 3.

Almost all of the content is loaded from external image and xml files which makes it possible for the client to update all of their information without going back to In Post or myself.  As a result I was faced with a lot of fresh challenges from a coding perspective.  I won’t go into all of the details but it’s safe to say that I learned a lot of tricks making this site and have expanded my flash arsenal considerably.  Another advantage to loading data in this manner is it keeps the initial swf file rather small and the site loads much faster than if it were made from a large self-contained file.  

Note: When I last checked the site content was incomplete.

Update Feb 6, 2009: Some of the content has been updated but they’ve introduced a doubled up background image that doesn’t center properly.

Update Jan. 7, 2010: Every time I go to the BE site I get a warning that their server is hosting malicious software so I thought I’d post a demo version of the site so that people can actually see how it works.

Sammy on Much More Music.
Note:  You’ll need the latest version of Quicktime to view this video

I was happy to learn that Sammy the Hanukkah Lobster was featured on Much More Music’s Listed program over the holidays!  Sure it was as a horrible holiday tune but we were among some good company (and some truly horrible company as well). Regardless, I’m proud to have our work featured alongside Ren and Stimpy, Max Headroom and Gary Coleman.

Here’s the full list:

1.   White Christmas - Jingle Cats
2.   Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer – Dr. Elmo
3.   Reggae Christmas – Bryan Adams and Pee Wee Herman
4.   I Want to Rock You Hard This Christmas – The Dan Band
5.   Fleck the Halls – Ren and Stimpy
6.   Sammy the Hanukkah Lobster – H.B. Steinberg
7.   Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) – The Darkness
8.   Jingle Bell Rock – Hall and Oates
9.   Merry Christmas Happy Holidays – NSYNC and Gary Coleman
10. Please Come Home For Christmas – Jon Bon Jovi
11. O’ Come All Ye Faithful – Twisted Sister
12. I Hate Christmas – George Patience
13. Don’t Shoot Me Santa – The Killers
14. Zat You Santa Clause? – Buster Poindexter
15. The First Noel – The Crash Test Dummies
16. Merry Christmas Santa Clause – Max Headroom
17. Silent Night – Winger
18. Christmas Magic – Ali Lohan
19. Make Love to Christmas – Ivan Hrvastska
20. Little Drummer Boy – Ru Paul

I was a bit dismayed to hear the female commentator say that Sammy was neither catchy nor fun to watch but after viewing the entire program I found that this was her constant refrain along with “It’s not Christmassy at all!”

Other than Sammy, my personal favorite would have to be Make Love To Chistmas although I’ve always had a soft spot for Max Headroom’s Merry Christmas Santa Clause.

I’m astounded that after 4 years Sammy finally got his due.  If you’ve never seen the Sammy the Hanukkah Lobster video there are two high quality versions available for viewing on Sammy’s official website.

 

Christmas Eve is upon us and I wanted to wish everyone joy and merriment over the holidays and all the best for the New Year!

I finally finished watching the Survivor: Gabon reunion show and one thing has stuck in my head (other than the fact that Bob should have given  the $100,000 to Sugar or at the very least made some acknowledgement that she was the only reason he made it to the end) and that is a remark Jeff Probst made.  He thought it was interesting that Randy was applauded while Corinne was booed.  Personally I don’t find that to be much of a mystery.

The difference between Randy and Corrine is that Randy’s nastiness comes from a real emotional hang-up and Corrine’s comes from her believing she’s better than everyone else.  

At some time in the past, something happened that emotionally crippled Randy.  He mentions that his dog “never cheated on him, never lied…” and that’s made me think it may be something like his wife/lover having an affair with his best friend.  Whatever it was it fuels his anger and makes him the way he is.  At the same time he’s very self deprecating and he has a sense of humour about his misanthropic personality.

Corrine on the other hand is merely nasty and this nastiness is driven by an unwarranted sense of superiority.  In contrast to Randy, someone (probably her parents) made Corrine think that she was really special.  She’s a spoiled princess who’s social skills haven’t developed past 9th grade.  

It’s also no mystery that her most crass attacks focused on Sugar.  Corrine is just another insecure woman who needs to attack the competition to bolster her self esteem.  She makes a big fuss about being a college graduate while Sugar is “and uneducated leech”.  Like she’s the only one who’s ever gone to school.  What does she turn this much hyped education into?   Pharmaceutical sales! ( I don’t know if there are any statistics on this but it seems to me that a majority of reality show contestants are either wait staff or in pharmaceutical sales).  Woo-hoo Corrine!  That’s a lot more impressive than being a pin-up model!  No, wait… from what I’ve seen while waiting in doctor’s offices… it’s very much like being a pin-up model except you wear a suit.