I decided just for fun to make wordles out of the four major speeches from the two major political conventions this year. Wordle is an online application that makes images out of large blocks of text. The more frequently a word is used, the larger it appears in the image.

I don’t know if there are any major revelations to be gathered from these, but I think they are interesting to look at.

Here they are, in chronological order (click each image to view larger):

A few quick observations:
1. Both VP nominees talked a lot about their respective running mates.
2. The Democrats talked about John McCain more than the Republicans talked about Barack Obama.
3. John McCain’s most used verb appears to be ‘Fight’. Barack Obama’s appears to be ‘Work’. (I’m assuming ‘Promise’ is generally used as a noun in Obama’s speeches, but I could be wrong.)

Anyone else have any interesting observations?

Google Sketchup is a really fun program to play with. It took me just a couple of hours to make this 3D model of our new condo.

We’re playing with furniture arrangements and have picked out some cool rugs, I’ll post more updates as we make progress.

Barack Obama: The Original

Hillary Clinton: The Lesboerotic Spin Off

John McCain: The Republicans’ Attempt At It

Check out this Mashup by DJ Earworm.

It’s a mix of all of the song on Billboards top 25 for 2007. Sad how much alike they all sound.

As a result of my growth and goals project, I’ve realized that I need to re-organize my online presence a bit. I’ve written some things here that I’ve wondered whether or not to post because of a struggle between personal and professional content. I’m going be making a shift of this site to a personal blog only, and start a new design blog and portfolio at another domain I own: intios.com. There are a few posts on the blog there, and I will be moving my portfolio over soon.

Check out this video. It is a very artistic and informative video on the history of the web, and what role it is beginning to play in our society as it evolves. The world wide web is really a machine that is learning from everybody who uses it.

Thanks to the Daily Slurp for featuring me among their sites for August 11th. The Daily Slurp feed is aggregated by Most Inspired. The two sites brought me a good number of hits on Saturday.

These photo collages by Chris Jordan are amazing. It is some of the most powerful art I have ever seen.

This is a 5 by 10 foot piece depicting 2 million plastic bottles, the number used by Americans every 5 minutes:
detail:

Here’s an excerpt from one his Artist’s Statements:

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake…

Lots more at http://www.chrisjordan.com/

These are pieces that I would love to see in person. I would like to know more about his techniques as well; this process must be incredibly painstaking.

This ad is brilliant.

If “Awesomely Bad” were in the dictionary, there would be picture of this guy as an example.

Not so funny, and slightly creepy, it’s what this ad represents that I love about it.
I am just utterly amused that this is what TV advertising has come to.

The quotation that sums it up best is one of my favorite regarding business and marketing:

“No one ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
- P. T. Barnum.

Is getting it into the heads of your customers the most important thing no matter what the impression you leave?
That’s all for now. I gotta go buy some Berries and Cream Starburst.

I built a wine rack/cabinet for the apartment. This was my first real carpentry project and I’m really happy with how it came out. It’s made of pine and aspen with a dark walnut stain. Total materials cost was about $140 and it took about 20 hours for myself and my friend Shawn to build.

I measured out the space where it would go, and then just kind of winged the design as we were buying the lumber and building the thing. It has room for 42 bottles in the rack plus the cabinet space, which is 22 inches wide by 12 inches deep and has a shelf in the middle. Here’s some pics of it in place under the counter/bar between our kitchen and living room.