partyline

Saw this band play awhile ago as the support for Girl Talk. Had no idea who they were and, to be frank, don't really go for rock that much these days. Partyline are the shit though. Hope they come back to Australia some day.

Enjoy 'Trophy Wifey' by Partyline (except for the jarring "bleeps") and the way Allison sings the word "dude".

lil' folks

A momentous event occurred about five minutes ago.

I laughed at a Peanuts comic for the first time.

A short while ago I got into a drunken argument with Tones and Pete over the relative worth of the careers of Micheal Jackson and Charles Schultz. It went something like this:

Tones: I got a Peanuts book the other day.

Me: Man, Peanuts is fucking shit. Why do people like it? It's not even funny.

Peter: Charles Schultz is better than Micheal Jackson.

Me: Micheal Jackson is a genius who has been found innocent TWICE. You hear me? MUSICAL FUCKING GENIUS. Fiddling with children won't change that.

Luckily Tones recorded this event for posterity. You can see it mentioned in his comic here.
Pete also blogged the same incident. You can read it here.

o-g-g, yeah you know me

A funny thing happened the other day in class. A teacher mentioned that there was a strong possibility that, as of the release of Adobe's Creative Suite 3 (a collection of software programs that includes Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign), Adobe will no longer provide site licensing for their products. This would mean my school may have to pay a license for each individual install of CS3, and installation itself will be a laborious process, as the IT department will no longer be able to create a disc image used on all the computers (we're Mac-based, by the way).

Frankly, I don't think Adobe would be that stupid. It did bring home how much damage a monopoly can do, though.

I also teach how to use these programs, and this weekend I'm putting together the curriculum for the short courses. It's spurred me into thinking I should focus more on the principles of image manipulation and layout, rather than merely teaching how to use the particular tools in Photoshop (for example).

I think what I might do is distribute a CD with open source equivalents of these programs to each student.

As if I couldn't get any nerdier than blogging about open source software, I decided to start encoding my music to the Ogg Vorbis format – a music encoding file format similar (but superior) to mp3.

The drawback is that sharing my ogg music will be a might bit difficult. At the stage, however, I feel the benefits outweigh the detriments: it's open source, better quality and free. And it's good to see that I can now play back Ogg files in iTunes. I've been using Ogg Drop to encode the files.

np: 'Phantom Limb' – The Shins
'Shadows' – Midnight Juggernauts

more posterism

[Update: The final^]

Here's another poster heading toward a final draft. I appreciated the feedback from the last one. The client was pleased, but I wish I had known the final size was A3 and not A2 as I was told. Would've used a different line thickness in the illustration and changed the fonts and enlarged the Ding Dong logo.

This one needs more text running down the side – it will be changed from month to month. Was thinking of putting a blank scroll, but was leaning toward just running text over the top (on the right hand side).

Not sure about the typefaces on this new one either. Down the bottom it's House Industries' Neutraface [Titling].

The brief is a "circus" feel.

Below is another draft that I thought I'd share. I like it, but it doesn't really scream "big top shenanigans and needlessly happy clowns".

Feedback: You know you want to give it.