Over the past couple months, I’ve been working with Curt von Diest and Jay David to build a website for DART St. Louis. DART St. Louis is a participatory photography challenge. In April 2011, over 250 creative St. Louisans threw darts at a huge map of St. Louis City. Over the following month, participants visited the area where their dart landed and took a photograph.

Sadly, since I now live in Indianapolis I wasn’t able to participate as I have done in the past. In fact, I wasn’t even in the country when the site launched! Thankfully everything went off without a problem and the site launched with a final party at FK Studios.

Check out the actual site at http://2011.dartstlouis.com/. You can also learn more about how it was developed in my portfolio.



Every two years, Venice hosts a biennale. It takes place in the Giardini, a beautiful park on the southern tip of the island. Thirty countries have permanent pavilions (dictated by international politics during the 1930′s and Cold War) in the park, and within each pavilion is a curated exhibition to present contemporary art from that country. More countries are added each year, with galleries sprinkled throughout the city.

This year, the US Pavilion is curated by the Indianapolis Musem of Art. My wife started working for the IMA last January, and is part of the team that the IMA has sent to Venice. I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to tag along for the week and see what the Biennial is all about.

I’ve been to many, many museums and exhibition openings. However, I’ve never been to an opening quite like the Venice Biennale. It’s a great experience to see the best that the art world has to offer right now. There’s so much one can see. In particular, I loved the political photographs at the Danish Pavilion, as well as Mike Nelson’s work in the British Pavilion.  I will admit, however, that my favorite was the U.S. Pavilion, the three performance pieces and one interactive piece in particular. I’m not usually a fan of performance art. In fact, I usually despise it. So it takes a lot for me to really love it. The artists behind these pieces are Allora and Calzadilla.

The main performance piece, called Track and Field, is outside the entry of the Pavilion. It features an upside-down tank with a treadmill mounted over one of the treads. Throughout the day a runner gets on the treadmill and runs for 20 minutes. The tank and the treadmill have been synced to go the same speed.

Just inside the pavilion are the other two performance pieces, Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American). They feature old American Delta plane seats. During the day, a gymnast from USA Gymnastics performs an 18-minute routine on the chairs. With the background of the stark white room, it is amazing to watch these gymnasts flip themselves around these chairs with such grace and beauty.



Another piece was called Algorithm. It featured a custom-made pipe organ that had a Diebold ATM built into it. Anyone can insert their bank card and withdraw money (no fees, even!). The pipe organ then produces a custom score based on the keys the user has pressed on the ATM. It’s an extremely clever, interactive work. The artists collaborated with composer Jonathan Bailey.

I’ve been to Venice once before, a couple years ago, and it was for only 48 hours. I’m quite glad I was able to be here for a full week. It really allowed me to explore and absorb the city, from Tintoretto’s at Scuola Grande di San Rocco to the seafood on Burano (another island in the lagoon).

The Biennale opens to the public on Saturday, June 4 through November 27. If you are planning any trips abroad, I highly recommend stopping in Venice during these dates!

Please note!: I am a programmer, I am not an artist or a designer… let alone an art critic. If you’d like a thorough review, please check out the The Daily Beast review.

This post was cross blogged at the TOKY news blog.

For the past week, I’ve been preparing for a trip to Italy. I’ll be going with my wife to Venice for the Bienalle. Afterwards, we will drive up to Castelrotto for some hiking in the Dolomites.

As I’ve been preparing I took stock of all the amazing tools available to travelers today. It’s crazy how different travel preparation is today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 50.

Every trip, for me, starts with TripAdvisor. I can’t imagine staying at a Holiday Inn while in Europe. I want to get off the beaten path and try a local bed and breakfast. TripAdvisor, along with other online resources, help me find those places. In addition, we can get live satellite weather feeds, along with weather history to get average temperatures - always useful when figuring out dates.

Then it all comes back to Google, as it often does when talking about things online. Google Maps. Satellite View, Street View as well as the Google Earth browser plugin. I’m in no way planning every moment of my trip. However, it’s nice to know that I can preview something before hand. I’ll then create a custom map, add about 40 markers of potential interest and then use an iPhone app like Cartographer to download it for offline use.

Then of course, there is the wonderful iPad. Travel companion extraordinaire! From playing movies, to loading up a couple This American Life podcasts as well as downloading 4 or 5 different books for the flight. No longer will I choose my reading material based on size and weight! And I can also include all my music as opposed to my disc man and binder of 25 CDs.

And last but not least, which really isn’t a ‘new’ tool. It’s just my favorite so I thought I’d include it here. A robot headphone splitter so Rachel and I can listen to podcasts or watch movies together!

I know these things won’t work for everyone. Some will probably feel that this takes the ‘adventure’ out of it. However, I’m too OCD in that I like to have things planned. I’m unable to simply get off a train, wander around and find a place. I’d be stressed every minute prior to settling on a place. All these resources let me find places I never imagined. And, therefore, make my trip a lot less stressful and more enjoyable.

What do you know, it’s a blog post talking about launching a new site after a year of inactivity. This is probably the 6th or 7th time I’ve done this. It’s a habit I hope to actually break myself of. To launch a site, and to stick to it! Not that I have many faithful readers or anything, but more so for my own sense of self discipline! I can do this! And I will! (i hope).

It’s a new year, and a new town. For those that don’t know, I now live in Indianapolis, Indiana. I still work for TOKY in St. Louis. My wife is now the Director of Publishing and Media at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

So…. fellow readers. I shall start again!

About every 5 years or so I get an itch to build a computer. Well, with great after holiday flat screen sales, I decided to get a TV for the bedroom and to build a custom home theater pc (HTPC). Building computers has always been fun, even if it can get a little stressful.

In my opinion, building computers is the best way to learn about computers. As a web developer, I don’t have to worry about the hardware that goes into a computer. However, I have a  better idea of how servers work and how certain things can go wrong or cause problems.

This time around I went with the Antec NSK2480 case. It’s a little bigger than the average micro ATX case, but it was made to run cool and quite. A lot of detail and thought went into wire organization (great for my OCD tendancies) as well as padding between hard drives and the top panel to minimize any vibrations.

The rest of the hardware:

• Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 HDMI
• Intel Celeron E3200 Wolfdale
• Crucial RAM
• Scythe Mini Ninja

I also purchased a wireless logitech joystick and a Cideko Air Keyboard. So the only wires are to the tv and to the power.

Today, Steve Jobs published his thoughts on flash. You can view it on the Apple site here:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Two paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

“Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

“Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.”

Steve’s got a great point with this. It’s very similar to my thoughts on iPhone and iPad apps:

The iPhone and iPad are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Apple, and Apple has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Apple’s products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Apple and available only from Apple. By almost any definition, the iPad and iPhone are closed systems.

Rather than develop iPad/iPhone apps, I choose to use HTML5, CSS and javaScript – all open standards.

A couple months ago, with all the press focusing on Apple’s announcement of the iPad, Steve Jobs made a comment that Flash is dying and that people need to push HTML5. Since this comment, I’ve heard from many clients who want new sites and want to avoid Flash because it’s a dead technology and has no future.

I never thought I’d do this, but I think I’m going to come to the defense of flash. I don’t like programming in flash all that much and I find it quite frustrating and annoying (I had hopes that when Adobe purchased Macromedia it’s type support would get better… not worse).

Don’t get me wrong, in 15 years I don’t see a huge place for Flash. But in the now, and in the next 5 years, it’s still going to have a very strong presence. I believe this for a couple reasons:

1. Upgradeability (Spell check is getting mad at me for that word, but it’s the best word for this reason): If you want to upgrade flash, you can now do it without having to restart your browser. In fact, it often takes less than 5 seconds (really!). It is such an easy process that almost everyone upgrades without even realizing what they are doing (I won’t get into if this is a good thing). Therefore, within 6 months of a new flash version over 96% of web users have it. That’s some amazing penetration. Web browsers on the other hand (Internet Explorer in particular) is on the complete other end of the spectrum. People still use IE6. Yes, it is in decline, but a lot of people (and more importantly, businesses) still use it. There is no easy way to upgrade. A user has to go through Windows Upgrades application (which studies have shown that most people do not use). Microsoft seems to have finally gotten back into the browser game and has released IE7, IE8 and is even working quickly on IE9, so perhaps this will get better. But the bottom line is that right now (and for the next couple years at least), most people do not upgrade their browsers.

2. Video. There is a lot of hype around the HTML 5 video tag. Sure, it makes it really easy to embed video. It’s just one tag. Sounds great right? I think it is, but the markup isn’t the problem here. The browsers are. Just like in the late 90’s and early 2000’s we had to have a Netscape version of a site and an IE version of a site. Now, we’ll have to have video in one format for some browsers and in another format for other browsers.  In my opinion, video is the one thing that flash does well. Why? Because of my reason number one above. Flash gets upgraded often, and can support better and better video codecs/formats as they come out. Browser manufacturers can’t agree on formats. And as time goes by and new formats come out, it will become even more of a mess.

In a perfect world, the browser manufactures would agree on standards. And as new versions came out, people would make sure the upgraded. These two things don’t happen. Therefore, flash isn’t going anywhere.

The claim that flash is dying reminds me of the late 90’s and all the claims that XML was going to revolutionize the world and every new site and application should make use of it. Sure, XML is a solid tool, but 90% of the hype wasn’t necessary. Flash will go away at some point. But not nearly at the speed that people claim.

Over the past year I’ve looked a bit into iPhone App Development. I have an iMac at home, I use a powerbook at work, and I talk on an iPhone. I love to work on mac’s. But I must admit that I have absolutely no desire to start developing iPhone apps.

It has nothing to do with the programming language, the IDE or anything regarding development.

It really comes down to two reasons.

One main reason is that I despise building something for one platform. I don’t want to build an iPhone app, rebuild the same project as an Android App, and then again as a Blackberry app…etc.

It’s the browser wars all over again where we had to build a Netscape version, an AOL version and an IE6 version…etc.

The other big reason has to do with Apple’s policy. It can take weeks for an app to get approved. And there is no gaurentee your app will even BE approved. I know one company that built an app for a client, submitted and had the app rejected because Apple didn’t think it would have a large audience. Really? So do we need to submit a business plan with our app that projects what Apple’s return will be?

Of late Apple has been critical of Adobe Flash and has been trying to promote the open standards of HTML5 (while I like Flash, I applaud a company the size of Apple trying to push HTML standards forward).

Last month, Apple removed over 5,000 apps that it deemed ‘inappropriate’. Really? So on one hand it promotes open standards, but on the other hand they want to create their own standards and change them after the fact. These apps were already in the store – meaning they had been approved. And many of them have been purchased many many times.

I hope they don’t pull an Amazon and go into the phone to remove the app.

I am no financial expert. So I will refrain from giving up too much advice. However, there was one item I should of included in my best of 2009 list. And that was paying off my car. And not just paying it off, but paying it off 2 years early.

It started about a year into my loan. I started putting 50 bucks extra with each payment. I’d start realizing that the 50 extra each month didn’t hurt too much. So before I knew it I was paying off two or three payments at once. Now, I know that two or three extra payments at once isn’t possible for everyone. But even just mailing in 20 or 30 bucks extra with each payment can help.

Paying it off, and paying it off early is a very, very good feeling

It’s the first day of 2010! What a better time than now to make a post about my favorite music of 2009? Just a quick note, I am not making a claim that this is the ‘best’ of 2009. Just my personal favorites.

Top 10 Albums:

1. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle. Bill Callahan (aka Smog) has been around for a while. I’ve always enjoyed his music. However, this one just put me in a trance. I found myself listening to it more than any other album that came out in 2009. It’s relaxing with a good hint of darkness to keep it interesting. Sadly he doesn’t have a video out, but you can listen to some tracks on the Drag City link above.

2. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion / Fall Be Kind EP. This was going to be number 3 on the list until Fall Be Kind came out. While technically it’s another album, I see it as a companion piece. Both the album and the EP are amazing and should be checked out.

3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orcca. Another Domino release! I’m a programmer, not a writer. So, I’m going to end my descriptions here and just post the video :-)

 4. Cass McCombs – Catacombs. Domino Again!

 5. The XX – XX

6. Micachu – Jewellry

 7. The Monks – Black Monk Time. Yes, this is a re-release.. but it needs to be appreciated. The founders of punk.

 8. The Mantles – The Mantles. Sadly no video for these guys. But you can download their single off of their site here.

9. The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa. No clue if this is an ‘official’ video

 10. The Sandwitches – How to Make Ambient Sad Cake. No video for these gals either. But you can listen to the track ‘Back to the Sea’ here.