Archive for March, 2006

03-31-2006

DIY Creativity Poster


Click for a larger version.

Michael Michalko has written some great books on creativity. His book Thinkertoys contains a chapter on a technique called Brutethink, where random words are used to generate ideas by forcing you to associate the words with the problem at hand. Thinkertoys includes a three page list of words (pp. 169-171) intended to be used in generating ideas.

When I read the book a while back, I thought the word list might be handy to have to refer to, so I OCRed it and converted it to text. It came to mind when I ran across tagged photos on Flickr. It was fun to plug in the various words to explore interesting photography.

After seeing Mike Matas’ post about creating a Life Poster, I decided to create a poster to use for a visual spin on “Brutethink” problem solving. Since Flickr has a great stock of photos licensed under the Creative Commons, there was a lot of source material to pull from.

I searched Flickr for photos tagged with some of the terms from Michalko’s Thinkertoys list and compiled them into a single poster-sized image. Not all the photos will necessarily evoke the words that got me to them, but I think the end product will still prove useful for generating ideas. There are also a couple of words duplicated, in cases where I couldn’t decide between photos I liked.

I used my favorite freeware image viewer, Irfanview, to crop the photos and create the contact sheet to make into a poster. The process was very similar to the one using XnView.

The beauty of Creative Commons is that I can make the poster available for download from Flickr under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To access the full sized version, click on the “All Sizes” button towards the top of the page. Many thanks to all the photographers who made their work available via Creative Commons.

After some price comparison searching, I decided to go with P-e-photo to print the resulting poster. With shipping, a 30″x40″ poster comes to a little under $30. I’ll update this post to include a photo of the final product, once the poster arrives in the mail.

If $30 is too much for you, an 18″x24″ print would be significantly cheaper and wouldn’t require cropping. Also, the resulting montage makes for an interesting—though busy—desktop background.

Keep in mind, the same idea can be applied using a variety of random stimuli. Some other sources to seed ideas include:

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Posted by Matt in cc, creativity, general, photography | 2 Comments »

03-31-2006

Search for Creative Commons Photos Using FlickrLilli

If you’re looking for Creative Commons photos to use in a project, check out FlickrLilli. The site allows users to search Flickr for photos released under Creative Commons licenses. Flickr already allows users to search for photos under each particular license, but FlickrLilli adds the ability to search across multiple licenses at once.

Posted by Matt in creativity, photography | No Comments »

03-27-2006

Beijing Photos and Trip Report

Amanda and I got back from Beijing about a week ago. It was a whirlwind trip, since we only had six days to spend there.

The highlight of the trip was visiting the Great Wall. On our second day in the city, we woke up in the middle of the night. Since we couldn’t sleep, we decided to get started towards the Badaling section of the wall. Rather than take the $80+ tour or hire a private car for $100, we opted to take the subway, then the local #919 bus. For two of us, the subway fare totalled about $1.50 round trip and $6 for the bus. We got to Badaling around 7am and it was still pretty quiet. The tour groups were just rolling in around the time we left.

The Chaoyang Theatre Acrobatics show was also impressive. The tickets were pricey, at $25 each for a one hour show, but the talent was top notch.

The most impressive food was at the two restaurants inside the Grand Hyatt. I had read multiple recommendations on Chowhound.com for the Made in China restaurant, but it was booked up the first night we went. Instead, we tried the restaurant downstairs called Noble Court. The food and service were excellent. We went back for the “Beijing Duck” at Made in China a few nights later and were even more impressed.

The Beijing Zoo was mostly depressing. The pandas had a decent enclosure, but with $2 admission, it’s not all that surprising that the cages for many of the other animals were dilapidated. The newly built aquarium—located inside the zoo but with a separate $12.50 admission fee—was impressive at first. However, you soon realize that the exhibit area is rather small and most of the building houses the dolphin show. Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and weren’t able to stick around for the show.

Another downer was our hotel. Luckily, we got a good deal via Priceline. The lobby of the hotel smelled very strongly of stale smoke. Overall it had little worth recommending, except for the huge grocery store in the basement of the attached mall. I was amazed to find that I could get Dr. Pepper (in the imported foods section) for about $1 per can. My favorite find was the bottled green tea they stocked, at less than $1 for about 1.5 liters. I probably drank about 8-10 liters while we were there. Now that I’m home, I’m hoping I can find some comparable bottled green tea at one of the local Asian grocery stores.

I enjoyed the trip and I’m glad we went, but Beijing is not high on my list of destinations to recommend to others. I know that they’re trying to make the city more tourist friendly in preparation for the Summer Olympic games in 2008, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly tourist friendly yet. In hindsight, I would have planned and researched more, to try to avoid some of the less impressive attractions.

I’ve posted my favorite photos from the trip. I’d love to hear feedback about the photos or from others who’ve been to Beijing.

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Posted by Matt in food, photography, travel | 2 Comments »

03-24-2006

Funny New Online Comic Called “Married To The Sea”


train-time
Originally uploaded by maven.

I ran across a new online comic recently on populicio.us called “Married To The Sea.” It uses old illustrations, but with anachronistic captions. It hasn’t been around long, but so far it’s cracking me up.

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Posted by Matt in humor, reading | No Comments »

03-23-2006

Free Wireless Coming to Downtown Austin

The Austin American-Statesman has a story on the new plan to bring free wireless to much of downtown Austin. This is in addition to the existing free hotspots in parks and businesses.

The City of Austin plans to create a high-speed wireless network that will deliver free broadband Internet access to parts of downtown Austin, East Austin and Zilker Park.

The city is partnering with Cisco Systems Inc., the largest maker of computer networking equipment, and the World Congress on Information Technology. Cisco will donate nearly $700,000 worth of wireless networking equipment for the project to the group hosting the international gathering of technology leaders in Austin in early May.

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Posted by Matt in Austin, communication, tech | Comments Off

03-23-2006

Big LUECKE

Luecke as seen from space (via Google Earth)

Amanda and I flew back into town last night from Beijing. On the flight from Houston to Austin, I finished my book, so I was looking out the window when I noticed some HUGE writing on the ground. The writing spelled out “LUECKE” using trees.

When I got home, I looked up the word and Google pointed me to a post on the Google Sightseeing blog about the giant letters. It turns out that Luecke is the name of a rancher who decided to leave his mark on the world in a big way.

One of the commentors mentioned an article that had been writen in the Austin American Statesman about Mr. Luecke. I tracked down the article, from March 6, 2000, which included the following:

Before you even think of invading Earth, check the trademark just north of Smithville and go see Jimmy Luecke. You see, it’s Luecke’s world — some of us just fly over it.

We know you’ve seen the name. Commercial airline passengers into and out of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport have seen it carved out of the woods on the Luecke ranch. Jet pilots who don’t know who Luecke is have long guessed he cut the name 3 1/2 miles long and 3,100 feet high to make absolutely sure you knew who owns this planet. Hell, John Glenn, our oldest astronaut, helped take pictures of it on a shuttle mission two years ago.

Posted by Matt in Austin, communication, creativity, travel | No Comments »

03-14-2006

My Favorite 2006 SXSW Interactive Panels

I just finished up my last day of SXSW Interactive. Unfortunately, I’ll be missing the last day of the conference. Of the panels and presentations I made it to, my favorites were:

I wish I’d taken better notes, especially in that last one—What People Are Really Doing on the Web. I’d be especially interested if anyone wrote down the three trends Michele Madansky mentioned at the end of the Q&A. I remember the first one was something along the lines of personalizing media. My brain was a bit fried by the end of the day though and I missed the other two.

I’m also bummed that I missed Kathy Sierra’s talk, since Creating Passionate Users is one of my favorite blogs. I’m hoping that it will be one of the presentations that gets posted as a SXSW podcast.

I would have included the Ambient Findability in my list of favorites, but I think Peter Morville needed a good dose of Presentation Zen. He certainly wasn’t the only one, but his slides were the most information dense I ran across during the conference. He had great photos and illustrations to back up his talk, but many of the slides were text-heavy to the point of distraction.

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Posted by Matt in Austin, communication, general, tech | 1 Comment »

03-09-2006

Bookmarklet for Finding Similar Sites Using similicio.us

I ran across a new site called similicio.us that allows you to search for groups of similar websites, using data from del.icio.us and EasyUtil. So far, the results seem much better than Google’s similar pages search or others that I’ve tried.

To make it even easier to search similicio.us, I created a search similicio.us bookmarklet. If you’re not already familiar with bookmarklets, Lifehacker’s article “Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets” provides a good introduction.

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Posted by Matt in bookmarklets, general, lifehacks, tech | No Comments »