Recently in Creative Category

I've been quiet on my blog. I blame Twitter. I'm not sure I've ever waited four months to finally tell everybody about a new mix for Mary. This time I did it accidentally (I'll explain). Much like the other mixes I made for Mary, I wanted to share with each of you. Maybe you'll find a song or two you enjoy. I gave it to her on Valentine's Day this year, and managed to surprise her yet again with a mix. It took a lot of effort on my part to not let her see it (at the time our computer was in the most public place possible, which provided very little warning that she'd walk around the corner and see me working on it).

I've made a (practically completely useless) T-SQL ASCII Text Art Generator. Despite my affection for all things Apple, during the day people pay me to be a Microsoft/Windows geek - specifically a T-SQL and Microsoft's SQL Server (and Reporting/Intelligence Services) geek. I needed a little brush-up on loops, and went overboard to make this thing. If you feed in the right stuff, you'll end up with useless things like this:

88""Yb 888888 8888b.  88""Yb  dP"Yb  
88__dP 88__    8I  Yb 88__dP dP   Yb 
88"""  88""    8I  dY 88"Yb  Yb   dP 
88     888888 8888Y"  88  Yb  YbodP  

I've made the code available for your useless purposes (and I offer no waranty or support for this stuff). You can see the clean version here and the more easily editable version here. I've licensed the code under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. Copy, distribute, transmit, adapt the work, so long as you give me credit for the original, and if you distribute this (or a variation) that you have a similar license. I have no clue how well it'll work in MySQL, but I'm sure somebody can find out. No matter what, enjoy.

I found great humor in Josh Millard's Useless Fliers. I immediately copied his idea, and made several of my own fliers/flyers, and posted them at work. My only problem was that I didn't want anybody to know it was me. Here we are now, months later and I still don't think anybody truly figured it out (though some were pretty close). Either way, it doesn't matter, since I've stopped. Despite that, I wanted to share my creations with you people reading the internet. Print one of these things out. Cut where appropriate. Post it. Enjoy the results. As with other creations, I'd love to hear about your own. Some of my favorite (of my own creations) are:

• Free Pieces of Pi
• Free Peaces on Paper
• Take Only the Star Wars References (not the Iranian government references)

You can see the full listing of fliers, and download your copies to print out here. Several of them came about as inspired by McSweeney's Lists (a continual source of enlightenment). Happy posting!

The other day, Cabel Sasser (@cabel) (of Panic, fireworks displaying, and snack hunting), tweeted about some tile work uncovered in a building undergoing renovations (I'd love to know the building's name). Five days later, he tweeted again showing the unfortunate destruction of that same tile work. I thought it'd be a shame if that tile didn't get more attention/rememberance, and spent the time to digitize it.

Here is the base hexagonal pattern, and a modification using Panic's (and their awesometastic FTP application Transmit's) colors:

   

Additionally, I've gone and created a full-sized desktop picture (perfectly fits my 27" iMac).

Download: my original Fireworks PNGs. The file has both the main, hexagonal pattern, and the side square pattern. If you create your own versions, I'd love to hear about them.