A Collection of Things I Like

Been looking for something to write about but it's been a pretty dry week. Nothing's jumping out at me, and I really need to feeeeeeeeeeel it, you know? Otherwise what's the point? Gotta have passion in everything we do, right?

But the header of the blog does say "a collection of things I like"... it's not solely devoted to spots and production. So here's three items I've come across in the past few weeks that I find generally wicked cool.
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iPhone: I don't know about you, but I'm just not as fast messaging on the iPhone as I am on a Blackberry. Not having actual keys to press still fucks me up sometimes, there's simply no tactile feedback to let me know that I did indeed press a key, or the space bar, or whatever. But the real pain in the ass is switching between keyboards to add numbers and punctuation.

So here's how to make that go faster. When you want to add a number or other mark to your text, press and hold the ".?123" key, then drag your finger to the mark or number you want. When you lift your finger it should insert the mark and switch back automatically to the alphabet keyboard.

Just think what you can do with all the time you'll save.
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Drop.io: As a freelance producer, I never cease to be amazed at the minuscule attachment sizes allowed by most agency and client e-mail servers. I understand that nobody wants to clog up their e-mail server with a lot of huge files, and no one deletes anything anyway until their mailbox is full. But sometimes you just need to e-mail a rough cut, you know?

Enter drop.io. This is a great tool for freelancers, agency producers, anyone who needs to move large files around and doesn't want to deal with managing those files when the job is over.

There's plenty of drop box services, but drop.io has a couple of features that make it particularly user friendly. First of all, it's free. Your drop box is 100MB, which is a decent size, but you can have as many drop boxes as you want. So it's really unlimited. The most excellent bit, though, is that you can set the length of time that the files stay active. Default time is one year, but you can set the expiration for different lengths. So your vacation photos or client materials won't be floating around the Internet forever, and you don't have to remember to delete the files or the site when the job is over. To me, that's huge.

There are some other great features that you won't find on other drop box services. You can fax to the drop, and it creates a pdf of the file. You can e-mail directly to the drop. You get a phone number; people can call the drop and leave you a voice-mail. And you get a conference bridge to boot. It is a pretty useful tool.

I'm gonna go drop something in there right now.
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This is kind of trippy and creepy at the same time. Open up this picture and take a good look at it. Actually it works a lot better if you download it and make it bigger. Like fill up your whole screen with it, or print it out. Now get up from your computer and walk across the room and look at it again.

Aaaaaaaah!

Is that crazy or what? Apparently it's got something do with how our eyes pick out different resolutions (sharp lines vs. blurry ones) and process that information over distance and time. It's part of some work being done at the Computational Visual Cognition Laboratory at MIT.

There's some more of these creepy pictures here. If you are so lazy that you cannot get up from your desk, or if your office is really small, these movie files will simulate the experience for you.