Well, that was not quite how it all went down, at least in my world. It isn’t something that can put into words, you just have to experience it first hand. I know I’m not the only one who has felt the need to disconnect from the internet, so this fact alone makes me feel a little less crazy, but not much lol.

Getting to the point

So anyways the other day on Forrst I posted the question: “Do you ever get overwhelmed by the endless amount of information?” and, if you don’t know what Forrst is it’s an invite only site for designers and developers to share/post only things of interest to people like us. So, it is the perfect site to post this question, since others there would understand and comment on.

I was really very impressed and surprised with what some responded with. There were those that agreed straight up, mentioning things like how bookmarking has not only become useless but also a distraction when they try to sort through them and in-turn wind up adding more to them and failing the original plan. Others explain ways they’ve found to help them deal with the overload, that thing which can eventually drive oneself off a virtual cyber cliff during a mental meltdown caused by something made up of a bunch of 1′s and 0′s.

Then there was what I deemed to be the “best comment ever” in the discussion, posted by Ken Erickson. I think it was one of those “just what I needed to hear” types of things that make you feel much better after, and even change your entire perspective at the same time.

A Comment Can Be Worth A Million Words

The biggest education fallacy of modern times is that more knowledge is better. We’ve all been trained to value information absorption over mastery.

As life long competitor in mental sports (chess, poker and draughts. And yes, several variants of draughts are played competitively ) my major leap in playing strength came when I begin to realize that the fundamentals are what really matters.

Mastery does not come through accumulation of a huge library of knowledge, but through an increased grasping of the fundamentals. The great chess grandmaster Emanuel Laskeronce reflected on his rise to world champion and said his increase in strength came from forgetting more than half of what he had learned.

The knowledge you pack on doesn’t help increase your skill it just serves to convolute and confuse the mind, making mastery harder. Eastern philosophers might call this muddying the waters of flow.

There can be the urge to absorb every new design article that pops up in hopes of learning more. But I can tell you now that there are no subjects that require you to master more knowledge than can fit in a pocket sized book. If you feel your skills are lacking its probably not due to a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of mastery over the knowledge that you do have.

It may seem like masters of a subject have a much greater library of knowledge than you do but I can assure you they don’t.

Increasing mastery of the fundamentals is the only way to get better at anything. It may seem that those tip articles are improving your skills by some magical increase of knowledge; but really what is happening is that these articles are catalysts that help you master fundamentals. However, they are the worst catalyst possible.

Learning to master things varies from person to person, from learning style to learning style, but the basic tenant “know thyself” applies universally to all.

Learn how you learn and the roads to mastery of anything will become clear to you. Once you understand you, teaching yourself will become much clearer and easier.

In every subject there is a ton of fluff that results because of differing learning styles; learn by example books, workbooks, screencasts, audio books, conferences, blogs, documentation and on and on. They are all methods of trying to make the fundamentals “click” and finally become clear. Everyone is trying to sell their own way of learning, the key to learning well is discovering what cocktail of learning methods work for you.

So all I can say is stop trying to absorb everything “new” that popups and focus on the little things. Just stop following and subscribing to everything, its not helping in fact its probably hurting you. If your a designer then study typography and design fundamentals again and again and again. If your a developer pick a programming pearls book and go over the design patterns again and again and again.

You may be saying to yourself “well turning off is fine for learning, but what about new technology? I don’t want to miss new tech coming out”, all I can say is that if a new tech really matters then you’ll hear about it eventually. Most technology builds hype and then disappears, very few new bits of technology ever become relevant. Think about all the time you’ve wasted following and reading about new tech, take Google wave for instance.

Follow the big guys relevant in your subjects and let the others be, if something new matters eventually the bigger guys will cover it.

It’s Not Exclusive To One Specific Topic Or Person

This perspective doesn’t apply to just the one topic of discussion I started. It can be adopted in other areas of your life as well, any equivalent thing which causes the same feeling of overwhelming stress. Everyone, no matter what they do, has one thing that can cause such a thing, it just may not be as common or extreme depending.

Basically, this is sort of like a life lesson that you may eventually learn, or unconsciously have an awareness of on some level. I am glad I posted that question on Forrst. All of the responses were just what I needed to hear, because I know I am not alone, some ways I can deal with or prevent needing to deal with this in the future, and also now have a whole new outlook on the point at hand.

The wicked web of the world, is not so wicked, it’s just wicked overwhelming with a wealth of information. It is this free and publicly accessible information, however, that helped me become the designer and programmer that I am today. So I can’t complain much about it.
Can you?
Post a comment below with your thoughts.

No matter the season, day, time or reason, it’s no exaggeration when I say I can easily snap over 1000 photos in a single day, and that’s just during my commute to and from work. I mean, every time I bring my camera out with me anywhere, it’s dead by the time I get to the place I was going. This is very annoying too, since once I get where ever that may be, there are tons of pictures I miss out on while there. But what can ya do.

For your visual enjoyment, here are 30 of my most recently taken photos, some I shot while driving, which is usually the case as you may already know, and others are taken at a friends house, one of those rare times I happen to bring my camera with me when I go to a new, cool photographic location.

Tell me what you think!!

Post a comment below with any thoughts or feedback you may have. I’d love to hear what you think.

The second video you may have seen already. It is the New Dork song, basically highlighting social media, and the online world of today. Check em out.

Seriously, today was way too much of an information overload, and I really have to just get this out. I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t, and I don’t want to find out.

Sooo……

Woosaah. I needed to take a breather.

Now, the list of links, which I was more or less bombarded by Bombay bombers. All I wanted to do was a search for at the time was a simple, online color picking tool that I could just bookmark, and have quick access to at my fingertips when I need to make a different shade or tint of a color setting I’m using, or whatever other reason. Just a simple search for something I knew had to exist but never saw was a mistake. I had no idea how many of these tools there would be, and what a wide variety of different, cool, and worth sharing at least, bunch of color picking tools. The first is exactly what I was looking for.

This is a basic colorpicker that is similar but better than the one used in Photoshop. Both RGB and HEX codes are used by it and you can store a set of up to 10 different colors if you want. Plain and simple, just the essentials. Out of all the different ones I found below, I just wanted a simple HEX / RGB color picker, and will take the added bonus of saving the colors.

You need MORE!!

Color picking tools. Save time and if you just need to grab a couple colors really quick for something, and work in real-time.

Pick Color RGB and Hex Codes

There were many more, by the way just no time to re-gather them all or I’ll be here all night. The color pickers above half of what I managed to collect in about 3-4 minutes, no intention to do that (link junky?). I honestly didn’t know what the hell was going on, or why I all of a sudden felt like I went from living in a black and white world, to feeling as though colors were bleeding from my eyes. Maybe I became possessed and since don’t have any clue what went on during that time, I must have blacked or gone into epileptic shock or something. It was just so beautiful you wouldn’t be able to imagine.

That’s when I hit my breaking point and had to stop with the colors. Which brings me to what I found previously. A entirely different thing that I was again overloaded after finding it, some how or another most likely on Twitter, I came across a CSS and JavaScript tool that claimed you could drag and drop fonts into the page for testing in real-time, and this I had to see obviously since that’s cool shit if it were real. This is how I found theCSSninja.com and from there it happened, yet again. A handful of posts on that site, in combination with some 25 other random tabs I had opening and closing at any given time, it was just a matter of minutes before I had far more information than I needed, again. I tried to stay focused on the things from thecssninja site as could since it was new to me, but I’m unable to focus when there’s so much info swirling like a tornado around me. So that is why in the list below I focus more on cssninja posts. Yes, I am crazy. I know you’ve already concluded that by this point.

Font Dragr – Drag and Drop Font Tester

This is a page that you can just select, drag and drop a typeface, or font into the page, so could test how it would look in that page in the section which you can also edit in place if you wanted. Stuff like that is cool in itself.

CSS – JavaScript – Text

There were others but I can’t remember what they were. That’s ok though, they will be found again, and by larger numbers. That I have no doubt will be true. While I’m on this topic, I might as well rant on about it some more, because it was one of those days that you just say, damn there’s just too much.

There are so many new things in web technology. Things that have extremely cool, easy to use, and feature-filled, and these things include the W3 recently released and/or updated technologies HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, SVG, along with the less recent but still new and extremely powerful jQuery1.4.2, and the somewhat even less recently updated jQueryUI 1.8, which is the cherry on top this list of all that is possible from any one of them.

I would say it is easy to understand why someone who works with these things daily, as I do, becoming extremely overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing number of resources for any or a combination of these technologies. Which is noticeably advancing into the future at the speed of light. Every next thing I see, is yet even more amazing, and never could conceive as a possibility just a mere 3 months ago.

This is by no means a bad thing, and I am extremely happy to be able to be apart of the growing community of developers and designers, BUT, I mean come ON, take a chill pill. I know that asking an entire online community to chill out and take a rest is delusional, and I would never want it to stop, I love it to much! It would be nice to have that kind of power though, huh?

Anyways, I guess what I should do, but have a very hard time doing, is to take a step back with Jeff Star, since it would seem to be a good, no, Necessary* thing to do. Duh, obviously. I know but actually doing it and knowing it is good to do, are entirely different things. Just ask me, I am the king of knowing all the things I should or shouldn’t do or be doing. Do I do them though? I can do what you do? Voodoo, coming through your area, – Fugees. Despite having ability to do what you do, or doing what I should/shouldn’t do, I 90% of the time, do NOT DO them. I just do things the hard way, the way NOT TO DO them. Don’t do what I do, in case you were planning to, I know you were.

One last thing, all of that stuff above, also makes it very difficult to get anything at all done, and I have: a plugin update to release, a theme to finalize, as well as 2 half completed posts over at New2WP.com, one which is a continuance of the W3C HTML5/CSS3 meetup post which is the post-meetup review and overview of what was covered at it. Coming soon!

Anyways, ok I feel much better now that I got some of this stress of the web today out. Thanks for listening, if anyone does actually read this.

Okay go play with those links I posted, no more blabla mouth from me. Good day to you all.

I have done photo manips in the past, but nothing I would consider a real photo manipulation, including some of the images below, at least not by what I define as a “photo manipulation”.

A Little Ramble

The way I think of it is more exact than what you and probably most people understand it. I have my own opinion based on what my eyes have seen. Some of the art I’ve seen created by real and extremely amazing graphic artists has contributed to my understanding of what a photo manipulation is.

My understanding, or personal view of what a photo manipulation is a work of art that one has created, using pieces from a completely different work of art, such as photographs or other graphics, combined with different techniques and methods with the use of design tools, that produces a newresult using elements from the original piece.

This is my own opinion, and in no way do you have to agree, or understand it the same as i do. I am not saying that other what others consider to be photo manipulations are not works of art. I just think they should be called something different.

You may notice many of these have girls as the focus of attention (to attract people to look). I mean I am a guy after all, and naturally attracted to girls. Therefore, it would make sense that girls are what inspire me and motivated me to create art, duh. When I see a great photo I am compelled to manipulate it, aren’t you?

Some images below do contain partial nudity and may not be safe for work

Click each image to view them full size.

Battle for New2WP.com – A Design Contest

I made this for a little competition between me and my friend and co-author at New2WP.com, Antonio. We decided to have a little contest to see who could make a better poster design in an hours time for an imaginary event called Wordcamp on the Moon. He won, though I have my qualms about why but I’m not going to get int that. I’ll just be the bigger man and give it to him. Given more time it would be the other way around. My master-pieces, of crap, take much longer than an hour to be completed.

Friend Of A Friend

This is made with two different photos of the same person. She a friend of a friend, and I decided to make her this when I saw her amazing photos.

My Strange Friends

I had to do some weird stuff with this once I saw this picture I just couldn’t resist. My weird friends deserve even weirder photos, so that’s what I have done.

Even Stranger Friends

Version two of My Strange Friends. This is just a variation of the photo above, with another friend of mine, and even MORE weirdness to go along with it.

Delicious Dreams And Wishes

This is an enhanced photo of one of my bestest friends ever. I love her, and so I turn her into a beautiful work of art.

Eye Manipulate Eye

This is just a rather simple eye manipulation I made. Simple is a relative term here since it did take a couple hours to do, much like almost all of these did.

Naughty By Nature

This was created from 2 stock photos. A photo of Faye, a female model, and a naturalistic looking photo of a forest. I found both photos on DeviantArt, though I do not remember who’s gallery(s) they are from since I made this a while ago.

Face OFF

The photo used is another female model on DeviantArt who I thought was very beautiful looking, so I had to use the photo.

Colleseum Cake

I used a stock image of the Eiffel Tower and created the trees, grass, and towers using different parts of the image. The clouds, sky and river I just made from scratch. Not the best, but still kind of cool.

Weaving My Face

A self-portrait photograph I took and made my face look like it is weaving together. I used a tutorial for this that you may have seen before.

Ninja Star

**Contains some nudity**

This is just a basic head swap that I find funny, just for the fact that I did it using these 2 pictures. The sexually explicit photo is censored for your virgin eyes. I don’t know what made me choose the images I did, I guess cause it was somewhat comical to me perhaps..

You like?

Ok so this last one maybe pushing the envelope of what is considered decent for all audiences. If you don’t like it, then don’t look, or just post a comment and ask to remove it. I won’t have a problem doing that if anyone asks me to. It is somewhat risqué, I suppose.

It’s quite clear, to me anyways, that I am much better at making web graphics because these could use some work. I have a long way to go before I am able to create manipulations like the ones showcased here, for example. It is a far more difficult skill to master than creating web graphics. I give a lot of credit to those that have, and hope that someday I will too. Let me know what YOU think of these in the comments below!

What my plugin does is it utilizes your information from the WP dashboard on your profile. It makes better use of the fields by removing the Yahoo IM one and adding a Twitter field. Then it will pull the information from that and the URL and Bio of the post author, as well as display the Gravatar of the author by getting the authors email address. Then it adds a nice box in between the post and the comments.

I am extremely excited about this. I never thought I would ever be able to complete it, and get it working. I managed to create the functions and simulate it over at New2WP, but getting it to work in a plugin has been a bit more work. I am still working on cleaning it up and adding the finishing touches, and then I will submit it to WordPress.

You can see an example of it below, I am currently using it on this site, and I’d love to know what you think!

So what is this

I just wanted to quickly explain what $(this) is since it was so confusing to me while learning jQuery.

$(this) is easier to understand separately in 2 parts. $() is a function call plain and simple. $ is a reference to the jQuery function, so therefore, $() is a shorter more simple way to write jQuery().

If you use another JavaScript library that redefines $ then you would want to use either jQuery() instead of $(), or you could use jQuery.noCoflict().

What ‘this’ is can be more confusing since it’s used for many things. It is used in an object’s methods to refer to that object, itself. Sort of like talking in 3rd person or something.

$(this) may make you even more confused, so let me know if you have any questions.

And be sure to come check out more jQuery and WordPress tutorials at New2WP.com

The art of Stop Motion is one that takes A LOT of time and patience, not to mention the planning involved and the obviously required need for imagination.

Stop motion animations can take as long as 1,500 hour or more to create, 8-Bit Trip for example. That is the reason I personally would never create my own stop motion video, at least not one as long and complex as some of these. Though, I do very much enjoy them, and give the creators tons of credit for their work.

Here are 6 of the my favorites

Stop Motion T-Shirt War

The PEN Story

Human Skateboard Stop Motion

Stop Motion Stick Figure Body Art

7x7x7 Stop Motion Assembly

My Animated World

How you enjoyed these as much as I did. There’s a lot of hours spent making these videos. Show respect, they’ve worked hard and deserve it.

The whole weekend really was basically nothing more than ordinary as far as birthday weekends go. It’s not like I couldn’t find stuff to do, I just wanted to do what I do, and it made me depressed.

I did go to the Cheesecake Factory with my family on Sunday which was nice. Also went to a small gathering of friends, where I only knew 3 people, and was only there for an hour or two. I used to do cool stuff, but now I’m boring I guess.

Anyways, I wanted to include in this extremely compelling post a list of WordPress blogs for designers and developers that I used a lot over the weekend, and many times in the past. There’s a lot of great information for learning WordPress on each of them and recommend checking them out.

Digging Into WordPress

New2WP

WP Beginner

Cats Who Code

WP Recipes

WP Hacks

Weblog Tools

Am I the only one that sits at home alone on a computer on my birthday?

A little over a month later Shorewood High School, a longtime rival school of Shorecrest in sports and band decided to show them up by releasing their own music video to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.” What’s even more amazing about their video is that it is shot in reverse. All of the students learned to lip sync the song backwards. After seeing OneManSho’s sing songs in reverse that aspect of it is not quite as impressive to me, not to discredit them though. I’m sure it isn’t an easy thing to do, but it seems less difficult after previously seeing this done.

Either way both videos are amazingly well-done.

I have worked with video recording, production, and have studied film and am more aware of the level of difficulty involved in shooting a 4 minute long continuous shot. I think that is the most amazing thing of all when watching these videos.

Shorecrest High School | Outkast – Hey Ya!

Shorewood High School | Hall and Oates – You Make My Dreams Come True

There is a poll up on King5.com for people to vote for the video they think is the best. I personally like the one by Shorecrest better because I love the song “Hey Ya!”, and I don’t like the song by the other school at all. I also think they didn’t do that great in lip syncing the song, granted it was done backwards, it decreases the quality of the video.

This isn’t over yet though. Shorecrest has stated that they are already working on their next video but are keeping quiet about what they have planned. It will be interesting to see how far this goes and what they come up with.

I wish I were growing up in the age of technology, like teenagers are today. When I was in high school we had old Macintosh computers that we used in “computer class”, which was called Keyboarding. Yeah, learning how to type. I’m only 26, so it’s not like I’m old, but we sure as hell didn’t learn how to do advanced video editing and producing like this. They even teach web and graphic design in high school these days. If I started doing that back then, I would know so much more, and be so far beyond the point I’m at now in my abilities. Kids today don’t know how well they have it, and they take it for granted. OMG I’m starting to sound like my mother. Dammit!

So which video do you think is better?

Post a comment below stating who you’d vote for.