I had this site bookmarked for about a week intending to post it, but there was just too many distractions.

This website “Today and Tomorrow” is seems to be a pretty good collection of unusual artwork found by this guy in Berlin. Great browsing through there for inspiration.  I found these 2 things that caught my attention:

While it’s a bit like living in a giant Tupperware box, I like the fact that it’s almost 360 degrees of open window space in some areas. Yeah, I could live in a place like this. Only problem is that it looks like a siren call to every graffiti tagger in town. (Plastic Moon)

And then I goofed around on the site a bit and my eye landed on Claudia Schiffer with a broom up her ass.  “Uhhhhhhhh….ok” Can you imagine the balls on a photographer who could go up to a supermodel like Claudia Schiffer and say “Um, excuse me Ms. Schiffer…you see this broomstick?  Work with me on this one I have an idea….” (photographer: Erwin Wurm)

I think I’ve had recent days where I can relate to this to some degree.

I’m having intermittant problems with my cable internet connectivity today *cough* RoadRunner *cough cough*

I guess if I’m slow to respond to your emails today, you’ll know why. I guess if you see this post I’ve managed to slip this in during one of the “up” times.

This might be a sign for me to take some break time today. My wife is home sick with a slight cold today. We ended up having breakfast this morning with a very non-traditional chinese menu of rice juk, tripe, chicken feet, egg tart, and shrimp dumpling.

When I reflect on my life it’s so bizarre how things have gone. Growing up I almost hated anything Chinese. Now I’m sitting in a restaurant this morning staring at a dish of chicken feet.

Whatever happened to a good old fashioned breakfast of Frosted Flakes and milk?

I’m trying to learn how to use my flash better in my photography. I can’t seem to make it work the way I want it to. Here’s some of my results using my favorite model test subject.

The photo on the left is with flash, the one on the right is without it. Personally I like the look of the one without flash as it retains more shadow and depth. ARRRGH. I need to learn how to control my lighting better.

Apparently this Illustrator, Wendy Macnaughton, spends 20 minutes each day on your commute to-and-from work to sketch some of her fellow passengers. Beautiful collection on her blog

This week I’m intentionally keeping my meetings and phone calls light folks. I have some big projects on my table I need to concentrate on. It’s difficult making headway on these design projects while picking up a phone call every 15 minutes.

Please forgive me if you call and can’t reach me right away. If you leave a message I’ll be sure to slip in some time here and there to return your call.

I think if Batman wanted to do a little interior decorating to his Batcave, this sideboard would be one of the furniture items he would get. I like the shape of it closed. (David Keune; via Designboom)

Here’s an update for those of you who may have read my post a couple months back about my bandwidth dilemma. Basically I’ve been getting hit with a healthy dose of traffic to my site, both good and bad. Enough so that I have to keep increasing my bandwidth costs to my host.

Well, the good news is I think I’ve made some headway as to controlling the amount of bandwidth that’s been sucked up by “bad traffic” — basically I’d consider that anybody or anything that sucks bandwidth out of your website for no good reason or benefit to you.

I found the most offensive search spider was this one called Sogou out of China. It looks like it’s trying to be a Google clone. When I checked over my logs…I found that day after day it kept returning to my site and grabbing images over and over again. It’s ok for a search engine to come index my site every now and again, but to come suck it all out on an ongoing daily basis is obscene. There’s no reason why I only have less than 500MB of content on my site but it sucks out 6GB of traffic.  BASTARD!

Anyway, I’ve been blocking the IPs going to Sogou and it seems to have reduced that “spider” line from close to 9GB down to 3GB without affecting my real legitimate traffic.

Those of you with heavy image websites (e.g., artists, photographers, designers, etc.) I’d recommend taking a regular check on your logs and see if you’re getting nailed by this irritating bot.

Stumbled across these pretty awesome wood sculptures done by an Italian artist by the name of Gehard Demetz.

Having dabbled with woodworking in college art classes, I can tell you that I particularly don’t have any patience to do something this lifelike. It’s almost like it’s got a marble look doesn’t it?  I’d love to have one in my house but I’m sure these will freak me out at night. (more on BeautifulDecay)

Sorry, if you try to call me today (10/15/09), I may have to screen calls today. So please leave a message and I’ll do my best to call you back. Worse case scenario I’ll call you on Monday.

It’s gotten really busy and I really need to buckle down today and get some project work done without interruption.

Obviously if it’s an emergency I’ll drop what I’m doing and take care of ya!

I stumbled across another well-done Photoshop tip/tutorial site the past week. Nice and clean tutorials and I see some effects here I haven’t tried before.

I know people blank out if they’ve never seen a Photoshop interface before. It IS intimidating at first. It’s the same blank look I would have if I pulled up a 3D program like Maya…I’d have no idea where to start.

But if you DO have access to Photoshop, I’d recommend attempting to go through some of these tutorials every once in a while. It’s a good way to get to know the program. I self-taught myself (hmm..who else would I be self teaching?) Photoshop back around version 2 or 3 just by following along with tutorials that were around like these. Now I make my living based off of this darn thing. Whodathunk?