Sometimes the mouse leads you on a strange journey.

Justine Henin -> Serena Williams -> Yetunde Price -> Crips -> Stanley Williams -> Arnold Schwarzenegger -> Conan the Barbarian -> Conan the Destroyer -> Grace Jones -> Massive Attack.

Created in January 2004, Cinema Redux explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment.

This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. – Brendan Dawes

Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)

http://www.brendandawes.com/sketches/redux

Thank the heavens, this retweet thing was driving me insane!

I never understood why people re-tweeted posts or tweets from popular accounts. Take this for an example, I follow Mashable and so do 1.4 million other people.

If you follow me, and I follow you, and we don’t know each other, chances are we both share a common interest. Lets say that common interest is Technology or Social Media (hate that word).

Because I follow people who share the same interests as me, chances are your going to retweet something a hundred people have already re-tweeted, affectively spamming my twitter stream to shit.

Here’s Twitter’s official explanation of the new feature:

One of the main confusions and criticisms about the retweet API was around what happens when a given tweet is retweeted multiple times. The explanation was that developers need to do their own retweet collapsing. If N people retweet a given tweet, you’d get N instances of that same tweet in the appropriate retweet timeline and the home timeline. You would then have to do your own internal book keeping about whether that tweet had already come in. If it hadn’t you’d display it for the first time. If it had you’d update the already displayed tweet.

Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated and confusing. We’re not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it.

Looks pretty cool from the screenshot, hopefully they’ll get this going pretty sharpish.

After a well deserved break I’m back to the daily grind. After some thought, a staggering 5 minutes! I decided to shift the focus of this blog a little and change the name – more on that later.

Is Twitter worth 5 to 10 billion dollars? Not in a million years but some beg to differ. While on holiday it was a really useful tool though, and provided many a joke. I just wished more of my friends used it but unfortunately they’re all heavily entrenched in FB.

In other news, England are through to the FIFA World Cup Finals after thrashing Croatia 5-1. Should we Brits brace ourselves for more heartbreak come next summer? Who knows – But I remain optimistic.

And moving WordPress to another domain is not as difficult as you may think. Here are some useful tools and links that I recommend.

• Update URL’s
• Domain-Change
• Moving your site
• Telling Google about your domain change

If anyone knows me well, they’d know I love my newspapers. Come lunchtime I’d head over to the local Cafe for my traditional English breakfast, which consists of beans, toast, bacon eggs and tea.

Before chowin’ down though, I’d exit the Cafe and walk through the doors of my local newsagent. Knowing my food was waiting I kept the chit-chat to a bear minimum, quickly picking up a copy of my favourite newspaper and placing a twenty pence piece onto the counter as I left.

“I was always very polite.”

Heading back into the Cafe where my food was waiting. The waitress would deliver my tea just how I liked it – strong no sugar – now I could begin to have my lunch, I was ready.

Then that all changed, I moved offices. Now out in the middle of nowhere, no newsagent in sight – gone was my afternoon ritual of 10 years.

Now I’m resigned to reading the news on my Nokia N96 while I eat my lunch in the corporate cafeteria. Its not the same, especially when I drop some beans – my Nokia doesn’t like beans.

Sad but true the newspaper industry is fighting for its very survival. And one day there will be no newspapers, no smiling newsagents, no lots of things.

Be careful what you wish for, (06:20) gets me everytime.

Attending tg2009 Tweetup tonight, some interesting peeps attending so it should be fun. Who’s idea was it to host it on the same day as the Wimbledon final?

This is sad, not that I ever read the magazine, but it’s still sad. ^(1) (2)

Recession Proof jackets anyone?

1. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/vibe-magazine-to-close-down-immediately/
2. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/06/30/vibe-magazine-shutting-down/

So, what happens when your Internet connection is abducted by aliens and they refuse – no matter now much you plead, to give you back even a kilobit of the thousands they stole from you? I guess you don’t update your blog for 3 weeks, which is the case here.

But, life moves on.

They agreed to hand me back 481 kilobits from the millions they stole which was a nice gesture but I’m still not happy. Perhaps Judge Judy could help me out with this one.

I want to type more but every character I type is delayed by 3 seconds, memories of AOL spring to mind – this is so depressing.

“A man without Internet is like Superman without his cape – useless.”

I have no idea what’s going on, but every search on google at the moment is reporting a Malware warning. Google broke the internet, how interesting.

• Techcrunch
• Twitter
• PC PLus
• Arstechnica
• Cnet
• Telegraph

* Update

The problem appears to be fixed now.

* Update 17:00 GMT

Google officially responds to today’s incident.

I’ve been fortunate enough to own a box-set of Tony Robin’s media which I have found to be an invaluable resource for at least three to four years.

No matter how many times I listen to his Cd’s whether I’m running, driving or taking a hot bath I always learn something new.

If you haven’t heard of Tony Robins before or listened to any of his audio over the years stay tuned, you’re in for a treat.

Tony has been kind enough to start a blog this year, providing anyone with an Internet connection and a browser with free videos, audio and other training materials from his sell-out seminars all over the world.

I’m sure you will find these free resources useful.

• Tony Robins Training

Something to think about.

• Reciprocity
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social Proof
• Commitment / Consistency

Thanks to 500 Hats.

Update via Twitter.

@jonnytokyo those 6 rules are from “Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion” by Cialdini, one of my all-time fave books.

On Friday I gathered around with some of my closest of friends and headed off to the cinema to watch The Wrestler. Like most good movies they spark a certain emotion within you, some make you sad, cry or rejoice.

In this case The Wrestler inspired me to write, thus the title of this series is called The Blogger in homage to the movie.

Money Money Money

You can’t help but notice the ever growing list of successful bloggers out there. Every morning I crawl through my RSS subscriptions and bam! Like a clothes line from hell someone hits you with ‘How I made over $40,000 in one month’ or $50,000 even.

It kind of makes you feel ‘ah eh insane’ but in truth without these guys I wouldn’t of started this blog. My goal has always been to run an online business, and I thought that by starting a blog and connecting with like minded people who shared the same passion would inspire me, and it has.

Blogging is fun; I quite like the banter and the ridiculous things I read sometimes. But in truth it’s become much easier ever since I changed my mind set from making cheese to writing these.

In other words from September 2008 onwards my goal was not to make money but to write what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted. I no longer found blogging hard work for that very reason – I changed my perspective.

Follow The Little Guys

I make an effort to subscribe to a lot of smaller blogs, I’m talking zero PR and manky domain names. And for the first couple of weeks I notice their on fire, writing 3 – 4 posts a-day because their mentors tell them too.

But after awhile they run out of oil and burn up – and I don’t blame them, just who on earth are you blogging for little guy. I feel sorry for you, your fingers must hurt.

And let’s be honest, for the majority of us – in the first 3-4 months the traffic to your blog is going to be just enough to make you want to puke and think what’s the point. But that’s okay, if you look around a little you’ll notice you’re not alone.

Pinch of Salt

Take what these so called experts say with a pinch of salt, they are obviously doing something right but they have also worked very hard. Success is not achieved overnight, and anyone that convinces you otherwise is probably doing so for their own momentary gain.

Be inspired

Saying that be inspired by them seriously – because some of them once in a while will share some great advice.

Congratulations to my Fiancée, who after months of career searching has finally been offered an excellent job. You deserve it, I’m really pleased 2009 has started so well for you and us.

May I have that diamond watch you promised now?

 I love you.

Last week I brought myself a new toy, the Bamboo Fun. And boy I’m really having fun doodling with it, what you see above is my first rather poor attempt at drawing Angie.

Click the image for a larger view if you want. Drawing while looking at the screen is really strange, but the Bamboo itself is awesome and cheap too.

I brought the Bamboo because I wanted to get back into drawing a little bit, I really enjoyed art at school amongst other things like drama. These subjects were the only ones that brought me any happiness.

Speaking of drama, excuse me for blowing my own trumpet here but I was a bad-ass actor in school. Not only did I lead in various plays, but I directed and scripted them too. Did I mention I also played the part of Jesus?

Which leads me onto my second new toy. Celtx is a open source i.e ‘free’ tool for writing screenplays. Celtx is Windows and Mac compatible which is great for me.

I have a bunch of short stories ideas and scripts, written in everything from my old Nokia phone, to notepad and the now defunct Sophocles. I’m hoping to write a couple of short scripts and upload them to Celtx’s Project Central for the critics to marvel over.

More on that later.

]]> http://burlyape.com/2008/09/new-toys/feed/ 0 http://burlyape.com/2008/09/full-of-chrome/ http://burlyape.com/2008/09/full-of-chrome/#comments Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:20:12 +0000 S. Jonathan http://burlyape.com/?p=545

I don’t know about you, but my daily news feed is pretty much full of Chrome right now. I feel almost sad writing this post because it’s as though I’ve become part of the collective by writing a post simply with the word Chrome in it.

As sad as that may be, it led to an interesting conclusion. And that is, the smaller blogs that I’ve subscribed too didn’t mention the word Chrome at all. In fact they did exactly the opposite! And you know what? It was a breath of fresh air and made me think about values.

Adding Value

How does one add value to their blog? Well the first thing that sprung to mind was not to regurgitate the same tosh the top blogs do. This is something I’ve tried to do since the beginning, only downside is my posting schedule is not as frequent as I would like.

Secondly, I realised in order to achieve this value I needed to do a lot more research, and that means adding a lot more blogs into my RSS Rolodex. So lets start by sharing with you some of the more interesting topics I found around the web this week.

• Book Trailers

We all know about movie trailers, but how about trailers for books? That’s exactly what COS Productions have done over at You Tube. I think the idea is the rather cool, some of the trailers are kinda tacky but it’s an interesting concept.

• The LFL

More commonly known as the Lingerie Football League. I think this is out right hilarious, is there anything America wouldn’t do?

• Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld in New Microsoft Ad Campaign

To commission a $300 Million Dollar advertising campaign and not even mention your company’s name ‘once’ seems rather odd. Perhaps Bill assumed everyone knows who he is, other than that the Ad was pretty cool.

Update

Actually Seinfeld mentions Microsoft once, now that’s value for money.

For the last couple of days I was away on a business trip to Bristol, and subsequently I haven’t had the opportunity to update here. After Bristol I have to say I’m pretty happy about being back in London.

On the plus side the hotels where super in Bristol. I was surprised to see an iMac in my hotel room, it was also connected to satellite-TV which was a nice touch.

My next trip will be at Microsoft’s Reading campus for training. I’m pretty excited about this as my technology background is primarily Microsoft based. And yes I’m a MS fan-boy, the macbook was just purchased to extend my knowledge beyond the Microsoft o/s.

Other News

I was planning to participate in Pro Bloggers group writing project. Unfortunately time did not permit, however you can read the latest submissions here.

Two of my favorites where What Harry Potter Taught Me About Writing An Article Series… and Are You Raising a S…. I witnessed this remarkable phenomenon in Bristol and it ain’t pretty.

]]> http://burlyape.com/2008/08/back-from-bristol/feed/ 0 http://burlyape.com/2008/08/number-1-on-yahoo/ http://burlyape.com/2008/08/number-1-on-yahoo/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:00:12 +0000 S. Jonathan http://burlyape.com/?p=372

Not bad for two weeks worth of SEO. Sadly the same cannot be said about Google, come on! Hurry up and index Jonny Tokyo.

One of my common Internet pastimes is reading up new and successful business ideas. Check out the “Free Idea Bank” there you will find #178 business ideas, most wacky but it’s an entertaining read non the less.

Secondly take a look at “Unusual Business Ideas That Work” for fully comprehensive case studies of unusual business ideas that worked.

Technorati Profile

It took someone like Tim O’Reilly to finally make TechCrunch stand up and take notice of how frustrating the constant linking to CrunchBase was and still is for their readers. If you are a long time reader of TechCrunch, you would know that traditionally the logo always linked to the company covered in its stories.

Then the all singing all dancing CrunchBase came along and totally changed that policy. Somewhat alienating a large majority of its readers by redirecting them to CrunchBase instead of the companies’ independent website.

After a few noticeable complaints TechCrunch apparently discontinued that policy and instead started distributing a lightweight widget beneath each cover story that enabled users to make an informed decision as to whether or not they visited CrunchBase.

Problem solved? Well not quite. In addition to the widget now embedded in each post, TechCrunch started randomly linking between CrunchBase and the companies’ external website. After awhile it became a lottery as to where you would actually end up after clicking on a company link.

Let’s be honest, we all know why TechCrunch are doing this, where not stupid. But don’t get me wrong either, CrunchBase is a great resource and I fully commend them for making it available to us free of charge. But your readers are your bread and butter, and this embarrassment could have been avoided if you just stuck to your original promise.

Browsing through the comments it looks like the majority are with Tim on this one. Maybe now TechCrunch will add some consistency when linking to CrunchBase, if they do we all have Tim to thank for saving our sanity.