Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • The First Round of Dailies from Max’s Movie

    Unnamed Max Lawver School Project – Dailies Day One from Kevin Lawver on Vimeo.\
    Max is making a movie for school, so we’ve turned the front room into a jury rigged animation studio. Max is making all the models, backdrops and I’m making him move the models when we film. I take the frames and will help with iMovie when we get there. We’re using iStopMotion, which is going pretty well so far. It even supports my Nikon D80 in PTP mode. We tried that for a couple test shots, but I don’t have a real macro lens and the table is too short to do it right, so we’re sticking with the iSight for now.\
    We’re going to try to film the other two scenes tomorrow and Monday. We’ll post dailies each day and then, of course, the final product.\
    Here’s a shot of the “studio”. You know, where the magic happens:

    a photo of our home animation studio

  • My Second Trip to The British Museum

    The lion from the main entrance of The British Musem

    This was my second trip to The British Museum. My first was in October of 2007 with a friend from AOL, but we could only stay for about an hour. That’s not nearly enough time. We only got to see the Rosetta Stone, some mummies and a little bit of the Assyrian collection.\
    My only touristy goal on this trip was to really dive in and see a lot more of the museum. And boy, did I. Ann and Tobey met me, and we spent a great almost four hours wandering through history. I won’t go in to how the museum came to possess its collection, but it is amazing. If you get the chance to go to London, give yourself a good half-day to wander through it. It’s truly unbelievable.\
    I took almost three hundred pictures, so it’s going to take me some time to upload them. They’ll all end up in the set on flickr eventually.\
    I was particularly fascinated by the statues from India and Asia, especially the ones depicting Hindu deities. If anyone has recommendations for a “beginners guide to the history of Hinduism”, I’m all ears.

  • Why I’ll Be Tired Later

    a police car races down the street

    I have a very long day of cab – train – airport – airplane – airport – airplane – airport – car ahead of me. The hotel fire alarm going off around 3AM and my inability to get back to sleep so far is not going to help the situation.\
    I have a lot of photos from my trip to The British Museum to post, but they’ll have to wait until I get home.

  • 25 Things About Me

    Because I’m now been tagged three times for the 25 things list on Facebook, and twice for the seven things list, I figured I had to do it… so here I go.

    1. I am horribly addicted to caffeine. I’ve tried to quit in the past, but when work pressure/stress increases, so does my caffeine intake.
    2. I love clementines. I can go through a case a week, easily. I don’t like regular tangerines or oranges, because the seeds are a pain, but clementines are fantastic.
    3. I have an over-developed sense of guilt. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to figure it out and get over it, but nothing’s worked so far.
    4. I’m allergic to shellfish. My allergy developed in my twenties, and I hate it – because I love shrimp, crawfish, crab and lobster. Stupid allergies
    5. I’m snobby about TV (hate most broadcast TV, all my favorite shows get canceled, etc), but still watch some horrible rubbish. But, thankfully, I think I’m finally over my addiction to the various nationalities’ Big Brother‘s
    6. I miss the people I worked with at AOL, but I don’t miss AOL’s management at all.
    7. Aside from my allergies, I really like living in Savannah, but I wish there was more of a tech community there.
    8. I’m very organized at work, but a complete mess at home. Thankfully, Jen keeps things in order.
    9. I’m in awe of my kids most of the time. Sometimes, I want to drop kick them, but most of the time, I’m in awe.
    10. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be drunk, but not enough to try it.
    11. I don’t understand pet people – dogs, cats, whatever. My mom and I are both allergic to dander, so we never really had dogs or cats when I was growing up. We had a dog for a little while, but that really didn’t work. I don’t understand how people get so attached to things that will basically always be toddlers. My kids eventually stopped crapping on the floor and putting things in their mouths. Like I said, I just don’t get it.
    12. I know I’m not normal, and I’ve decided that I don’t care. The only time I really feel like I belong is at home, work, SxSW or Mashup Camp.
    13. As I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world, my political views have moved farther and farther to the left. I’m pretty sure I’ll never enter Hippie-ville or buy a beret and grow a scraggly revolution beard, but you may hear me muttering “revolution” under my breath from time to time.
    14. I think funny trumps pretty much everything else. If it’s funny, I don’t really care how offensive it might be.
    15. I miss doing Tech X every week. It was a long time ago, but having that weekly goofy performance was a blast. I put an episode up last year. It wasn’t the first, because it took us a good 10-12 episodes to find our “stride”, which feels ridiculous to say, but I said it anyway.
    16. I’m afraid of what will happen when I get tired of writing code.
    17. I love building things and solving problems. I don’t write code for the sake of code. I’ve got to be trying to solve something for it to be fun.
    18. I swear a lot. I keep catching myself and trying to cut back, but I’m really good at it, and the Bible says we’re supposed to develop our talents, right?
    19. I’m not handy. I’m not good with tools or fixing things outside of a computer.
    20. I’ve always wondered how I’d do at standup. Once, in high school, a friend’s mom offered me a gig doing stand up on Saturday nights. I turned her down, but I’ve always regretted it. Of course, I don’t regret it enough to do anything about it now.
    21. I’m inherently lazy. I’d much rather watch TV or play video games than do something productive. I’m not much for creating my own inertia. You wouldn’t know it by how much I work, but once I’m done with work for the day, I’m really done.
    22. I suck at setting and keeping goals outside of work.
    23. I can’t help it, I really really like The Polyphonic Spree. Sometimes, it’s good to be without irony or sarcasm.
    24. I like Thanksgiving more than Christmas. Let’s give it up, people, Christmas is no longer religious, it’s just a stressful gift-giving tradition with ever-mounting expectations for expenditure. I like making Thanksgiving dinner and just hanging out. That’s my kind of holiday.
    25. The manliest thing I do is grill. I love grilling stuff. I’d grill breakfast cereal if I could figure out how.

  • My Slides from Future of Social Media

    Making Marketing More Human Through Technology

    View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: cluetrain tumblr)

    I finished speaking at *The Future of Social Media”… it was fun telling them not to join twitter if they’re just going to be marketers and not actually be human. I told them other stuff too, I think.\
    I didn’t have a lot of time to talk about the future, so I didn’t get to talk about identity vs. persona and my three categories of social networks… maybe next time. I’m pretty sure I scared the hell out of them when I talked about reputation stuff.\
    Some things I mentioned that either I didn’t put the URL for in the slides or didn’t have in the slides at all:

    • The quote from Jeremy Tanner about twitter spammers comes from his fantastic blog post – read the whole thing.
    • You can read The Cluetrain Manifesto online for free.
    • I talked a little bit about Seth Godin. His blog may be a little pat, but I’ve learned a lot about marketing and product development from his books.
    • My interest in reputation started with Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. It introduces the idea of “whuffie” which captured my imagination. I hope to some day implement a real whuffie system online. I came really close once.\
      I think that’s it… hopefully the people who saw it enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was a lot of fun preparing it.

  • Writing Conference Bios

    Kevin Lawver doing his best Glamour Shots pose

    I’m speaking at a conference this week in London, and am speaking at SxSW again this year, which means I’ve had to write two conference bios in short succession. I hate writing conference bios, mostly because I feel like a complete ass writing about myself in the third person. But, I’m rather proud of these two. Oh, that picture up there? That’s the headshot I’m using for SxSW.\
    For the conference in London, where I’m supposed to talk about new technology and software in the social media world, but I’m really going to talk about how to be human and not be a complete tool on twitter:\
    bq. Kevin Lawver lives on the internet. He’s been blogging since 2000, been uploading to flickr since before it was in beta, tweets all day long about whatever moves him, and can be found on most of the major social networks and many of the minor ones. He worked for AOL for thirteen years building massive web products that millions of people used every day. When not tilting at windmills, Kevin: helped write a book about web development, won some awards, helped create some web standards, got his name on a patent, been interviewed on Canadian radio, invented a holiday celebrated by literally tens of people, and spoke at conferences just like this one all over the world. Kevin currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, and works for Music Intelligence Solutions building awesome web products that will hopefully revolutionize the music industry. You can find out more about Kevin at http://kevinlawver.com and about his work at http://uplaya.com.\
    For SxSW, where I’m honored to be on the Amazing Mr. Smokler’s how to stay inspired after SxSW panel:\
    bq. Kevin Lawver is a man among people of every gender. Kevin used to work for a larger internet company, but now works for a small music technology company telling people what to do and building killer web sites for independent artists. He loves working on the web, taking pictures, writing code that works, and making a fool of himself. He’s very very good at the last one. He invented a holiday to celebrate “awesomeness”, helped write a book about standards based development, won awards for building cool web stuff, and looks forward to having his face put on a commemorative plate. Kevin blogs with his wife over at http://lawver.net and launches web stuff over at http://uplaya.com.\
    Yeah, they’re not that different… I still hate writing them.

  • Someone Doesn’t Like the Name “Ficly”

    \
    (the ficlets bit starts about halfway through)\
    Well yeah, when you say it that way. Seriously, I think stories will still be called “ficlets” because calling them anything else would sound silly.\
    In other news, Jeremy Kieth and Simon Willison both posted about ficlets’ use of Creative Commons. Why did we do it? Well, I wanted to use flickr’s CC-licensed photos and I thought it would be only fair (and possibly required by the license on the photo) if we also licensed the stories under CC. It also fit with the whole concept of the site. Every sequel and prequel is a work inspired by the original, so we might as well allow the inspiration to expand beyond the “walls” of ficlets. It didn’t really develop that way, but it could have. My favorite by-product of the discussion with the lawyers about using CC was that it ended up meaning we didn’t really need any other user agreements. By agreeing to post under CC, you free up anyone to use the stories pretty much however you want. I didn’t think I would be one of those using them, but here I am…

  • The Ficlets Memorial

    Finished and installed just in time, the ficlets memorial is up and running. It’s on my Dreamhost account, so it’s not going to be super speedy, but I’ve cached as much as I can, so it shouldn’t be too slow.\
    I’m not entirely happy with it, but I didn’t have time to do much other than make sure I had all the data and that it’s navigable. Thanks to Alexander Grässer, I was able to get all the mature stories as well and now have a full archive of the site from last weekend. The stories should be up-to-date as of this morning, and I’ll do another update tonight before ficlets gets shut down for good.\
    I have more plans for the data, and the design, but they’ll have to wait.\
    Update: Someone asked if they’ll be able to “take ownership” of the stories in the memorial. Since I don’t have any user data (like how you logged in, your AIM screen name or OpenID), I can’t confirm that the person trying to claim the stories is the original author. AOL won’t budge on giving me the database, and I’m tired of asking. As for how the original ficlets will be included in ficly, I don’t know yet. I’m hoping to at least let people use them as inspiration, but I’m not sure how that will work.\
    If someone wants to get the stories and do something else with them, I’d be happy to share the data. I’m planning on creating several sharable versions of the data at some point, but I just don’t have the time right now. The best I can do is a MySQL dump (which won’t help any “normal” people). I’ve never tried creating PDF’s in Rails, so I’ll probably play with generating those from the stories (mostly because I’m curious how many pages The Big Book of Ficlets would be), but that will have to wait.

  • Ficly: Live After Ficlets

    Like a phoenix from the ashes, something new is in the process of being born. I give you ficly. It’s not much now, but we’re working on it in our spare time. Jason (he was the driving force that brought everything together) has been pushing things forward while my job’s been crazy and while I recover from my epic sinus infection. He got the awesome folks at Viget Labs to help us out with the visual design, which you can get a taste of on the landing page. Right now, all you can do is sign up to be notified when we launch… and that’s about it. But, we’re slowly making progress and I hope to have something for real up in the next couple months (maybe by ficlets’ 2nd birthday at the beginning of March).\
    Why do this when I have a full-time job (a more than full-time job, really)? I need a hobby, and I feel a responsibility to the ficlets community. If AOL’s going to abandon them, I’m not. Nothing made me angrier in my last couple years at AOL than when the company shut down products without giving the communities that loved them a place to go. I never quite understood how the company could repeatedly stab their users in the back and then expect them to remain loyal to the brand. And now that it’s happening to my users, well, there’s something I can do… so I am. First, I’m working on a “memorial” to ficlets that will preserve all the stories and keep them pretty much as they are now. That’s pretty much done, I just need to clean a few things up and get it installed in production and it’ll be ready to go. I plan on launching it on the 16th, the day after ficlets shuts down.\
    Ficly may take a while to get done. It’s strictly a part-time thing for all of us. But, I’m not done exploring short fiction and community. I never got to “finish” with ficlets (that’s a story I’ll also probably never tell), and there are some experiments I want to try that I’ll never get to do working with music technology (my day job).\
    I hope you’ll come along for the ride. We’ve got some fun stuff planned.

  • Save Your Ficlets!

    I’ll have the graveyard up and running by the 15th, but if you want to save your ficlets (which I highly recommend since I’m not getting mature stories and can’t get your drafts), you should follow Chris Meadows’ great tutorial.\
    And, if you want to be sure your stories are saved in the graveyard, I wouldn’t right anything after 5PM on the 14th, just in case.\
    Also, if you want to get really angry at AOL, go read Wil Wheaton’s great eulogy for ficlets (yes, that Wil Wheaton). I know why AOL won’t turn it over, but I still don’t understand it. But, whatever, onwards and upwards, right?