made in costa rica

A few days ago I read a compelling argument for bailing on the RFP game by Max from Big Bang Technology that got me thinking about this stuff.

Interestingly enough, today I was watching this talk Jim Coudal did at GDC and he presents the idea he pitched to his agency regarding RFP’s.

I thought it would be interesting to cut the clip and upload it, in case Max hasn’t seen it or any of you find it interesting.

I stand somewhere between Max’s and Jim’s take on this.

(This is not my video. It’s publicly available as a 1hr+ presentation on the Coudal video wall. If you have time to spare, I recommend you see the entire thing.)

If you haven’t heard, the whitehouse.org team has announced that their entire platform is running on drupal and a few other open source projects powering their servers.

This is big news for the open source movement but more than that it really goes to show that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, specially at this scale.

Here’s a link to an interesting article (by Tim O’Reilly) in which he makes some good points about the value of tapping into on going open source initiatives and how that enables the government (in this case) to cut costs, get access to countless modules and plugins to achieve functionality they otherwise would have had to develop on their own, have an incredible community of people working on the software making it secure, fast and pretty much the best in can be.. etc, etc.

It’s a good read if you have a few minutes to spare.

Wordpress and drupal are very similar in that they both have gained massive attention both from developers creating things for it and organizations adopting them.. they also do very similar things.

As any Mighty Mouse user probably does, I hate it’s little fucking nipple for all the times it forgot it could scroll.

The problems caused by that thing over the years have been simply maddening.

Yet I still use it. Call me an masochist, but I like the stupid mouse otherwise. I love clicking the nipple for a middle click (commonly used to open links in background tabs while browsing).

So the mouse is almost 4 years old and Apple finally updated it with a multi touch scrollball-less thing of beauty. Except that it can’t do a middle click.

God damn.

Continuing with my experiments in stop motion photography comes my latest project.

The scene is what’s leftover from a bonfire the night before (in what probably will be the latest bonfire of the season), chairs turned upside down over night by the wind make for a memorable view.

5 hours of shooting frames every 15 seconds with my Canon Rebel XT on a tripod, with the shutter handled by Dragon Stop Motion on my mac.

Post processing included bumping the vibrance and highlights all the way up in Aperture for every shot and doing an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro set to 6 frames per second.

The song is The Field’s Everybody’s got to learn sometime.

The video is embedded below but I highly recommend you click through to Vimeo and see it in HD:

View “Fall in Muskoka, a timelapse of the sunset” in HD.

PS: There’s another timelapse coming later on today.