Here’s a YouTube version of the intro I did for the Remember the Future website.

Alzheimer's | No Comments »

I just finished the redesign for Remember the Future, my family’s Alzheimer’s Association fund. All donations made to Remember the Future go directly toward the Association’s advocacy initiatives, urging Congress to appropriate more funding toward Alzheimer’s research and patient care.

One of the biggest issues regarding Alzheimer’s disease, aside from the disease itself, is the huge burden it puts on our health care system. Right now, the total cost of Alzheimer’s to Medicare, Medicaid and businesses with employees caring for Alzheimer’s is $148 billion annually. Meanwhile, as the baby boomer generation ages, the number of Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s is expected to more than triple in the next 40 years, reaching 16 million by 2050. So increasing funding for research is a must.

But I digress.

If I can geek out for just a minute — I built the site with Flash CS3, and honed some serious actionscript skillz in the process, mostly in the intro. It was the first time I’ve used TweenLite, and certainly won’t be the last. That saves some serious busywork. One major lesson I learned is that audio and animation are nearly impossible to keep in sync for more than 30 seconds, whether you’re streaming or attaching a sound object. Needs some serious attention from Adobe.

So check out the site and, if you can, make a donation to Remember the Future. You can also join our team for this year’s Memory Walk, on Treasure Island, SF on October 11.

education, Alzheimer's | No Comments »

I just finished up my stint directing a reporters camp in San Rafael (see previous post for more details). Lots of fun turning kids on to multimedia reporting. Nick News — a kid-focused news show on Nickelodeon — called us yesterday. They’ll be coming out next month to film me and some of the kids for a piece they’re doing on summer camps. So if you watch Nickelodeon on a regular basis, keep an eye out for me…

A gallery of all the slideshows is in the works. As soon as that’s up, I’ll link to it. In the meantime, follow this link to watch a slideshow the kids produced last week, after we took a trip out to Infineon Raceway.

photos, sports, media, education | No Comments »

Sammy Hagar Poses with the first session of this year’s Fast Forward Adventure Reporters.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks helping 5th - 10th graders learn to be multimedia journalists, as part of Fast Forward’s Adventure Reporters — an annual summer camp in San Rafael.

For the past several years, kids attending the camp have had the opportunity to interview a variety of famous and interesting people in the Bay Area. Their writing appears throughout the year in Fast Forward Magazine, which is distributed to schools throughout Marin County.

This is the camp’s first foray into multimedia, and I think the kids are enjoying it. Here’s a link to a slideshow created by two boys who went to Pixar studios and interviewed Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E, before the film’s release.

photos, media, education | No Comments »

“Every bloody street I look down, I see nothing but misery, nothing but monsters.”

Everybody reacts to New York, but from the brief period that I lived there, I can’t say I have the same visceral response to the city as Henry Miller does. Of course, this is Henry Miller we’re talking about. And he sure is fun to listen to:
Warning: language NSFW

(go here for an additional, longer video of Miller pontificating in his bathroom.)

art, literary | No Comments »

In a piece titled “‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett,” filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. splices together footage from a single episode of the famous PBS program, replacing the interviewee with a second interviewer. The result is a wonderful bit of postmodern minimalism (hence the Beckett reference) that’s equally absurd and disturbing.

From the artist’s description:

Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named “Steve” is “not happy.” Though this seemingly random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it is — a threat. But who is “Steve” and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold?

media, art, funny | No Comments »

The Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery is at the southern end of Big Sur, along Highway 1 on California’s coast. Elephant seals starting showing up there in the fall of 1990. There were fewer than two dozen of them at the time. The following spring brought about 400 seals to the area for molting. Now, the rookery is home to more than 16 thousand elephant seals throughout the year.

I was there in mid-February, while the new pups were weaning, and took some photos.

Use the arrows or thumbnails to navigate the images. Mouse over a photo to hear audio.

photos | 2 Comments »

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, founded in 1999, makes all their instruments out of — you guessed it — vegetables. The music they make is truly impressive, ranging from Jazz to Electronica to Dub, all played with hollowed out carrots, cucumberphones and leek violins.

Check out their website for photos of their instruments and audio samples.

art, music | No Comments »

Thank God for CNN. How else would we ever come across a story with two of the most compelling narrative aspects ever to be combined: weiner poopie and a ransomed Jesus?

(Thanks to a local news follow-up, it was revealed that the 80 lb. Jesus was taken - and returned - by a family member.)

funny | No Comments »

This past weekend, in celebration of my upcoming 30th birthday, my girlfriend Kate surprised me with a trip to wine country. The first thing on the itinerary was a skydiving adventure.

(In response, my family has subsequently promised Kate a wonderful waterboarding experience for the holidays…)

I put together a narration of the experience with a couple photos, below.

Enjoy.

photos, sports | 5 Comments »