CAPTCHAs… I hate CAPTCHAs. Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? They are the fields on a website signup or purchase form that make you spell out text that is provided in some distorted, tough-to-read image. Half of the time they are just random letters and not even legitimate words at all. You might ask, “Alex, why do these exist? Do I get a prize if I fill it out correctly?” No, reader. You get a flickr account or whatever it is you were signing up for. CAPTCHAs are a measure taken to provide security to websites from malicious bot attacks. Yes, bot attacks.
I tell you all of this to show you something I came across on twitter. VidoopCAPTCHA, the “Free CAPTCHA that stops spam, not humans!”, the developer boasts.
“VidoopCAPTCHA is an image-based verification solution used to distinguish a human from a computer program, protecting web sites against malicious bot attacks. When compared to traditional text-based CAPTCHAs predominant on the web, VidoopCAPTCHA is easier on the user. And it’s FREE!“
Look at it! So easy to use. No confusion. Click the image Vidoop tells you to click and you’re in. I really do appreciate the innovation. It’s free, does it’s job, is easy to use and solves the problem: text-based CAPTCHA headaches.
Alex Fun Fact: Did you know that I went a year without a flickr account because I got so frustrated with yahoo’s text-based CAPTCHA? Don’t get me started on needing an account with yahoo in order to have an account with flickr.
Play with Vidoop. They provide a demo. You and your user will enjoy!
Out of all of the commercials played during this year’s Super Bowl, Google’s Parisian Love spot was the tops for me. Culturally, I’d not seen anything that spoke so much of where we are right here and now as a people. We Google everything! I thought it was beautifully done and told a wonderful story. Also, it made my girlfriend cry. I think that means that it was sweet and/or cute or something. Well don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself :]
I’m no Wired Magazine or Macworld but I thought I would talk about how excited I am for the new technologies coming out and being taken advantage of. With the announcement of Apple’s iPad last Wednesday and some inter-office dabblings with streaming to and from the iPhone, ideas have been just flowing left and right. Not only is it exciting to see these possibilities of new and wonderful things but to be partners with some of the pioneers in the field who are paving the way for everyone to enjoy them.
PECULIAR leverages a pretty awesome streaming solution provided to us by our partners. Streaming video on the web, live, on the iPhone and I hope the iPad one day. Making rich, streaming video content available and most convenient for everyone to see. It’s a wonderful feeling to see what is within our reach and know that it will benefit and change the way companies do things everyday.
I love it when a campaign really speaks to me. A.D.I.D.A.S. certainly did it for me with their Star Wars Collection. Check out this awesome spot they put out. Star Wars, Snoop Dog, Daft Punk and David Beckham. Too cool!
So the last couple of nights here at PECULIAR we’ve been working with a family music ministry based here in Greenville, SC – The Brown Family. Equipped with amazing vocals, some really cool tunes and some amazing hearts, this family has allowed us to be a part of their creative process and to make music with them. With Tim at the helm producing, TJ, a PECULIAR designer as the bassist as well as me on drums, this project promises to be an amazing adventure.
Wait. You’re saying to yourself…”full service audio production? …music??? …TJ can play bass?!” The answer to all of that is yes. Yes, yes, and yes. We’ve actually got a really cool setup. We have everything from multiple isolation booths to an amazing fully-digital recording suite. Digital? Yes, digital. This is all in an effort to work smarter, not harder, and to bring you that “Big Time” New York/LA/Nashville quality right here in Greenville.
I’m really excited to be working on this project and can’t wait to get some video of our efforts up on the blog soon. In the mean time, take a look at some pics TJ took on the iPhone!
It was today, the 23 of December 2009, that I found out Jimmy John’s of Greenville, SC shut their doors. Jimmy John’s is an amazing sandwich company based in Champaign, IL. Their bread is made fresh daily, delivered by the nicest people and is super friendly on my wallet. I tell you all of this to comment on their great customer service using social media.
View the exchange below.
and then they were like…
(only an hour later)
Then I was all…
Fin.
After that last tweet a multitude of replies came my way and I think I even gained a few followers. It grieved me that I lost my sandwich buddies but it continues to blow my mind how awesome it is that companies are leveraging social media. It’s happened to me a few times. I was complaining on twitter about my cable company’s service being down and making me miss the season premiere of HOUSE, M.D. and their rep contacted me wanting to help. Then one time I was wondering about an effect pedal that I was thinking about buying and the company contacted me directly answering all of my questions.
Dear Companies, this is what makes you human and real to us consumers. This is what makes us feel empowered to purchase!
Thank you Jimmy John’s. It’s been a great couple of years and all of us here at PECULIAR will miss you.
Just a few weeks ago, a few of us creatives here had an idea for a great way to wish our clients a merry Christmas. We thought it would be really neat and somewhat of an adventure for us to take a crack at making a stop animation feature using our characters that were developed using our logo as well as a totally custom, made from scratch set.
The Matts.
We had been talking about wanting to play with stop animation for a little while but what really made us have the moment of “We MUST do this.” was when we all huddled around Tim’s desk and saw the new Kindle commercial. It was so creative and it was done so well using stop animation.
We decided to do all of our pre-production and filming after hours so we can really devote our concentration and energy to making this something really special for our clients. No one complained, no one walked around the room sighing and looking at their iPhone for the time. We ordered some amazing Chinese food and worked until there was nothing more to do. It was a really fun time. Check out the finished video here and show it to all of your friends! Merry Christmas!
Now I can’t sing the praises of this interweb based magazine but Smashing Magazine is amazing. I often dig in here for inspiration and just to keep up. They really seem to have the finger on the pulse of web design, photography and design. So yeah… make sure you RSS this and them.
Here is an article they put out showcasing some “Trends and Examples” for TV show web design. Very cool. Very inspiring. Enjoy this and your Labor Day weekend. Be safe. ^_^!!!
I don’t know about you, but I get excited when I get new things. Even excited enough to do some things that I would consider a chore otherwise. With the advent of Snow Leopard, I’ve felt the need to clean up the hard drive of my home desktop so that everything is nice and fresh for the new kitty. It’s one thing to go through your general documents and project folders to clean out old junk, but what about other places? What if there’s just one or two jumbo files that are hogging all the real estate?
So I found this free program application called Disk Inventory X which generates a visual representation of your hard drive, showing you the types and sizes of your files. Who knew that backup Windows XP virtual machine we forgot about was taking up 20 GB of space? Ultimately we freed up over 100 GB just deleting big files we had forgotten about. It’s definitely a good thing to do every once and a while.
So if you want to free up some hard drive space and don’t know where to start, download this program. And while you’re at it, go ahead and give them a donation as a way to support free software development, you freeloader.
Cameras! I love cameras! I recently spent a large part of my day working with a local news station and their camera crew. It’s amazing some of the gear those guys keep around. After talking to the camera operator we came to the conclusion that we were playing with well over $50k in equipment. That didn’t even include the $2,000 sticks he had the camera on. Sticks, that’s “camera guy” for tripod. Now don’t hear that and think, “What in the world?! I’ll never be able to afford that!”. While you may not be able to afford the $40,000 Sony body with the $10,000 Canon glass (”camera guy” for Lens), don’t let yourself hate the camera you have.
Here are a few things that I’ve started doing to help make me love my camera again.
1. Read the manual and get that camera out of Auto. There is a whole world of possibilities inside of that camera that you ignore when you stay in automatic. Play with frame rates and aperture settings. You should know every feature and setting that comes with it. You’ll be surprised.
2. Framing/Composition. Know how to frame a shot. Look at the placement of everything in it. This will make you all the more satisfied with the look and feel of what your camera can produce.
3. Lighting. Here is some poor camera science. Everything you see is light. Light enters the iris, passes the picture through a chip that then prints onto a hard drive or tape. A bunch of ones and zeroes later, and you have your footage in raw format. Great lighting will make for a great picture. You can only add and take away so much in the editing process and at that point you run the risk of degrading the picture with gain.
4. Compression. You can do all of the above and if you don’t know how to compress, your final output will make you want to quit photography all together. Clear and tight compression can be the redeeming factor to many of your camera’s short comings. We love Quicktime here at PECULIAR. The great thing about compression is that you can find some pretty amazing formulas online. You don’t have to be a wizard or anything like that.
So yeah! When you get down-in-the-dumps about your camera not giving you all you want out of it, make sure you’re not actually impeding it’s potential greatness. Experiment, learn from that, and then make great shooting practices part of your process.
