c. scott andreas

I’m heading up to London to for the 2007 Cut & Paste digital design competition today and tomorrow.

I’ll be spending most of the weekend shooting around a thousand photos while walking around and relaxing away from the laptop. Now that’s my kind of weekend.

Are you nearby? Drop me an e-mail - let’s grab a cuppa.

Last week, I received an iPhone as bounty for some of my work on a super-secret project with a super-secret company (*wink*). You can imagine how stoked I was about this, I’m sure. Since I’m moving to the UK in two weeks, I don’t have service through AT&T but am happily using it as an awesome PDA + camera + iPod combo.

I took iPhone with me to Seattle last weekend to give it a “travel test” and am very happy with how it turned out. Despite its poor performance in very bright and very dim conditions, I was very impressed with the camera (the next few photos below were taken using it). I’ll definitely be taking more snapshots now that I have a decent small camera to carry around.

Here’s the kicker, though: mobile blogging is astonishingly simple.

1. I took a shot with the camera and tapped “E-mail Photo.”
2. I chose my Flickr Account’s e-mail address out of the address book, added a title and description, and hit “Send.”
3. The next time I walked by an open access point, iPhone hopped on to start sending the messages (via an encrypted SMTP connection).
4. Once the messages sent, Flickr added the images to my account and automatically posted them to my blog

Now that’s cool.

More tricks later.

At around 10:30 this morning, Brian returned from a couple interviews. As he regaled me with his tales of triumph, a disturbing noise began emanating from the kitchen, growing rapidly in intensity. We looked at each other for a moment, then at the “new” dishwasher (which we haven’t used - it must earn our trust).

About thirty seconds later, clean dishes in a drying rack began clanging and a plumbing snake popped up through them. We turned once more in disbelief, watching as it moved along the counter, wrapped itself around the coffee maker, then fell to the floor and crawled out of the kitchen and into the living room.

I knocked on our neighbor’s door and asked if someone was working on their sink. He said “Yeah,” then ran to tell the plumber. I couldn’t hear what he mumbled, but the plumber shouted “COOL!”

Over the next hour, two plumbers ran between our homes, alternately fishing the snake through the pipes, using a toilet plunger on the drain, and ignoring a wretched black sewage-goo that simply would not stay down.

And that’s how our sink became sullied by sh*t.

Indulging a tangent from an ongoing research project, I spent the better part of this afternoon exploring the secrets that people tell on their blogs. It began as a quest for narratives constructed for the purpose of establishing a sense of authenticity – a peephole, as it were, selectively revealed by the author to an anonymous audience in order to establish a connection of sorts. I refined a new sort of search designed to automatically trawl for these stories, then configured a script to publish them to a web page, updated once every ten minutes.

And it worked. It worked too well, in fact. The stories that came up were not selective revelations. They were constructed, certainly, but most were fits of emotion - veritable hearts bleeding XHTML - and not intended for strangers.
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As a college student, I stumble upon many strange recipes in my culinary travels. Here is a recipe for a great summer barbecue salad that I stumbled upon last week while staring at a spotty cupboard.

It’s best features: great taste, dirt cheap, a little spicy, and it takes 5 minutes to make!

• Start with a salad mix, preferably one loaded with vegetables.
• Cut up and add a fresh Roma tomato.
• Slice a few cubes of pepperjack cheese (Tillamook!)
• Grab a handful of corn tortilla chips, mash them up, and drop them in.
  Blue chips add great color.
• Substitute your usual amount of salad dressing with your favorite barbecue sauce and some nice brown mustard.
• Finally, top it off with a bit of salsa.

Enjoy!