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I forgot to link to the man’s blog in my last post

http://paulewingutah.wordpress.com/

that is all.

Paul has been a friend of mine for the past 9 months. I met his wife in a meeting in the hopes of consulting her publishing company.  Paul happened to be in the meeting, and we hit it off right away.  In the middle of the meeting he pulled me aside and wanted to know if I would be interested in a new start-up he was getting off the ground…I said yes, and so in doing, have been OOC for the past 9 months. Sorry.

That’s my excuse for not bloggin in all this time.  I hope to be back soon with lots of new adventures, but for the time being, I’ll remain OOC working hard on something big:D

Driving web traffic and optimizing websites for search (SEO), is something I do. I have had the pleasure of meeting Kalai (http://www.kalai.cc/) and he hired me on the spot to improve his web traffic and overall internet visibility.

I have spent some time with the star before, and ended up walking around with him at an open air free concert in downtown SLC the other night. He was bombarded by about 10 different fans at different times, asking for a photo with the soon to be legend of soulful music. So needless to say I am very excited to help his already amazing career make it to that next stepping stone.

Recently he was on Kimmel live featured here in this video. Watch and comment on where you think this young musician is going to be in a years time.

I was pleasantly surprised this morning with a quick little golf logo design request.  Its was fun because golf has been on my mind a lot lately.  I just revamped my swing and have been doing a lot of reading on golf. So to celebrate completing this logo I went and played a round with artist Sean Diediker.

What made it even more enjoyable was that I nailed the look they wanted on the first try… no bad comments or “can you fix this” emails or calls.  Aint life grand?

I recently got involved with 4 of the craziest guys I have ever met…let me rephrase that, 4 of the crazativest guys I have ever met! That’s it a new term for these guys (crazy + creative = crazative), they are truly in a category of their own. Jeff hein, Justin Taylor, Sean Diediker and Benjamin McPherson, 4 amazing and accomplished fine artists. They recently “broke ground” (or should I say “fixed up an old classic building”) and plan to open their new Academy of art “Bridge Academy of Art” to be exact AUG 1. I’m posting this here because I will be doing a few things on and off line for the 4 mad men of art, I’ll try and keep up with the goings on of these guys in future blog posts.

This is the building exterior they started with for the academy:

Slowly breathing life into this, 100 year old majestic 3 story brick structure:

Complete with official Hare Krishna temple doors, made and imported from India these doors adorned a lovely Krishna temple for the past “who knows how many” years, and were an absolute find for the foursome when the temple decided they needed new doors.

Hers is a better shot of the doors as we dropped them off at a carpenters shop to be refinished and have a little life of their own breathed back in.

They are going to look magnificent when they are all fixed up!

Check back soon to find out how my fight to the near death with a floor sander turned out!

Ben Stier

Dean Rotbart called me up a few months back and asked if I would design an identity for collateral and other materials for the don Quixote Fest 2008, since it is hosted by a non-profit organization (The Wizards Academy) It would be considered a “donation” on my part. After several renditions of the logo this is what I came up with:

A depiction of Don Quixote riding his trusty steed, lance pointed towards the sky, head held high. In his left hand he holds a book. In the high-resolution version you can actually see the text in the book, i’ll give 100 points to the first person to comment on what Quixote is reading.

Ben Stier

Something I get asked allot is “hey, are you going to eat that?”…something else I get asked allot is “Hey, how do I get the word out about my blog?”.

The answer is simple, but with an explanation: Pure unadulterated shameless self promotion, but with a twist.

You might be ultra-mega prolific in your blog writing, mastering the tools provided by Wordpress you arm each blogpost with keyword’s and strategically bolded callouts. Along with photo’s posted on Flikr, and a “hey whats up” to all your fabulous followers on Twitter. You probably already have a Facebook account that you also mention you have a new blogpost, along with writing on all your friends wall’s, linking back to your new post letting them know how intelligently you just posted on how to make the ultimate PB&J masterpiece. Oh, lets not forget reading all of your friends blogs, and commenting on them telling them that “this blogpost on how to make the ultimate chocolate milk would go great with my new post!”. By this time I’m pretty sure you have opened a FeedBurner account and have enabled “feed tracking” as well as let Technorati know you just updated your site, lets also not forget the press release you did telling the world how awesome your new blog is.

So in truth and without taking over 1,000 words to explain how to promote your blog you need to be part of the community every-which-way-you-can. Be honest, be endearing, be daring and be yourself.

Ben Stier

Not long ago there were a few guys that decided sending a pair of space craft
into deep space was a good plan. These adventurous guys thought up a cool way to communicate with any species that may actually find one of their deep space fairing capsules, a large golden disc. The cover of the disc, albeit cryptic, shows scientific pictographs revealing to whoever finds it, how to play it. Units of time measured in the lower right display a “hyperfine transition of hydrogen” the spin up state, and spin down state of the hydrogen atom can specify a unit of length. The big circular thing on the upper left tells the curious being attempting to play this, how fast to play it. When they do play it they will find 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. Musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages. A little slice of life here on our Earth.

A lot of critiques argue that the only beings that are going to find and play it will be us, in a few hundred years. They say it will most likely be retrieved and placed in a museum. I bet none of these critics like to fly kites or walk outside just to feel the rain on their face. The adventurous spirit that made this endeavor possible is the same human spirit that walked the American South West 2,000 years ago. So will the original one thousand year disc please stand up?

Newspaper Rock is a petroglyph etched in sandstone, estimated to have recordings of 2,000 years of humanity. You’ll notice the thousand year old disc on the left side of this photograph, proof that our ancestors beat us to the punch.

I come full circle, back to data storage and our current situation. If and when some advanced civilization discovers us (possibly ourselves, in a re-discovery effort) what will be of all our digital media? Without a proper solution how are these future binges going to be able to say “well, look at that guy he looks like a character, oh and look there’s a dog just like Rex… My she’s a pretty gal for a 900 year old.”

Vintage Family Photo: Everyone plus the Dog

“This is (The Voyager) a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
— U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

The issue of backward compatibility in storage is really haunting; it’s an issue we have dealt with, continue to deal with and will deal with. We need a long term storage and backup product that is easy to pay for, easy to use and easy to retrieve from. Not only do we have the issue of backward compatibility but also the issue of what medium? Online services can run as high as $200/month to store your data, and it’s safe to say as time goes on these prices will also rise… Some simple online storage options can also run as cheap as $130/year but max out at around 600GB of data storage. Then the price my friend goes up, big-time.

So I sit in the dark for the 2nd time in my life, transferring old DVD data to new DVD data. My cat watching me, his eyes bouncing back and forth, 30 more discs to go. The crazy thing is I know that what I do is in vain. CD’s and DVD’s have already proven the test of time, errr by time I mean around 10 years. Then Entropy takes over ( the 2nd law of thermodynamics) and you end up with several small fragile Frisbee’s that used to hold such items as birthday photos, baseball game videos, weddings, financial records, and all those illegal-but-for-some-reason-you-just-cant-get-rid-of Napster downloads from 1999. Even the CD’s you store in a Ziploc baggie after sucking all the air out then placing in a cool dark, temperature controlled hole will fade after around 15-20 years, so my online reading tells me… And the internet never lies.

Then the question becomes “How do I keep a terabyte of data for about five years, in a way that is possible and painless to transfer to another medium/storage solution just before the Grim Reaper of data takes my 1’s and 0’s to the grave?” So now I digress in my post here, we know it’s a problem, look around you, look at the icons on your desktop and the things they connect to; photos, videos, your life. Then think for a moment that 99.9% of all this information will not outlive the life of your housecat… And life is a coming and goings of cats.