AKA: I blame Google

I’ve been using LinkedIn recently. LinkedIn is like Myspace for career networking, but it’s got so many design problems that their various UI components battle each other gladiator-style for the honor of pissing me off.

I was using it the other night, looking in vain for the the list of contacts that is displayed with most profiles. I knew it was there because I had seen it before. I was simply missing it. Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes of searching on the page and looking for options that might hide/show them, I saw it: Read the rest of this entry

Amazing website designer, intrepid tiki reporter, and my girlfriend Humuhumu has an incredible story that starts with her wearing a vintage Tiki Room dress to a Disneyland Fan convention in Anahiem, and ends with her modeling a reproduction of the dress for Dinsey’s online retail website.

While we were at the NFFC convention to help with a presentation, I snapped a photo of Humuhumu wearing a vintage Tiki Room dress that was on loan to her from Disney artist Kevin Kidney. That photo got posted to my Tiki website, where some other Dinsey artists discovered it and mistook it for a vintage photo. Inspired by the photo, Disney decided to reproduce the dress design and sell it online as a limited edition item. The reproduction dress is a different color than the vintage one because the fabric was reproduced first for another Tiki Room hawaiian shirt.

When the reproduction dress was ready to be photographed for their website, Kevin contacted Humuhumu to be the model! Disney had us drive down to LA for the photoshoot, where I got to see a lot of the cool stuff they make for the Disney catalog and website while Humuhumu modeled the dress. The rest, as they say, is history!

Links:

Humuhumu on the Disney site
Humuhumu’s retelling of the story with all the details

Something I do a lot in my Macromedia Director projects is save a proplist or a linear list to a text member in order to recall it later. It has some advantages over using external text files. I use it a lot for game levels where the levels are saved to text members during authoring and read back during playback.

While working on my next game I thought of a simple technique to compress these lists a bit while still making them human readable and easy/fast to convert back into lists when I need them. My compression rouinte is getting my game levels down to about 75% of their original size.

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