BLOG 02/2002

24 FEBRUARY
I know what you're all thinking - "What else have you bought for your
house, Mr Glitch web-site person?". Well, as regular readers will know,
I can now confirm officially that I do now own a bed. However, I haven't
assembled it yet due to a lack of hammer issue - UNTIL TODAY! I am
now the proud possessor of a hammer with a yellow handle. So I'll
be able to assemble the bed frame today and sleep at a cruising height
of approximately 32000x10^(-5)m.

Chopping boards. Yes. Why do the product designers not adhere to basic
aesthetic condsiderations such as aspect ratio?
My chopping board is 28x44cm. That's a ratio of 1.571 approx.
The Golden Ratio equals (1+sqrt(5))/2 = 1.618 approx.
So, my chopping board is quite good, but it took a lot of hunting
to find one that wasn't nearly square.

This leads seemlessly onto my next technical article (in the red blocks)
about - you guessed it - aspect ratios. It's going to evolve over time
because I'm too lazy to write it all at once and, besides, I haven't
yet crystallised all my thoughts on this weighty issue.

17 FEBRUARY
Scramble vector graphics glitch, 1982 vintage (Vectrex emulator).
Check out the pixels!
This could be a highly scientific diagram of decaying alpha-particle
trails in a bubble chamber. Highly radioactive stuff - you should
be viewing this site behind 2-4mm of aluminium. 


SWI2/CWAII/DAA

I think the next several weeks or months will be mostly dominated
by vector-graphics glitches, which is an area I haven't explored yet.
This one is quite modest and doesn't necessarily look like a vector graphic,
but it really is from a Vectrex emulator game called Etch. I randomly hacked
at the binary executable until it produced something interesting without
just crashing. The original black and white image has been mapped into
subdued grey blue and milky albino-eyeball colour pinkish-white to give it a 
subversive domestic feel. You could give this to your Granny and she'd be none the wiser.


CO-PROXAMOL

12 FEBRUARY
OK, I've put up some Oslo pics at last in the orange blocks.
Getting settled into new house - should be getting my first
piece of furniture tomorrow - a bed! I know you're all enthralled
by the trivia of my new domestic situation, so I'll be keeping
you fully informed. Oh yes.

This is some PC RAM with a non-square pixel aspect ratio. I must
add stretching to my short list of allowed rules for 
glitch art images... so that's cropping, changing colours and stretching
(only horizontally or vertically) in total. 3 is a good number of rules to have.


ENDEMEROL

06 FEBRUARY
I'll be minus a net connection for a few days because I've just
got a mortgage on my first ever house - no more irritating housemates
to share with. No more disgusting kitchen floors. No more people
starting to cook at midnight. No more sleep-deprivation. No more
yukky bathrooms. No more trumpet lessons in the evenings. No more
obsessive-compulsive disorder housemate making sure the front door is
shut 10 times in the mornings. No more chronic-depressive housemate
muttering and swearing to himself constantly. No more scatty housemate
leaving the front door OPEN at night - hmmm, yes, let's all allow any
old random nutter to walk into the house.

I could go on.

OK, I will. No more shite smelly sofa. No more cooker with broken controls
and missing oven handle. No more fridges that vibrate so much they
keep me awake. No more concrete "garden". No more landlord that does nothing
to improve things.

This is a new beginning. I'm taking control. And, yes, you guessed it, I'm
also taking control OF YOUR MINDS (with my antennae device with dials and
flashing LEDs). Set control to 10. Initialse the kettle, I'm making
the cup of coffee as a metaphor of LIFE ITSELF. Er, do say if I go too far.
You get the gist.

It's going to be well cooleroo because I've got zero furniture! So I'll be
sleeping, eating, drinking and computing on the floor until I get some stuff,
like a Japanese cyber-dude. It'll be interesting if the new low-down
modus operandi adds a different theme to the glitch images. (If you're new
to BEFLIX, this site is actually about glitch art - I don't usually prattle
on like this.) STOP TALKING! Here's a glitch or two. Enjoy. Bye - talk to you again
in a few days after the relocation.


ANVALENORAT


ZYROXENE

02 FEBRUARY
Been reading about colour management in Photoshop, fascinating stuff but
it gets deep quite quickly. 
Anyway, I've used the Adobe(tm) monitor calibration tool to (suprise, suprise)
calibrate my monitor to a reasonable accuracy, and create an ICC profile.
Having done this, I now realise that I've been viewing images too dark. So I
apologise to everybody out there with _correctly_ calibrated monitors - my
dark and scary images on these pages have been looking a bit washed-out. Oops :)
However, things are much worse for Mac users - the Mac OS RGB colour gamut is
considerably lighter than the Windows one, so everything looks pale for them anyway.
I suppose I _could_ do two versions of each image from now on, and find some Javascript
to detect the browser platform and display the correct version.
But I think a better solution is just to do black-and-white pictures from now on.
Has a Javascript expert ever bought you a pint of beer? Exactly.