ALL ART BURNS

In the past few weeks I’ve switched to yahoo.com as my primary search engine.

Do I have mental damage? A job at Yahoo that requires I eat the dog food? A pathological hatred of popularity?

No, no, and yes, but that’s not the reason.

The fact of the matter is that for my every day life, Yahoo has become the better search engine. Three quick examples as to why:

– On Thanksgiving, I wanted a quick refresher on how to carve a bird. The main page of yahoo.com had a section on everything I needed to know about carving a turkey straight from Martha Stewart herself. I didn’t even bother checking out google.com, maybe I could have found something after poking around a bit.

– The other day I saw an episode of Biker Build-Off[1] featuring Zero Engineering. I typed “Zero Engineering” (no quotes) into google.com and got a couple of hits with online magazine articles, but nothing pointed to Zero Engineering’s web site in the first few pages of results. Using the same search at yahoo.com returned http://www.zerochop.com — Zero Engineering’s website — as the first result.

– Last night we wanted to go see a movie. Again, yahoo.com wins — start with yahoo.com, click on “Movies”, enter my zip code, and within minutes I had the show-times for local showings of “A Very Long Engagement”.

On the other hand, maybe I just have good library research skills and know where to start looking for things. Google’s a bit too much like every index of every book in the library concatenated together while Yahoo has become the card catalog and the nice old librarian behind the counter, all in one. (I know, I know, “What’s a card catalog?”. Damn kids today and your fancy library terminals.)

1. An excellent series about top notch fabricators designing and building bikes designed to be ridden and entered in show competitions. Definitely not a soap-opera like “American Chopper” or “American Hot Rod”, if you want to learn something about metal fabrication and paint, the various “Biker Build-Off” series are a must-see. “A Car is Reborn” and “A Bike is Born” should also be on your TiVo DVR’s Season Pass list, but I’ll write more about those later.

Technorati Tags: search engines | motorcycles

WORST. COVERAGE. EVER.

The desert changes everything, or so they kept saying on the first hour of OLN’s Dakar coverage. I’ve seen bad coverage before, but I wouldn’t wish OLN’s level of coverage on my least favorite sport.

And, yes, you’re right: 2005 Dakar is already over. So why is OLN’s coverage just starting? I guess “timely coverage of a sporting event” wasn’t in the OLN contract with Dakar organizers.

20 minutes into the first hour of OLN’s coverage it was clear that for OLN, the desert had changed everything about the nature of racing coverage. The desert drove OLN to cover the Dakar by showing lots of stock footage, American talking heads, and not much about the Dakar itself. I don’t know who these reject hosts from the Travel Channel and ESPN 27 are, but someone should have told them they were there to cover a race, not produce a gee-whiz puff piece on American racers.

Sadly, once the actual race coverage got started, it continued to be the Robby Gordon and his American Pals Hour. Look, here’s an American racing in the Dakar! Isn’t that amazing! Here he is in his Red Bull VW drinking a Red Bull while going on like a speed freak about the race. Oh, and here’s some European guy, I think he won once or something, but since nobody wants to read subtitles while he talks, lets go talk to Robby Gordon again! And here’s some standup interviews with the drivers standing beside their pristine vehicles talking about what the Dakar means to them. Gosh, aren’t they courageous to go out and race across the desert like this?

Where’re the interviews with top contenders? Where’s the look at all the new technology being used this year? How about that new Yamaha 2WD motorcycle? What’s up with the changes to the motorcycle classes in general? How about some coverage of the new classes — are Quads official yet? Maybe go over some of the basic hazards of each country while showing the map — didn’t they have to skip one of those countries last year due to political strife? Aren’t there bandits in that one country that regularly carjack racers and crews? What are the new rules on marathon stages and tire changes? Aren’t there vintage and privateer racers, support crews, or the tech leads on the different works racers worth hearing from?

Worse still, OLN’s coverage already looks to be a couple of guys “in the rear with the gear” commenting on footage shot by people actually willing to leave the airconditioned production vans and get their clothes rumpled. Are these guys even with the race in the desert or are they just shooting standups during the liason stops?

The first time I saw an episode of Speed’s Dakar coverage, some sunburnt reporter was talking to a motorbike rider out in the desert while the rider was draining fluid from his own elbow. I was instantly hooked — what the hell is this race, why are they out in the middle of the desert, and who on earth is stupid enough to even do this sort of thing? Toby Moody was out there with the racers in the weather from start to finish talking to them at the pre-dawn starts, mid-day CPs, and late-night finishes.

That, OLN, is how you send someone to cover the Dakar. Send ’em out and get ’em dirty. They don’t want to get dirty? Fire ’em and find someone who does. It also helps to hire someone who is experienced with Dakar racing and can correctly pronounce competitor’s names. If you’re really stuck and can’t find anyone, call me — I might not know as much as the pros, but I’ll at least get out there and cover the race.

To be fair, OLN did show some actual footage of vehicles racing. As a matter of fact, I think I saw more crashes, stalls and wipeouts in the first hour of coverage than I have in any other hour of Dakar coverage. Look it’s people crashing motorbikes on the first stage! Here’s some crash footage from previous races! Let’s see a few dozen more crashes! Wow, look at that guy crash! And there’s a woman crashing!

Who cares about seeing the vehicles actually racing, aerial coverage of the course, or even footage of the pit and staging areas? SHOW ME MORE CRASHES. I’m easily confused, so don’t show me a course from the air, don’t show me footage of vehicles I don’t recognize like a 2CV or a Tatra, never show me any sort of coverage that actually might require me to think. SHOW ME MORE CRASHES.

It’s the desert. It changes everything. It makes race coverage suck in ways race coverage has never sucked before.

dakar

…and I thought winter break was going to be a time of rest and relaxation.

Because I have a BA in an unrelated field, I’m being asked to apply as a transfer student at the school I’d like to attend full time. (I’m only part-time at my current school, and if I go full time, I want to go to a much better schoo.) Since I’m applying as a transfer student, I have to submit a portfolio — preferably 10-15 items and a recent sketchbook. On the upside, I’ve documented the hell out of several recent projects. On the downside, I didn’t organize any of that documentation. Oh, and a sketchbook? Well, I have several, but only every third page is something other than project notes, todo lists, personal commentary, etc. So, time to start keeping a ‘real’ sketchbook.

So this semester I’m only going to take only one class — Drawing I — and spend the rest of my time focusing on building portfolio material. My portfolio review is only a month after the start of the semester, but I’ll need all the free time that I can manage to get things together. (Oh, and I already checked to make sure I didn’t get the same professor as before. Based on the reading materials for the class, this one actually appears to be interested in teaching us how to draw.)

Q: So what’s the point of all this design school talk, anyway?

A: I finally figured out what I want to major in!

Granted, it’s 20 years late, but I think I figured it out. Maybe I can’t get a second degree and change careers, but I’ll never know until I try.

When I look back on the past 15 years of my career, I can’t point to much that I’m proud of. I did some great work supporting businesses that never made a profit (and in some cases never shipped a product), but it’s all gone. You’ll have to take my word for it that it was great work and that you should hire me, and that I’m not a complete goober who can talk a good story about how great their work was.

In itself, that isn’t a reason to change careers, but it got me to thinking about what I would be proud of 20 years from now. It got me to thinking about what I like doing, not what I tolerate doing because people pay me to do ti. And that brings us to…

Doing Something Meaningful With My Life
It sounds hokey, but it’s true. I want to do things that make a direct difference in other people’s lives. I feel like I’ve taken a lot from society, but that I haven’t contributed much back. Ok, so I’ve helped VCs spend a lot of money, and who knows how many sales rep’s kids i’ve helped put through college, but I’m not sure how proud I am of those things.

Take a look at the TiVo remote. It’s amazingly different from every other remote, it’s easy to use, and it’s pure genius in so many ways [1]. You might say that re-inventing the remote is not the most useful goal I could have, but it sure as hell beats anything I’ve done in the past 15 years. Maybe I can come up with a better instrument cluster for motorcycles, or develop new video game controllers, or make better interfaces for tele-operated robots. And maybe I can’t. Maybe I’ll suck as a designer, but I’ll find that out quickly enough. There’s plenty of other things I’d like to do, and some of them could be done whether or not I become a designer. Two things that come to mind are building custom vehicles from scratch like John Britten did and setting up an arts/education organization like The Crucible.

Hey, if the school thing doesn’t pan out, at least I have grandiose plans that can easily go awry!

[1] I don’t have a problem with the symmetric design, but the lack of any tactile feedback to let you know which end of the remote is “front” really bugs me. I’d have put a weight in the bottom side, or some sort of textured surface on the plastic to give the holder a non-visual cue that they’ve picked the remote up backwards. Or am I the only person that fumbles for the remote in the dark and picks it up backwards?

Haven’t written anything about school in some time. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I’ve got too much to say and I’m not sure where to start. Going to break this up into a few different posts to make it a bit easier to read.

Term papers
I had a term paper due last week in my art history class. I spent days trying to figure out how on earth I was going to write an intelligent paper on a topic I was interested in and kept coming up dry. As I haven’t written an undergraduate term paper since the KLF was the coolest band ever, I went looking on the web for term paper guidelines published by art history professors. I quickly discovered (then remembered) that undergraduate term papers are fancy versions of the book reports we wrote in grade school. Nobody is expecting any amazing insight into unsolved problems, they just want to see that you read some books, absorbed the information, and can write something coherent.

USENET and the WeLL are tougher audiences than any undergraduate prof I’ve ever had. 11 pages of text and 6 figures later, I had made a basic case legitimizing irezumi as an art worth studying alongside ukiyo-e. Ok, so the prof said 5 pages should be plenty, but it really took me 11 pages to even begin to make my case. Halfway through I realized it was probably a great MA Art History or Japanese History topic, but I don’t have a year to research and write a paper. I have a few hours a week over a few weeks.

Work vs. Play
It’s taken me almost a semester to reshuffle my deeply ingrained habits of how I spend my non-working time. First off, I have to redefine “non-work” as “not-in-the-office”. No more working at home after dinner because I slacked in the office all afternoon. If I’m not going to work in the office, I need to come home and study or do school work. If I’m home, I need to do school work, not turn off my brain and relax until the next work day. Here’s an analogy that will hit home with some of you — imagine that most of the year is the month before you leave for Burning Man working on harebrained projects.

In a typical, oh-those-look-like-fun shopping moment I bought Metroid Prime 2, an Eye-Toy and some other games last week. I’ve played MP2 for all of 2 hours and the Eye-Toy is still in the box, and probably will be until after finals. Same goes for every comic book I’ve bought since August, my magazine subscriptions, etc. (Ok, so I spent a couple hours playing the Japanese version of F-Zero GX so when I get to sent to Japan on work I can unlock my memory card using a Japanese arcade game…)