Wired News is running a story that clued me into one of the coolest web-design projects I’ve ever seen. According to the website, 10×10 “is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time.” The web site’s main content is a picture that is composed 100 smaller pictures that are all based on 100 words found in a few of the top news websites RSS streams. The web site runs an algorithm that looks at the news feeds and then attempts to sum up what is happening in the world by picking 100 words and pictures. There is also a more interactive page that allows you to see the words associated with each picture as well as links to articles that the pictures and words were captured from. The web site is updated every hour and produces a new picture and interactive page when the search is completed. The picture below is an example (I removed the dynamicly generated picture to lower the bandwidth usage from their web site) picture created by the web site. (the pictures that make up the larger picture are copywritten by the news companies that were their source, so please be mindful of their rights).

It snowed about half of a foot last night. The roads look kinda slick and messy from my window. Of course there is going to be school today; Lehigh most likely had workers out from 2am on working to make sure that all of the sidewalks and streets here at Lehigh were “good enough” for people to walk on and get to class. Funny thing about this whole thing is that it doesn’t matter how bad the roads are surrounding Lehigh; as long as the sidewalks and roads on campus are OK, there will be class. Not like it matters if a commuter student can’t drive here because the towns havn’t plowed well enough. Not like it matters that teachers can’t drive here because the hills are icy and they would slide down them unsafely. Nope, doesn’t matter. There will be class today because the sidewalks and roads were cleared around the campus.

I have an interview today and am a little nervous.

It’s with a company named LeCroy. They are a NY-based oscilloscope and circuit testing company. They make scopes that can test just about every signal you can throw at them (even up to 6GHz, twice the speed of currently available processors). Many of the scopes are Windows computers with special hardware for testing built in and, since they build their scopes on top of computers, there is a lot of digital systems design work available.

*cross fingers*

I’m off to bed so I can get up bright and early for the interview.

I was searching the web for stock-piles of pre-made buttons, or templates for them, to use for links and buttons on my site and finally came up with a solution that works even better than pre-made ones that could potentially be copywritten: I created my own based off of a web site here: http://www.kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/.

Enter the text you want, colors you want, layout you want, press submit, and recieve your nice new button in .png format. I created a bunch of images that way for buttons for the quicklinks down at the bottom of the page and for another project that I’ve been working on: making category icons for each post.

Using the topicon 1.2.1 plugin for Movable Type (found by clicking on the Movable Type icon at the bottom of my blog and then going to their plugins section), I added buttons to each page based on the category of the blog entry. I’m using simple buttons for now, but may move to my old icons from my last web site to this one to use for category images.

Just for fun, I have reposted my old web site again so that all of my hard work isn’t for naught. You can get to it by going to http://www.geoffkerr.com/PostNuke/index.php. Registration will be closed there so that no new users can join and I will no longer be posting on that site.

UPDATE 4-19-2005: I’ve since taken this site back down to save ~80MB of disk space on my servers.