A lovely new toy!

Cathie found a new toy!
Cathie loves words, Cathie loves colours, Cathie loves tshirts .....

Cathie found Wordle.
(Cathie hates talking about herself in the third person ... really)

The home page of Wordle describes it thus.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

That is sooo understating the fun you can have. After doing a couple for the kid's bedroom walls, I decided to try and put one on a tshirt. After a little fiddling I got it figured, and here's the results: (note the plural - I challenge you to stop at one!)

Ah yes - clicking on the tshirts will take you to my RB site to buy one all of your own!!

Running the Numbers

Wow.

I'm not a numbers kind of girl - obvious to many who know me, But Chris Jordan's website Running the Numbers has absolutely blown me away.

For those of you (and me) who struggle to visualise boring statistics and numbers, have a look at this!

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=?view=XXX_09NNN/

Be mindboggled ... by both the statistics AND the analogies.

The Joys of Social Networking (Part Deux)

While doing some housekeeping on here today, I was quite surprised to find that I have had a presence on Facebook for a year, and the big excitement at that time was that I had created a Tizme.

So, since then .....

Well - Mr Facebook has sold himself and become a squillionaire at some ridiculously young age - another fine case of "why didn't I think of that?" and the thing that is Facebook has just got bigger and bigger.

Amazingly, of the people that I grew up with, the only people I know on there are my mum (seriously), my cousin who is a few years younger than me and one bloke that I went to primary school with. I don't know what the issue is with the friends of my youth - perhaps they're too busy having real lives or maybe they're a little a-feared of the techolojony??

Me, I love it ... mostly as a promotional tool for my tshirts and photographs, but also because it sorta fits in with my preferred level of correspondence .... "Hi! ... you're still alive then" ..... nice puppy/kitten/kid ..... "How drunk were you??" .... and "You're going on holidays again??

In that time, I've started two groups - one for my "art" and one for old scholars of my primary school which was bulldozed a few years ago. That's where I found the bloke who was in my class, all the others in the group are mere babes in arms!

I've created an application - "Send a Cathie Tee" which would be a great tool if I could just work out how to put an actual link to the real tshirt - so if people liked it heaps, they may be inspired to buy a real one ..... a dismal failure ... I feel like the guys who invented WD39 and 6-UP!

Today I created a Cathie Tranent "Page" so that people could become fans, well probably more so I could get a much better interface for showing photos and I now have 5 fans! (even if one's me and one is me mum ...)

All this social networking is a wonderful thing, but I do wonder sometimes how much more time I would have for making art if I wasn't so busy talking about it?? ;P

Moo-ved to Blog!

Today in the mail, I received my eagerly awaited Moo business cards!

Having heard so many people on Redbubble speak so highly of them, and having been a recipient of some of thickblackoutline's mini cards I decided to lash out.

The quality is everything promised and then some ... I got the pack of 50, and sent through a dozen photos. I have just put my name, email and mobile phone number on the back .. (left the url of my website off (???) but there's room to hand write it anyway, for that personal touch!)

They come securely packaged in a two part cardboard box - great for storage with a pair of dividers marked mine and theirs! (And it's made from recycled cardboard as well)

The colours are rich and vibrant, and the matte finish just make you want to touch them!

I have put aside one of each to keep - I just keep seeing them in little frames .... a great promotional tool for something special.

They are by no means the cheapest business cards available in the web wide world, but as far as quality is concerned, I think they're second to none!

Oh - and if you want to check them out for yourself - click on the "Moo-ved to Blog" header to be taken to moo.com

Catherine Lambert

 

After a chance meeting at the Gaslight Tavern at Bowden, I was lucky enough to discover that Adelaide jazz diva Catherine Lambert and I were long lost twin sisters (ask her - she'll tell you .... /grin).

Over a couple of bevvies, Catherine mentioned that she was in need of some new promotional shots - and as luck would have it, I'm a photographer ... lol.

So after taking some shots for Catherine's amazing Adelaide Cabaret Festival Show, we looked at getting some of the aforementioned promo shots.


 

These three are some of my favourites from the session!

TinEye

This nifty little "thing" (image search engine) - will search an image for you by
using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks.

TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.

At the moment, according to the website, their database contains 701,666,310 images from the web but this figure is increasing regularly!

In private beta at the moment, I can only see this getting better as time goes on and their image base increases.

I have searched a couple of my most popular images and have found no matches, (thankfully I suppose)but have been having fun with their "cool search" function!

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, as of 18th August, it's now in open beta so click on the blog header TinEye above and be taken right there!

PS. They have a nifty FF plugin too - means you can just right click and search from your image page!!