In the non-linearly timed film, above, Leth places his human in a ‘boundless room, radiant with light.’ I interpreted the title not as “the depiction of the perfect human” but rather as “the perfect depiction of the human” – that is, a precise telling. This brings to mind the nature of the World Wide Web – boundless, driven by packets of light, arranged in a non-linear fashion, and accessible at any precise point – especially via today’s powerful search engines.

So to tell the 2010 version of The Perfect Human, I built a tool that brings a user into a precise – albeit random – point along the vast continuum of the Web. Using the voice over and dialogue from the film as body copy, one can highlight any range of text and be presented with a relevant (as deemed by Yahoo!’s search engine) destination on the Web in the results section below it.

If you have a second and can give it a spin, please do. It’s certainly still in beta, with some interface elements to clean up and complete. But check it out. Scroll along the text box, watch as the film at the top (which takes a bit to load – it’s 9MB) follows suit. Alternatively, click play or scrub along the QuickTime video and watch the text move. When you’ve found a piece of text you’d like to search the Web for, highlight it. It can be any portion of text – not necessarily single or even whole words. You can also scroll along to see what past users have searched for and the coinciding results.

If you give it a spin, please leave some feedback in the comments section here.

Click here to access the tool.

I had a few things I wanted to accomplish:

Setting Flash Aside Momentarily

I’ve built plenty of sites, apps, and other widgets in Flash/ActionScript. And while there are certainly a multitude of ways I could present my online self in Flash, I decided it was time for a new challenge. Combine that with the fact that I wanted an iPhone/iPad friendly site and I decided to jump in to jQuery as my main development framework for the presentation layer. I’ll be keeping my portfolio (once that gets a facelift) in Flash, however, so that my AS3 skills are properly represented here.

Unifying Feeds

Partially inspired by Mr. Daly‘s Flavors.me built site, I realized it was time to start unifying all of my disparate feeds. I use Twitter and this blog for my ramblings, Flickr, Tweetphoto, and TwitPic for my image sharing, LinkedIn for my resumé, and a slew of location based services for my geotracking. Isn’t it about time these all lived in one place. Besides, the site IS called Barely Concealed Narcissism. Maybe there should be more about ME.

Updated Design

I’m not really a designer. I like to think I have some basic design chops, but nothing compared to the art directors I’ve worked with over the years. In a few weeks I begin working towards an MFA in Communication Design, but the focus there will be more theoretical than practical. That said, I wanted to keep the look and feel simple and clean, inspired by my latest obsession (to which Mr. Norton can attest), 60′s style screen prints.

I admit that it took a few weeks of thinking to figure out what this new site would be. It actually came to me in the shower one morning. How’s that for a too-much-information-cliché? I sat down that weekend (the wife was out of town) and cranked this out in 48 hours or so. It took a few hours of tweaks afterwards to clean it up (more on that soon), but here we are.

I’d love to hear your reactions. Naturally, since this is a site about me, I plan on sharing my thoughts. In the interest of attention spans, I’ll take care of that in Part 2.

- Launched Stride on MTVTimesSquare last week. Send your message/photo to MTV’s 42ft screen (Broadway btwn 44th and 45th). Then get a ‘memento’ screenshot of what it [probably] looked like. Legalese and logistics have forced this one to be kept under wraps for a while now. Hopefully we have the opportunity to improve the whole concept as it runs.

- Posting and processing my latest shots to my Flickr account last week reminded me how much I miss taking daily photographs. Doubt I will get back to that frequency, but need to make sure I keep the camera with me more often.

- Have moved to XCode for my Arduino development. Struggling significantly with decoding IR messages from the Apple Remote. Speaking of homebrew-geekiness, congrats to Mr. Saunders for some great recent work.

- Wedding planning is flying, thanks to my wonderful partner in crime. Have some initial pages posted to sg.weds.gs. Starting to think about the registry now. Extremely conflicted on this part. More on that in the future.

- Finally, I leave you with a relevant shot, taken this weekend. Sixty-three years of marriage. And counting. Too bad I’m marrying into this family; I could certainly use some of those genes.

This one listens to the noise around the computer (as long as you have a built in mic) and displays a quasi-equalizer. Nothing fancy, but definitely progress. You can adjust the sensitivity by clicking “Options…” I also learned about the importance of the nested iterator patch, reducing the number of total patches significantly. Screen shots below. If you give it a try, let me know.

Install by copying to /System/Library/Screen Savers/

Root Patch

Iterator Patch

Volume Bar Patch

Decided to open up Quartz Composer the other day for the first time. Pretty sweet.

After a little playing around I came up with an extremely basic screen saver idea that floats three cubes around your screen, displaying the first 18 images from a given Flickr RSS feed. You can change the feed to whichever you’d like; the default is mine.

Included my patch macros, below. If you have any thoughts, please let me know– I’m extremely eager to get better at this.

Root Macro Patch

Controlling cube position

Timed Sampler Patch

Passing Flickr RSS to parsers which output images to cube sides

Flickr RSS Parser which downloads the thumbnail and passes to output