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.

About 10 years ago I wrote a program in REALbasic that simply displayed the same phrase in each of your installed/active fonts. The purpose was to quickly see what your options were when it came to font choice. I uploaded the software to various freeware/shareware sites and it was downloaded a few thousand times. It was also twice featured on the CD included with MacAddict magazine.

FontTasteTester 1.0

Right before the new year I received an email from a past user forwarded to me from my father:

I tried again today to see if FTT had leapt the Mac OSX gap, or failing that, whether there was anytrhing similarly easy and rational for trying phrases and then concentrating purely on their visual effect. I had to upgrade to OSX about a year ago and I really miss that facility and wish I had written fan-mail at the time.

Nothing comes near FTT, even the Linotype widget with its many bells and whistles.

Thank you for your ingenuity and generosity…

So I decided that I would challenge myself to redevelop this thing. I also decided that, as part of my January Self-Improvement challenge I would try to develop something for a platform for which I had never written before. While Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard is technically a webpage in a widget, this was still a new experience. I used Apple’s free Dashcode for development.

As such, I present Font Taste Tester 1.0b3 for Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s definitely still a beta, as I haven’t done extensive testing and it’s my first foray into Dashboard. Anyway – if you give it a try and have comments, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.

This officially closes out my January Self-Improvement challenge. Look for a February Self-Indulgence intro/update soon.