We At The Media Show Got Wind Of Some Dodgy Claims By McCormick Spices Extolling The Supposed Health

Joybubbles (May 25, 1949-August 8, 2007)

Joybubbles (born Josef Engressia) was an early phone phreak.

With perfect pitch he was able to control the phone system by simply whistling the tones normally generated by Bell's systems, an ability he accidentally discovered at age seven.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Daily doodle number four is a quick sketch of the main character from La Linea (”The Line”), an Italian cartoon which as a child I thought was the greatest thing ever.  Now, as an adult, I still think it’s the greatest thing ever; this little long-suffering gibberish-spouting cartoonist-pestering guy is just as wonderful to watch today as he was when I was a toddler.

Search for “La Linea” on your video site of choice to watch any of his excellent shorts.

Ada Lovelace (December 10, 1815-November 27, 1852)

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was a writer and mathematician who worked on Charles Babbage's early mechanical computer.  Her work in what she called "poetical science" led her to a legacy as the first computer programmer, and continues to inspire generations of hackers today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

I started playing with recording over my own voice in multitrack, and after about an hour and a half this accidentally happened.

If you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who haven't experienced the glorious original version, here's the video and here's the Wikipedia article.  I put together these lyrics based on multiple English translations floating around out there; I think I've kept the basic gist of each line intact.

I have no regrets; if nothing else, at least I actually hit every sour note without pitch-bending or autotuning of any kind.

Download this track here if you're unwell enough to want to do such a thing.

There's a music video now as well.

K8 Red Telephone Box 1968

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.  The K8 marked the final generation of the classic red booth before the range was retired.

Bringing the classic phone box style into the modern era, the K8 took a turn for the minimalist; multi-pane windows, hard right angles, and wooden doors of the past gave way to single large glass panes, rounded corners, and aluminium doors of the future.  While the silhouette still evoked the distinguished red boxes of old, the updated details brought the range to a close with a thoroughly 1960s flair.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

AISLE SIX - YOUR ONE-STOP SUPERMUSICAL by Nicola McEldowney

More info on the FREE April 11 reading of this show in New York City which you can FREELY attend for FREE can be found in this blog post.

More info on the show itself can be found on my site as well as the author's own page about the show.

If you're in the area, come see us!

The Next HOPE conference badge, for which I did the graphics.

These badges didn't just grant admission to the conference, they served as fully functional and hackable tracking beacons for its Attendee Meta-Data project.  (There's a video explaining the basics here, and more hardcore hardware info from the extremely neighborly Travis Goodspeed here.)  After the electronics were laid out and finalized, I was given the badge files so I could scrawl like a madman all over graphically enhance them.

I used what space and resources I had to bring the badge in line with the conference's retrofuturistic design theme, while highlighting and playing with some of the text labels and gadgetry within.  I even snuck in a silly little detail only a few people ever found and called me out on; the grid above the arrow logo makes use of a method I came up with in elementary school for hiding messages in notebook sheets, and contains the conference's initials.

This is the first thing I ever made completely in Inkscape.

Edward Snowden (b. June 21, 1983)

Technical expert Edward Snowden once felt something to which he had access contained evidence of something he felt was deeply wrong, in a way the public had a right to know about.  The echoes of his actions continue on the world stage, and have left him exiled with no current possibility of fair trial.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Sharp J-SH04 2001

Manufactured by Sharp for the J-Phone brand, the J-SH04 is generally recognized as the world’s first camera phone.

The J-SH04 innovatively integrated a mobile phone and digital camera, devices many people of the day regularly kept on-hand, into a single unit with the camera functionality integrated into the phone itself.   For the first time, users could use a single device to take digital photos (at a then-impressive 0.11 megapixels) and share them via the mobile network.

The device (and photo-sharing in general) took off among young users and set the model for all future camera phones, devices which forever changed how we take and share photos and document our world.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.