Ian began his life with the Barbarian Group as an intern in the Boston office in early 2005, but he soon proved he was useful enough to be knighted as a full-fledged Barbarian. Before joining TBG, he found himself growing up in the adorable state of Rhode Island. It was in RI that Ian created his first site (“The Whack The Pud Contest”) at the tender age of 12. Later on in life he found work as a librarian for a group of archaeologists, who apparently rivaled the Barbarians in their drinking prowess. At some point he grew a beard.
Ian’s tasks at TBG include keeping tabs on a growing company’s ever-evolving server infrastructure, as well as helping care of the day-to-day IT problems that make some Barbarians yell technologically insensitive epithets at their computers. He’s also been known to write a few lines of code here and there. Ian has 1.5 degrees – an AS in Computer Science from Johnson & Wales and a BA in New Media from Emerson College. Aside from patience and street walkin’, he has skills in the realms of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and many other things not really worth mentioning here.
In 2007, Ian gave up the 2-car trolleys of Brookline in favor of the 8-car trains of Brooklyn and joined the ranks of the New York office. Rumors abound as to the reason for the move; Ian claims he was drawn to the vibrant cultural scene and world-class public transportation system, but his bosses seem to think it was because he “met a girl or something”.
on August 04, 2008 at 11:55 AM
filed under: New York
Some friends and I rode our bikes down to Coney Island on Sunday to bask in the sunshine and ogle the weirdos. I bought a Flip Ultra just for the occasion. It was totally worth it. See for yourself:
, but it had been almost 8 years since I’d left the country, so for me it was kind of a big deal. I even had to renew my passport.
Anyway, I took a lot of pictures (just over 1600), which, again, isn’t really that special, especially when you consider that more than 3 times that number of pictures gets uploaded to Flickr every minute, but I actually plan on going through my pictures and publishing the ones I like, so, again, it’s kind of a big deal, but this time in a rather cumbersome way rather than a really exciting way.
Though I guess it is still pretty exciting, being able to sort through all the pictures I took while I was tooling around the Bavarian countryside and relive all the memories, blah blah etc etc.
But it’s gonna take a while to go through over 1600 pictures and evaluate each one on its nostalgic and/or artistic merit, so in the meantime I decided to just stitch ‘em all together into one big index print using Ruby and ImageMagick and plop that onto the Internet instead:
I think it makes for an interesting study of how I go about taking pictures. Plus it’s the only way you’ll get to see just how many drunken pictures I took out the back window of the taxi-wagon I was lying in the trunk of after my great-uncle’s birthday party. Yeah.
on May 30, 2008 at 03:20 PM
filed under: Websites and Search
So I just went to Google and searched for something, then switched over to Google News to look for recent articles on the topic I was searching, when I noticed something weird. Observe:
They’ve switched up the G in their favicon! It’s jarring, isn’t it? What strikes me as particularly interesting, though, isn’t that it’s a different G, but that’s it’s a different part of the same logo and yet it’s still hardly recognizable. I’m so used to seeing the familiar blue capital G with the red, green and blue lines around it that a lowercase g in a smooth white box is like an alien life form.
It makes me realize how much we underestimate the importance of the favicon as a component of brand identity. It’s surprising how much of a difference a 16×16 image can make, but it does. Most major sites have long since picked up on its importance, though I’m sure many more still lag behind (I can’t think of any off the top of my head… can you?). Still others occasionally just plain get it wrong, I think, as Yahoo! recently did when they stripped Upcoming of its unique favicon in favor of the big red Y!. They certainly wouldn’t do the same to Flickr, so why Upcoming?
Anyway, I’ll try to keep from rambling too much on the subject, but the Google thing really caught me off guard. Looking at the big picture, though (the 64×64 picture? heh), it’s a much better icon for them, and even if the blogosphere pans it (which seems soft of inevitable to me for some reason), I think in the long run it’ll be seen as a good move on their part. Of course, it is a tad strange that their main site seems to have kept the old icon, at least for now. Maybe this is a soft launch of Google Favicon 2.0?
Was anyone else as shocked by the season finale of Law & Order: SVU as I was? That show has gotten pretty ridiculous in its old age, but I still love it all the same. I mean, how can you go wrong with a cast that includes a rapper, a nerdy comedian, and a guy that humps a fridge? ...
