Production of Trimpin’s work consists of boisterous collaborations with other artists, home-cooked electronics, and kinetic sculptures(?) composed of found objects “high junk” the likes of which Trimpin comments cannot be obtained anywhere in the world outside of the United States. I am not sure I am all that thrilled about what that says about our throw-away consumer culture, but through Trimpin’s creative genius, it sure makes for some beautiful and inspiring work. All that said, for me the most fantastic thing about Trimpin’s curiosity is how divergent it is in its processes and methods. In juxtaposition, so much of design work these days focuses way to much on the convergence of ideas. In other words, maybe we spend an inordinate amount of time converging on a product or solution to a problem, when we should instead take a deep breath and be less focused on finding such immediate closure in our ideas. We should do more seeking and less solving. I somehow got the warm feeling throughout the film that Trimpin is not really focused on an end-goal, but is more interested in forging into the unknown through the simple act of persistent tinkering. I guess in the end it is this constant persistence with which I am ultimately so taken with his work.

So, be on the lookout for this film in your area – because it is not so easy to be otherwise exposed to Trimpin’s work. He has never been represented by a gallery and he does not own a cell phone or have a website. He does not document his work, and he has little interest in recorded sound or music. He evidently even abhors loudspeakers, and only deals with acoustic sound. In fact, outside of this movie, there are no commercial recordings of his work to be had. Fortunately the film is currently on the Southern Circuit of Independent Film Makers before it does the film festival scene and then goes into (hopefully) commercial release. Be sure to check out the trailer below, and go to the movie website for more information, videos, recordings, and still images of the work.
[See post to watch QuickTime movie] ]]> http://protomondo.com/2010/02/23/trimpin/feed/ 0 http://protomondo.com/2010/02/16/public-notice-of-bankruptcy/ http://protomondo.com/2010/02/16/public-notice-of-bankruptcy/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:37:02 +0000 Rusty Smith http://protomondo.com/?p=1347 Today was the day. After being engaged no fewer than five times in conversations that began with some version of “hey Rusty, did you get that email I sent you about xyz….?” I finally had to admit that I was officially beyond the point of no return – it was time throw the switch. After my last meeting of the day with the Associate Dean I went to my office and just did it. For way too long I have been suffering under the delusion that my email inbox was too big to fail, that some government agency was going to come in at the eleventh hour and bail me out. Alas, it was not to be. I had to take matters into my own hands. That’s right – I opened up my email, and without looking, deleted everything out of my in box. All 871 messages.

Ugh.

Freedom!

So, if you have emailed me anything in the last couple of weeks to which I have not responded, this post serves as the required public notice that I have officially declared email bankruptcy. If your email was pressing and demands some sort of actionable response, feel free to resend it. But be advised however, I am no longer reading email. I am reverting back to my old strategy (how did I ever get out of the habit in the first place?!?) of processing email instead. What does that mean?

Wait! Before you can implement this strategy, you must commit first to always work off the top of the stack.
Most of us work on the “first in, first out strategy” of task management. In other words, A task comes in, you put it on the top of the stack. When you finish one task, you pull the next one off the bottom of the stack, always making sure that you do everything in the order in which it was received. Seems fair, right? Well, what I have found is that this method of working just leaves everybody waiting an equally really long time for you to get to them, and everybody becomes equally pissed off. Instead, by working off the top of the stack instead of the bottom (getting to work on whatever is the most immediate) you instead get to make someone’s day brighter by getting right back to them immediately. Besides, those folks on the bottom of the pile are already either a) already pissed off or b) already pissed off and they have solved their own problems. Nothing you are going to do is going to brighten their day, so why even try? In the end, if their task is really all that important, they will make sure they get back on top of the stack in a hurry anyway.

Processing eMail
This is pretty easy in concept, but admittedly a little difficult to maintain. I successfully implemented this strategy a couple of years ago for a while after watching the most excellent presentation that Merlin Mann gave as a “Google Tech Talk”  way back in July, 2007. You can watch the video yourself (warning: it is an hour long) or simply skip down and follow the 5 simple rules, or “processing actions.”

Inbox Zero
“What action can I have to take with regard to this email?”

1. Delete. Or at least archive. The first action is often the hardest, but the one that you should do the most. Read an email once (and only once) and decide immediately if it is actionable. if it is not, then delete it, or archive it. Most importantly, remember that every email does not need a response. And honesty is the best policy here. You know in your heart-of-hearts you are not going to respond to that email. So just delete it already! More importantly, don’t even think about developing some complex filing system – the search function in your email has become way too good not to use. I have one folder called “Archive.” I can always do a simple search to find whatever I need, whenever I need it.
2. Delegate. And then follow up. that is right. It is not always your responsibility to do everything – a lot of times you can simply forward the email on to the folks that really need to act on it. When I do this I like to leave myself a “tickler” in my calendar (with the email attached) that reminds me to check at some point in the future that it was indeed acted on by others.
3. Respond. In five sentences. or less. period. And if you don’t have enough information to respond, then ask a question. Tag – you’re it.
4. Defer. Each day I get a number of deceivingly simple one sentence emails that require me to perform hours and sometimes days of work. These are most often the really important ones that encompass the stuff that we are actually paid to do. They just demand too much time to process in the few minutes that I actually have at the moment. This is important: Clear it from your inbox. Put it in a “to do” folder. Mine is called “Maybe Someday…” And before filing them away I usually attach them to my action list that I can adjust and reorder as priorities change. This list (instead of my inbox) becomes the stack from which I work. I find this effective because it also includes all sorts of tasks that are not even email related.
5. Do. If there is something that you can do, well, then just do it, and get rid of the email. Now.

Ultimately the only way any of this can really work is if you turn off your email auto checker. Admittedly tough for me. It is almost Pavlovian. Out of the box my email client checks for email every minute. That is potentially 2,400 interruptions in a 40 hour work week. I will try to set aside some time  each day process email – we will see how that goes.

In the end my inbox will no longer be a to do list or a task manager. My inbox will only be for unread email. I promise. Or I can just declare bankruptcy again. It was actually kind of fun!

The excellent theme that I am using is called “Arthemia” designed by Michael Hutagalung. One of the cool new features of WordPress is the ability to attach a thumbnail to each post. Upon upload, the image is scaled, cropped, and optimized based on a variety of parameters that your theme establishes. This allows a single image to be used in a variety of sizes and formats as each post requires, perfect for a theme like Arthemia that has different size thumbnails that are called depending on the context in which the post is displayed. Unfortunately Arthemia was designed before this was possible in WordPress; it instead uses the TimThumb php script to crop and re-size the images for each post. TimThumb is pretty cool, but you have to add a custom field to each post which gets a little dreary…

So, following Mark Jaquith’s excellent tutorial, I hacked up the appropriate files in Arthemia and BAM! I have a much easier way to associate images with my posts. Finally, thanks to the cool Regenerate Thumbnails plugin by Viper007Bond, it is a snap to get all of your thumbnails re-sized as is needed should you ever switch themes, change thumbnail sizes, etc. A couple of warnings though, Viper007Bond’s plugin kept stalling out on me, it took a couple of times to get all the thumbnails converted. Also, and perhaps most important: I am not a coder. This works for me on my installation – your mileage may vary. So here you go, what I did to get the WordPress post_thumbnail function integrated into Arthemeia:

At line 40 of functions.php
add:

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50, true ); // 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall, hard crop mode
add_image_size( 'headline-thumbnail', 300, 275, true ); // headline category thumbnail size
add_image_size( 'featured-thumbnail', 100, 65, true ); // featured category thumbnail size
add_image_size( 'spoiler-thumbnail', 150, 150, true ); // spoiler category thumbnail size

Start on Line 15 of index.php

change:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/<?php
$values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=300&h=275&zc=1&q=100"
alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="300px" height="275px"  /></a>

to:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'headline-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

Start on Line 33 in index.php

change:

<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("Image");
if (isset($values[0])) { ?>
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
	<img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/<?php
$values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=100&h=65&zc=1&q=100"
alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="100px" height="65px"  /></a>
      <?php } ?>

To:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
	<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'featured-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

Start on line 86 in index.php

change:

<?php	$values = get_post_custom_values("Image");
	if (isset($values[0])) { ?>
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
	<img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/<?php
$values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100"
alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="150px" height="150px"  /></a>
      <?php } ?>

to:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
	<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'spoiler-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

Start on line 36 in archive.php

change:

<?php	$values = get_post_custom_values("Image");
	if (isset($values[0])) { ?>
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">	<img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/<?php
$values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100"<br />alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="150px" height="150px"  /></a>
      <?php } ?>

to:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
	<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'spoiler-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

finally, somewhere in your style.css add:

.attachment-headline-thumbnail {
	float:left;
}

.attachment-featured-thumbnail {
	float:left;
	}

.attachment-spoiler-thumbnail {	float:left;
	}

Let me know if this works for you, or if you have any better pointers – However I probably will not be able to help you much if it does not!

CODE EDITED: Turns out you don’t need all that php if/else blargity blargity, so I deleted it from the instructions above. You can use those arguments if you want to make your theme backwards compatible with all of the images that you have associated with a post using timthumb and custom fields, or if you want a generic image associated with a post that has no image.

Eight Ways to Kill an Idea

By: Scott Campbell