Via Flickr:
Folk artist Elise LeBlanc performs for LTDs (Leaders in Training and Discipleship) on the beach at Gull Lake Centre near Lacombe, AB.

I have been working at Gull Lake Centre for the summer, putting together videos and shooting photos for all the campers who come through the gates. It has been a wonderful opportunity to practice my photography, especially on days like these!

Via Flickr:

After about 6 months of waiting (which seemed pretty out of character) my Panic goods have finally arrived!

-Transmit (FTP client) stylized T-shirt

-”Loading” T-Shirt (been wanting something this geeky for a while!)

-Team Panic T-Shirt

-Full set of 4 Panic faux game boxes (so awesome!)

If you have never heard of Panic, they’re a great Mac software company that has been around since the beginning. Personally I use Transmit and Coda on a daily basis for all my website development work.

jole.ca on the iPad, while still under development

After almost a year of sitting on a fresh design for jole.ca, it’s finally here!

The first thing you’ll notice is the lighter, more magazine-style layout of the site. In some ways it is very reminiscent of my last custom-made theme for jole.ca (the one that came before aerogold), which incorporated the horizontal navigation and emphasis on non-blog content. Since then, I’ve learned more about web design, WordPress, modern web standards and conventions, all ideas that have grown out of working on WordPress sites in the past couple of years, notably with Trevor van Gorp of Affective Design.

Some of the goals for the new design were to include as many modern CSS techniques as possible, which is noticeable in the homepage where all gradients, shadows, rotations and image cropping is performed entirely in CSS. The homepage also uses the “Featured Image” feature in WP 3.0+, along with excerpts from any posts marked “Featured”. The bottom four panels are widgets that can be re-arranged and customized using a simple “Feature Page” widget I’ve bundled in the theme code.

In addition to these web-related features, I’ve also optimized it for viewing on tablets and mobile devices. Most image posts from the past 6 months are scaled so that they remain crisp when zoomed in on an iPhone, for example. The homepage was modelled after Flipboard, and serves as a “front cover” to the site. Text is well spaced and placed in narrower columns to make reading as enjoyable as possible.

One feature that is missing from the site is the Gallery, which has been officially retired. While the “jolephoto” brand is being phased out, my photography will continue to be developed on my Flickr feed. After purchasing a Pro account, I’ve unlocked a number of older pics that are available once more, and I’m working to build up Sets, Tags and Collections. I also plan to post entries on any major contributions to the feed.

Other special feature you’ll notice is better integration with social media and outside services, including the transition to Disqus for commenting. Disqus allows you to maintain a single account for all your comments across multiple blogs, and also allows for single sign-on with Facebook or Twitter.

While a refresh was certainly overdue, this shift also represents a new mission for the jole.ca domain, which is to promote the Joel Adria Technical Services brand. JoelAdria.com has redirected here for a while now, but I can now say it represents my work and brand more appropriately for current and potential clients. Be sure to take a look around, and I hope you enjoy the new jole.ca!

As part of the McLuhan Centenary 2011, the Vintage TV Wall is now on display in the departures area at Edmonton’s International Airport. The Wall plays back a variety of clips from McLuhan’s legacy, encouraging patrons to reflect on his well-known themes of “the medium is the message” and “the global village”.

Originally put together to promote the final Wave installation, the TV wall was shown at the Cool Media event at the Art Gallery of Alberta. TVs and equipment were contributed from Kevin Lau’s personal collection, and content and design were my responsibility. The display case created for the airport was put together by Cezary Gajewski, an industrial designer at the University of Alberta.

The display is in the domestic departures area past security, so you’ll need to take a flight sometime between now and November. After that it will be viewable in Enterprise Square downtown until January, alongside the final Wave installation.

Be sure to check out the Flickr set I’ve posted of the entire process, along with a video or two on the YouTube channel.

The backend is still WordPress, and works around the same concept as the AD theme, with a few improvements here and there. A number of recent innovations in WordPress will come in handy for next time round however. Featured images help simplify associated a thumbnail with a particular post or page, and content types allow you to separate calendar dates from blog posts within the UI.

One thing I noticed first on this particular WordPress install was that Dreamhost likes to turn off post versioning (presumably to save on database storage, and since disabling it inside wp-config.php is hidden from the user, most people would never notice its absence). However, when you are looking for post versioning and can’t find it, double check that it’s not disabled in your wp-config.php. You might want to turn it on now just in case!

Be sure to check out the Design for Emotion for details on the book and your chance to be involved in the creation of the book.

Wave is an interactive installation project with the goal of encouraging inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary involvement, as well as to celebrate the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth, a Canadian communication scholar who was born in Edmonton 100 years ago. The final project will be unveiled on June 23 at noon in the atrium of the Enterprise Square (old Bay building) downtown as part of the Media Ecology Convention 2011.

The final design is still under heavy development, something I’m very excited to be a part of. I’ve been working with Cezary Gajewski in the past few days, setting up our shipment of equipment and new toys in our development lab. Here’s a few images and stats on the project.

Equipment:

• 1x Mac Pro (8 Core)
• 1x Mac Mini
• 1x MacBook Pro (mine)
• 2x Sharp 60″ LCD TVs
• 2x Acer monitors
• 8x KRK Studio Monitors
• 1x M-Audio ProFire 610 audio interface

University Departments involved: Drama (Tech), MACT/Extension, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, Music, English

Number of alphanumeric displays to be manufactured: 300 (by hand)

Video after the jump.

Shown here is our development environment for the next Wave Interactive Installation project. I’m using Quartz Composer Visualizer to run a simple ball-moving visualization across three different computers with a number of different video devices attached, all through a simple network cable.

Promo Postcard for Portfolio Show

Portfolio Show is mostly geared towards the BFA Design students that us Techs and SM’s work with throughout our 4 year program, but we will have a few things to showcase as well, and my experiments with the Kinect platform will be incorporate as part of my official title as “Projection Designer” for the show. I’ll be posting about that project soon after the show goes up.

So when and where?

Where:
Second Playing Space
Inside the Timms Centre for the Arts
University of Alberta,
87 Ave & 112 Street

When:
Wine & Cheese Reception
April 6th 7pm-10:30pm

Gallery Open
April 7th 2pm-8pm
April 8th 2pm-8pm
April 9th 2pm-7pm

Silent Auction
April 9th 7pm-10pm

What:
A showcase of Theatre Design work from BFA/MFA designers, with work from BFA Tech and BFA Stage Management from the University of Alberta.

I hope to be around during the opening on April 6th if anyone wants to come by to say hi and talk tech! Hope to see you there! (I’ll post any FB events as they are available)

EDIT: Facebook event here!

The product they’re using is called Kintera Sphere, which provides CMS and member/donor management in one. They’ve had the member management working quite well for a while now, but the website kept getting delayed because there wasn’t a lot of time or know-how to get all the information into the CMS for them.

My task was just that, and overall it turned out quite well. Much of Kintera’s management is a bit antiquated, with some interesting interface quirks, and many traces of legacy code that isn’t quite in line with modern standards. The separation of theme and content also wasn’t quite well developed, which meant it was hard to output content in a logical way.

I did however manage to figure out a few of the many tools the CMS offered, and use them to my advantage. The launch was relatively smooth, and now the job of optimizing, tweaking, and keeping the site fresh over the months begins. Congratulations CSN on your new website!

Visit CSNSCN.ca

Duck 15 was recorded back in October 2010, and consisted mostly of an impromptu teleconference that has a few twists. Simon Kully makes an appearance in this one. Finally uploaded here, I really can’t remember what was discussed, other than that part of it was recorded while I was driving home.

Duck 16 was recorded yesterday morning (Feb 25), probably the first time we’ve recorded an episode early in the morning (and after having slept). We cover the latest MacBook Pros, telecom, and many other topics. Check out that episode here, and set aside some time, as its definitely a new record length, consisting of almost 3 hours of straight tech talk!

The purpose of the installation was to explore Marshall McLuhan‘s theory, “the medium is the message.” A group at the University of Alberta is developing a larger interactive installation entitled “WAVE” to be setup at the Faculty of Extension in celebration of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth. Our TV Wall was setup, with guidance from the WAVE Group, at a reception to raise awareness about the project.

So what is it exactly? The setup consists of 11 Television from 1960s onward that are tuned to play different channels. In one corner of the room we had an antenna connected to a high-end RF Modulator capable of outputting 3 different video sources on any channel. These three sources were from DVD players all at a different point on a media disc. In short, we setup a trio of our own TV Stations in the lobby of the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the results were pretty spectacular! Most of the TVs were from Kevin‘s personal collection, along with the VHS Reporter Video Camera that was feeding a few of the screens, and a few of them were acquired from a few Facebook call-outs and dumpster diving.

Embedded is a video of the final setup, and clips from its development are available here and here.