There are lots of good books out there. I want to read them all and experience the stories within them. I also want to get through more technical books faster and with better comprehension. Because of this, I made a website that doesn’t help with either of those things. It just expresses the feeling of being happily overwhelmed by the amount of good stuff that’s out there. It’s called I wish I could read faster.

I photographed a lot of books I had left at my parents house in preparation for the most recent addition to timespentalone. I wish I could read faster currently catalogues those 36 books and echoes the obvious sentiment of wishing to read more. I see some more photography and photoshop sessions ahead in order to bring to piece to a higher level of completion.

Books fall from the sky continuously, producing more content than could ever be read in the amount of time given to each book. Over time, stacks pile up and fade into the background. You can throw the books around by dragging them with your mouse.

I wish I could read faster uses the AS3 port of the Box2D physics engine to handle collisions.

I would like to add the ability for people to contribute books they either wish they could read or enjoyed reading. Right now, I’m not sure a file-upload tool would be used by anyone but me. If you would like to add books to the site, let me know, and I’ll probably build a submission form for everyone to use.

In my time alone, I often think about the places I want to go. I wanted to create an interesting/beautiful way to show that activity. As a result, I started talking with some of my friends about the idea. Through conversations with them, I have moved beyond the original goal of presenting my desires to presenting those of as many people as we can gather. I recently finished building the site to present those desires, and have begun filling it with content. It is an extension of my time spent alone project.

Rebecca Fenton is interviewing people she meets in Bamako, Mali, Africa. In her conversations, she is posing the central questions of the project to many people. Those questions are: “Where do you want to go?” and “Why do you want to go there?” Their responses to those questions are being added to the site.

In addition to viewing the responses of others, you are invited to contribute the places where you want to go, and the reasons you want to go there.

I just started a new online project at timespentalone.com. The site’s name plays on the peculiar brand of connected separateness that characterizes our era and the fact that I currently live alone. On it, I will be presenting a series of projects that deal in varying levels of joking and seriousness.

Currently, there are two completed projects on time spent alone. Things left behind is a series of photographs and words that capture an early morning experience of solitude on the beach. Each photograph is connected to a phrase in the story, allowing a non-linear experience of the text. Unraveling is a musing on what it would mean if everything we understood where slowly shifting and falling apart. The interactive portion of unravel was built using processing.

While working on the site, I noticed everything looked way better in Safari (and Plainview) than it did in Firefox. I did a bit of googling for browser color profile support, and came up with an oldish CNET article about how Safari added ICC profile support. This is awesome. Unfortunately, lots of people out there don’t use Safari as their main browser. If you’re a Firefox fan, you can get color profile support by installing the Color Management Add-on. If you’re on IE, please switch to Firefox, or accept that the web you’re seeing just isn’t as beautiful as it could be. If you use Chrome, send lots of email to Google telling them to add color profile support to their browser. Wouldn’t it be nice if graphics on the web were finally treated as first-class citizens in all browsers?

Root Division had an opening for a group exhibition tonight, an event which happily coincided with an obviously crowded Shepard Fairey opening. The quality of the work was good overall, but what interested me was the large representation of diorama-based photography. Keep reading »

Depending on how you get here, you may have noticed the new splash page. Coinciding with the creation of a quick-and-dirty project archive, I put together a homepage that lets you, the user, decide which of my sites to visit. That’s the only thing it does. Previously, an .htaccess file rewrote requests for sansumbrella.com to things.sansumbrella.com.

The archive is a python script that walks through directories and wraps the contents in appropriate html for display. It will make it easy for me to catalogue past work and make available more of my work that doesn’t necessarily get written up in my blog or make it into my portfolio. I will be actively updating the archive, but the python codebase should be pretty stable. If anyone knows how I can map cleaner urls so I don’t have to point you to my cgi-bin, please let me know.

View the project archives. View the splash page.

edit: I updated the design of the archive site. The columns float, and you can tell what project you’re on thanks to a header above the images. A few other minor design changes were made to make it look more like this blog. Thanks to Zach for the impetus to do something other than strip the default styling down to Helvetica.

update: I figured out the mod_rewrite business necessary to make the urls in the archive site pretty. Please visit and bookmark away on the newer version of the archive at archive.sansumbrella.com