Data Rot

Well-known author David Pogue recently aired this interesting piece on “data rot” for his CBS Sunday Morning tech series, which has been transcribed for the New York Times web site. Aside from containing some interesting geek trivia and a renewed warning that DVD lifespans vary greatly (5 to 100 years, depending on the brand and storage conditions), the line that smacked me in the face was “well, hard disks only last five years, generally.” And that’s not Pogue saying it; that’s Dag Spicer at the Computer History Museum, who is trying to preserve these things.

I know a lot of people have migrated away from tape backups to hard drives stacked in a closet; I know I copied as many of our old Exabytes as I could read onto an external FireWire 400 drive (in addition to using redundant DVDs of more recent material). I’ve always worried about stored drives spinning up again and potential “sticktion” problems; this is the first time I’ve personally heard a time frame put on it by someone of authority. And as we know, FireWire 400 is getting dropped by some computers as well. It sounds like backing up data is no longer a save-and-forget-it exercise (not that it ever was), but instead a shell game we need to be playing constantly in order to keep backups up-to-date.

Regardless of media used, as we noted earlier still make two copies - just to be extra safe.

A Rose-Colored Tint, by Any Other Name

Although I am primarily an After Effects artist, I also spend some time in Final Cut Pro and Motion. Quite often, I want to translate a favorite technique from one into the others. Unfortunately, this is usually accompanied by a spirited session of find-the-filter as the same visual effect may have different names - even between Apple’s own applications!

Unlearning by Example

Just stumbled across a fun blog about bad logo design: Your Logo Makes Me Barf. It’s not just about poking fun at bad design; quite often the critiques contain useful advice and explanation (note: they prefer simplicity…). Experienced designers will get a laugh; newcomers will get a useful education and potentially learn to avoid common mistakes.

As long as we’re talking about bad examples, I have to mention the classic Gallerie Abominate: a collection of truly horrendous 3D modeling and animation with matching lowbrow sense of humor. It hasn’t been updated for years, but it doesn’t matter: Unlike some flavor-of-the-month “good” designs, bad design seems to always endure.

Circling Around the Drain

I felt what is referred to as “the shock of recognition” while reading this first-person account on Newsweek.com about life in The Industry during the current recession: This sounds a lot like what our life was like just a few years ago. Although we work(ed) in the motion graphics side of the business rather than production, it was a similar situation: we lived from job to job, every job was paid in full, and we hoped another job came in before the money ran out. During the good times, we had a steady stream of jobs, with very little breathing room in-between. But as the years went on, the highs got higher (more jobs in at the same time), and the lows in between got longer. Fortunately, Trish is a wizard at calculating cash flow (hint: it’s not about knowing how much money you have in the bank today, and spending based on that; it’s about knowing the date when the money runs out, and throttling your expenditures based on that), so we managed through the lulls just fine before the phone rang again - but the trend was disturbing.

1000 Words is Worth More Than Most Pictures

This fun animation by Alex Gopher where objects are replaced with words that represent them is what Marc Canter would refer to as an “again” experience: It is worth viewing more than once in order to catch all of the clever references.

Please feel free to share links to other examples of clever type animation (such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) in the Comments below…

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