Discorax's House of w00t

I work at PBJS a creative agency that does a lot of work as a vendor for Microsoft. As a creative agency we do a lot of design work on Macs. The entire Art Department has Macs, I have a Macbook Pro laptop, our editing stations are Mac Pros. You get the idea. This is nothing shocking, the majority of creative agencies I've seen have Macs as their primary workhorse machines.

Since I do a lot of development I have a PC as my primary work machine, along with my fellow Interactive developers. I use Visual Studio for a lot of my coding. I'd even say "I'm a PC" on one of those ads. The fact is, I use them both to do my job depending on the given task.

Right now we are doing an installation for the new Microsoft Company Store. This week myself and the art director are going on-site to tweak in the space. Since we need to have our work computers with us, we needed to find a way to sneak a Mac Pro into Building 92. A picture is worth 1000 words!





MacPro box, turned inside out with Simon, our logo, and the words "I'm a PC". That should do nicely!

Labels: Microsoft, PBJS

PBJS, the data-driven creative agency where I have been working for past three years was recently aquired by Publicis, the fourth largest advertising firm in the world. That's right, the WORLD. Since the news broke today there have been a few articles talking about the acquisition:

• Press Release


• 
  The Seattle Times


• 
  paidcontent.org

Around the office we're thrilled to expand our list of world class brands/clients. The opportunities to get involved in new and cutting edge live experiences and digital advertising is really exciting. I'm particularly excited about the GLOBAL reach our small company can have. In a difficult economy, PBJS is looking very strong. It's a great place to be and I'm stoked to be a part of it.

Way to go PBJS, and way to go Simon!

Labels: PBJS

I've been working hard the past few weeks on a Silverlight Rich Media Expandable Ad project at PBJS. The task at hand was to really push the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in to do things it wasn't really designed to do. The project was generally a success. What I'm planning on doing is putting up some code snippets that I used to create this project to hopefully shed some light on Silverlight 1.0 for anyone that is interested in learning it.

The project pays homage to the Justice D.A.N.C.E. Video but adds an interactive element where you can influence the animations on the shirts.



For now, please check out the project.Please leave comments about any questions you might have.

I'm also going to try to see if I can get everything working live on this page, just curious at how well the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in will work inside blogger.

update: didn't work so well. so please view the project here.

With Silverlight 2.0 coming out soon, I'm very interested in making use of some of the features that were lacking in the 1.0 release, namely Rich UI Controls, Alpha Channel support in video, and a more robust graphical rendering engine. This project did push me into learning more about XAML and how to manipulate it using JavaScript.

XAML is pretty slick. The biggest drawback that I've seen so far is it's a little verbose for markup. In many cases, characters could be left out and it would cut down significatly on the file size of the XAML. It also requires all data to be a string, which isn't very efficient in my option. In many cases, I had to convert values to and from integers and strings because I couldn't use integers as values for attributes like Canvas.Left and Opacity. That struck me as a little odd, but I digress.

The other thing is every time you enter a value for a color, XAML adds the Alpha value as well. In my opinion, the default should be full Opacity every time unless otherwise stated. So #ff0000 for Red rather than #ffff0000, which is two extra characters for every color. There is probably a good reason for this, but I don't know why.

The Code Trip is kicking off after Mix08. I'm really anxious to see what kind of apps the guys come up with. I think Silverlight does have a valuable place on the web, and I hope to see more cool implementations in the near future using the new 2.0 features. For now I've been reading Scott Guthrie's blog which has a preview of Silverlight 2.0. There will be a lot of Silverlight hype in the coming months, I'm looking forward to the dust settling and taking a calm look at the aftermath and enjoying some full featured Silverlight Apps.

Labels: Javascript, Mix08, PBJS, Silverlight

At PBJS, I recently worked on a slick minisite to promote the Seattle Symphony Popular culture series starting in Feb 2008. The shows feature Bela Fleck, Los Lobos, and Herbie Hancock. Check it out, it's well done and if you're into any of the bands click on the buy now links. I'm totally stoked to see Los Lobos! See you there!

http://www.popularcultureseattle.com

The site was built using Flash. All the cool tweening was done using the MCTween extension for AS2 as well as a touch of Fuse.

Labels: Flash, PBJS

Pat making his tummy happy, with a little morning pick-me-up.

At PBJS, where I work, we occasionally throw out our diets for some tasty treats. This usually happens when the "Red Box of Happiness" is seen floating around the kitchen. The Red Box refers to a dozen of Top Pot's freshly made doughnuts. The bakery is only a few blocks away. It's amazing that there isn't a Red Box of Happiness around more often.

This blog post is created to celebrate good intentions, happy co-workers, and of course fried dough.

Thank you Red Box, Thank you.

Labels: PBJS