4D Advertising – PopWars

April 28, 2010August 23, 2019

Kickin’ It Live

My new Obama health plan covers yearly physicals and I had one yesterday. The timing, so close to a significant birthday, made it feel like a test to see if I can handle the whole thing. So far, so good but the blood tests are still out. We walked up to the park to see if the yellow magnolias had opened and they have. We plan on celebrating tonight at the Little Theater. Peggi ordered a big cake. Stop out if you’d like a piece. Not sure who’s gonna be in the band tonight. It’s been been fun playing with James the piano player. If I’m lucky it will be all new and different for my birthday.

The Rochester Music Hall of Fame has a shindig this weekend and we were asked to do a site for them but we have had a hard time getting around to it. We dove in today and did it live. There’s not much up there but an announcement and a form but it’s a thrill building it while it’s live rather than offline. We just finished doing Buffalo’s PosterArtUSA that way. It’s an Xcart site with credit card authorization, and he got an order within minutes of pulling the secure transaction switch. We’re behind with a few other sites so I won’t link to them.

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March 23, 2010August 23, 2019

New York Central Again

Buffalo Bills jacket in the neighborhood

I did really simple photo site for our nephew last night. He’s uploading photos to it right now. It’s a one page site with links to photos that display themselves in a slideshow script called shadowbox 3.0. I really like it because he can put large full screen Flickr size photos up there and if the browser window isn’t big enough it scales them down. The site took about two hours to construct.

I love coincidences. Yesterday I took a photo of Rochester’s long gone train station and today we went to work on Mark Corsi’s PosterArtUSA’s site today and he has some posters of the Art Deco New York Central Terminal in Buffalo. It was abandoned in 1975 but was never torn down, probably because the city couldn’t afford to do so. Recently a historic preservation group has brought it back to life. Mark’s site will have Xcart installed so people can buy Buffalo posters while he sleeps.

Now all we need is that high speed train between Rochester and Buffalo that everybody keeps talking about.

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July 17, 2009August 24, 2019

España

Hill in the country south of Rochester, NY

I would take a ride in the country any day over slugging it out with html, php and css. Although I did enjoy getting thoroughly obsessed with making this page work in the PC version of Explorer. I must have worked on it until one in the morning. I didn’t really intend to get into this whole project of redesigning our web site. You know how it is with a plumber getting around to fixing his own leaky faucet. But we ran out of business cards a few months ago, printed some online, passed a few out and then realized the site should sort of look like the card. So we did a simple rework with most of the old content. The whole site is now only five or so pages because we put all of the content in iFrames so you can scroll through it. I did the Web Design page and the Logos page with an iFrame and everything was cool. When I got the Print page I wanted to pop the small graphics up to show enlargements and I managed to find a version of the Lightbox script that would pop photos up out of the iframe and into the parent but when I tested it in IE8 on the PC the photos tried to open inside the iframe. Grrrr.

So I called Bill Jones and he talked me through setting up a scrollable div that served the same purpose and took on the extra challenge of doing the the page without tables. It was fun but not as nice as hopping in the car driving down to my brother‘s place in South Bristol. We did that the other day and came across this hillside that reminded us of Spain. Now, that would really be fun.

Margaret Explosion plays tonight at an opening at Genesee Center for the Arts. I’m thinking of just bringing my djembe instead of the whole kit.

Five Letters – First & Last The Same

Peggi Fournier in 4D Advertising offices

Peggi didn’t know I was taking this photo until she turned around. (see Steve’s comment below) She was battling the Flash encoder in order to post a movie on the Kazoo site. The five gallon water container shown here is empty. It’s the last one we will ever drink from. In fact I’m going to throw the whole dispenser out. It looks ridiculous anyway. We have had bottled water delivered for years and now we read that the plastic leaches hormones. I was wondering why I was hitting so many home runs lately. Good thing 4D doesn’t have a drug testing policy. I always suspected we would be better off drinking tap water.

Xerox moved their corporate headquarters out of town but they are still one of Rochester’s biggest employers. The word “Xerox” was formerly synonymous with a “copy” but they don’t even make copiers anymore. Does Kodak even make film anymore? And how about the fact that both of these Rochester companies have names that begin and end with the same consonant? Kodak was first so I guess that makes Xerox the “copy” cats. And then along comes Lowel where our buddy, Duane Sherwood works.

When Xerox announced their new logo, a spokesman was quoted as saying that it was a “significant multimillion-dollar marketing investment.” Multimillion for this? Why didn’t they hire 4D? We would have done this job for $5000. And that would have included five rounds of revisions, online/telephone review and the provision that we not be included in any of their committee meetings. We would have saved them $4,995,000.

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January 15, 2008August 30, 2019

Dear Diary

On the front page of our local paper yesterday there was a story about some remarks that either Hillary or Obama made about race. We couldn’t tell from the article who said what or why it was controversial. But the headline made it sound as if it was newsworthy. The article came from the Associated Press and it was probably so heavily edited by one of the few full time Gannett staffers that it came out incoherent.

Which brings me to the comment that Steve Hoy made on the “Send Us Your Problems” entry. Steve bailed me out when I was a freshman and we were roommates. I had a paper due the next morning and I was grumbling about it and Steve said, “Let me write it”. He banged it off and called it “Time, The Fourth Dimension”. I had my doubts but turned it in anyway and got an “A” along with a comment addressed to “Mr. Dodd” with an explanation point after it. And I work for a small company named 4D.

My nephew who is a senior in high school and one year younger than I was when Steve wrote that paper for me is in San Francisco for MacWorld. I’ve been following their adventures on his blog, The iLife. He and his friend got in line yesterday for today’s keynote address by Steve Jobs. They were first in line and were interviewed by Justine from iJustine.tv.

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