Tom Hapgood

Bloody Finger band video

To all of you who asked, here’s the video. I stress the “15 years since I’ve played,” and many apologies to Allen and Tommy, who are actually quite competent musicians. See it here.

‘Bloody Finger’ Performs at 80s Party

My new band, ‘Bloody Finger,’ played our first gig the other night at my birthday party. On my right is Allen “Anim-eater” Renfroe, and on my left Tommy “Insane in the Membrane” Loya, who played a bit with Cypress Hill in the 90s. I haven’t picked up a guitar and played with any serious intentions for 15 years and the three of us had never played together once. I probably shouldn’t have tried the guitar solo… (The hair was the closest I could find to the original mullet (below) and ended up a cross between Dee Snider and Bette Midler.)

Maybe some video coming soon.

24-Hour Film Festival through Art Amiss

Ready. Set. Shoot….

Prepare for the ultimate test of your creative abilities, not to mention your plain old endurance and will: The first annual Art Amiss 24 Hour Film Festival will take place in conjunction with Art Amiss VIII. An unlimited number of teams will race to complete a short film in the course of a single day. The likely-to-be uneven results will be screened at Art Amiss VIII.

More details here.

‘Beacon of Hope’ Receives Best of Festival Award

Beacon of Hope-The Story of the University of Arkansas (Carpenter/Foley 2007 [animation by Tom Hapgood]), will receive the “Best of Festival” award at the Broadcast Education Association annual meeting April 16-19 in Las Vegas.

The Broadcast Education Association (BEA, 250 colleges and universities) is the professional association for professors, industry professionals and graduate students who are interested in teaching and research related to electronic media and multimedia enterprises.

BEA was established in 1955, initially as the Association for Professional Broadcast Education, but the current name was adopted in 1973. While the BEA organizational name reflects our historic roots in preparing college students to enter the radio & TV business, the members share a diversity of interests involving all aspects of telecommunications and electronic media. Over 1,300 professors, students and media professionals are currently individual members and approximately 250 college and university departments and schools are institutional members. Associate memberships are available for stations, cable systems, advertising agencies, law firms and individual professionals who share BEA’s interests and support its goals.

The Passing of the Last of Disney’s Nine Old Men

Knowing the advanced years of Ollie Johnston, the last living member of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men” team of animators, I set up an automatic Google Alert that would let me know when his name passed through the major news outlets. I knew that it would probably be news of his death, as he was in his mid 90s. Surely enough, the Alerts started coming in today and it turns out that Ollie Johnston, one of the main animators on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Bambi and Pinocchio, has passed on. I just told my animation class earlier this semester about Ollie Johnston and his presence on the Disney Team for all those years, and last semester we watched “Frank and Ollie.” I just checked Wikipedia and it has already been updated. Long live Ollie Johnston!

Weather widgets

I’m a weather afficionado. I actually sit and watch the weather channel. I watch the local weather during the local news broadcast on tv. I check various weather web sites to keep updated. I check the accuweather mobile web page on my phone. I look at the newspaper charts and maps. I look out the window continually to see what’s going on with the cloud patterns and precipitation chances and will sit and watch the rain or snow come down as if I’ve never seen it before.

One method that I’ve really come to enjoy and rely on is hitting the F12 key on my Mac and watching my weather widgets come open in Dashboard. As you can see from the thumbnails, I have about nine that I watch. These widgets come from mostly differing organizations and individuals, from what I can tell. Many of the widgets are well-designed and work otherwise very well. Most include nice design elements such as “shininess,” elegant transparency and a straightforward layout, using the normal css, html and javascript. Most of the time I have them set to the same location: Fayetteville, AR, where I live. Other times, when weather around here is “slow,” I’ll set them to various locations where I’ve lived or spent time, such as Framingham, Massachusetts, Tucson, Arizona, Karlsruhe, Germany, Naples, Italy and London, England.

The widgets usually include the following: static and animated maps imagery (radar, satellite, infrared and combinations), daily or hourly forecast graphics and temperatures, a large real-time temperature display and atmospheric icon, interface animation, webcams and weather photos.

One problem is that none of the widgets seems to work perfectly. It’s a fun time trying to sort out the truth from all the widgets when they don’t match up in many ways, such as on the radar map. For instance, the AccuWeather.com widget tends to always display a very outdated doppler image when compared to the weather.com, WeatherBug or the others (see my screen grab). It could even be considered dangerous when you see that we’re under a tornado watch box in most of the maps except for the AccuWeather one. I have reported this a few times but it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.

Another annoyance, which one eventually gets used to, is deciphering which links/buttons on the widget will affect another state or section of the widget versus links/buttons that just jump out to the browser. As far as i can tell, the widget makers don’t consistently distinguish, with the sometimes exception of Weatherbug. Their “tabs” open sections in the lower pane, while their links in the lower pane tend to look like standard underlined hyper links.  Even their consistency has a limit, though, with the upper pane “More Observations” and “Alerts” buttons, which open the browser. Point being, when I’m in widget world I’d like to stay in widget world, or know exactly when I’m going to be thrust back into browser world. They could probably solve the problem by throwing an underline on the “More Observations” link and somehow on the ALERTS. The constantly moving wind speed and direction indicator on the WeatherBug widget is nice. They could probably lose the red mercury thermometer at the left as it amounts to clutter for me.

Many of the widgets have animated interface elements with click-inspired drawers that open and close, or collapsing/simplifying looks (default Apple weather widget), or an expanding weather map. The animation “award” probably goes to the NOAA round widget for having animation happen at just about every click. Click one of the four tabs and they circle around and disappear behind the round body of the widget, then animate out to reappear when the reset button is clicked. A nice touch, which shows they’ve done their interface/usability testing, is that when I click the Radar tab, it shows me the radar from a high altitude, then automatically zooms down closer to my actual location for a few seconds before slowly zooming back out to a regional view. Very slick.

The “Cams” or webcams features are pretty OK, but I don’t use the “Photos” much as they seem to be random photos of flowers and bugs.

The “Aviation Weather” widget I include just because I am also an aircraft freak and like to pretend that all of the data on that widget makes complete sense to me. The major problem with that widget is that it won’t remember my location and defaults constantly back to Switzerland. The developer Pascal Dreer seems to have made available an update that I’ll install, which might take care of that problem. I include the BBC’s widget because I like the economical design and pretending I “might be going” to London soon. (It has only settings for England.)

One of the reasons we moved out of southern Arizona was to live among seasons, green, water, weather and Arkansas has proven to be just the place for all of it. Here we have, as they say, four distinct seasons, which has made it a very fulfilling place for a weather-phile like me.

Where to get the widgets:
Aviation Weather Widget
NOAA Weather Widget
Weather Channel widget (and gadgets)
Weather Underground Widget
WeatherBug Widget
AccuWeather Weather Widget
BBC Weather Widget

Private Property Exhibition Opening Reception

Video footage of the opening reception of the Private Property exhibition featuring Tom Hapgood and Bethany Springer, in the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Arkansas.

Second Life Andidate Convention

The Web 2 class has completed setting up their “andidate’s” convention booth/presence on the UA island in Second Life. I’m trying to figure out how to best get people in there to walk around for a day or two, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are the images of each student’s work. Which andidate would you vote for?

UATV’s new Tech show off and running

Check out our own Josh Daugherty as an anchor on UATV’s "RJ45" tech show. Check it out.

Web 2 Projects Posted

Check out the first Flash-animated logo project by the Visual Design: Web 2 class and pick out your favorite “andidate,” or first android/robot candidate for President of the United States in the 2048 election. View the “andidates” here.