Posts from 2006

What is it about the Japanese that they loooove to blend colors?

Lest you think I’m indulging in some sort of bizarre racial stereotyping, I submit for your consideration the Technorati search results for blogs and other sites pointing to my Color Blender.  The Blender been moderately popular ever since its release, but so far as I can tell, the Asian market is just eating it up.  If I see a new Japanese site appear in my egorati feed, the odds are 49 out of 50 that it’ll be linking to the Blender.

So what’s the deal there?  Anyone have insights, specuation, or even translations that might shed some light on this little enigma?

(Note: it turns out that these are Chinese blogs using Japanese fonts, and not Japanese sites as I originally thought.  I’m leaving the original entry intact rather than update it.  Still, this means that the essence of the original question remains, even if the geography was off by a bit.)

• Japanese Color Blending was published on Friday, January 6th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Humor, and Tools categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.

Yes, two posts just showed up that are dated in the past week.  Just correcting a little holiday glitch—one of several, as it happens.  Anyway, move along, there’s nothing to see here!  Well, besides those two old-yet-new posts.  And this one.

I’m sorry, let me start over.

Look for posts in the next few days regarding Japanese color blending, my 2006 speaking schedule (as it currently stands, anyway), and the alpha release of a new version of S5.  Now with The Wolf!  (…cue salivating sounds from Mike Davidson.)

• Catching Up was published on Thursday, January 5th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

In my work with Happy Cog Studios, which is a strategic partner with Complex Spiral Consulting, we’ve had occasion to send each other really big files, like Photoshop design comps and so forth.  As just about everyone knows, this is hard to do via e-mail, since SMTP servers usually cap attachment sizes at 10MB.  Even if a file size is below that limit, it’s kind of a pain to send large attachments.  Your e-mail client sits there slowly uploading the attachment, and then on the other end, someone else’s e-mail client gets to sit there slowly downloading it.

This is why we started uploading our files to our personal web sites via FTP, and sending around the URLs in email.  That’s great for macho geeks like us, even if it is a bit tedious, but not so great for most people.

You know what would be great for most people?  DropSend.  You can upload files via your browser, or grab a desktop application (for both Mac OS X and Windows!) to handle that part.  Then you just send a link to the file to people who need it, and you’re done.  There’s a basic free account which ought to satisfy any occasional user, and some fairly cheap paid account levels to add more storage and sending capabilities.  If you’re in search of a better way to send really large files, it’s worth a look.

Nice site design, too.

Disclaimer: the creator of DropSend, Ryan Carson, is also the founder of Carson Workshops, for whom I’ve done a couple of seminars.  For that matter, he’s a co-founder of BD4D.

• DropSend was published on Monday, January 2nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been eight replies.