Sean Toohey

I first started creating digital artwork back in the mid 80s on my IBM PCjr in amazing 16 colours. In the 90s I switched to using Director and then Flash 3+ to create various pieces that I have long lost to the digital scrapheap. Last week at Gnomedex 10 in Seattle I watched artist/programmer/DJ & Googlite Scott Draves present 2 decades of open source artwork, and i wished I could recover some of my lost art.. but at the same time my work could never compare to the amazing and complex work Scott produces like the Darwinian AI Screen-saver Electric Sheep . Watch the video from gnomedex,  and ask yourself if androids dream of electric sheep. Here are my live tweets from the presentation: *10 @ spot #gnomedex 12:04 PM Aug 21st   Did he just Say 1 hr per frame to render!!! @ spot #gnomedex 12:03 PM Aug 21st @ paulbalcerak No explanation needed, just let it wash over you. 1...

Today I was watching a video on the first bloggers, and it occurred to me that I was blogging back in the mid 90s and yet the pages I created are long since dead and buried, fading away long ago with my University & Geocites Accounts. Then I recalled that I had built a website while working at the University of Toronto back in 1995/96 and that I had last updated the website with a slick javascript drop-down menu and stylish background some time in mid 1997. So I looked up the site , and behold, they have not changed it from my original 1997 design! WOW 12 years and the site has remained virtual unchanged. They have of course updated and augmented content, but my original structure, headings, logos & navigation have remained and somehow stood the test of webtime! I don't know how or why this has happened. It was a simple site and the original requirements were to keep it lean and image free for quick modem downloads. It seems those simple requirements have sustained the s...

I Recently converted our usedeverywhere.com websites over to the Google Ad Manager (GAM) platform, but I hit a wall... Google recommends you use no more than 1000 Ad slots. But my pilot site was running well with over 2500 ad slots and I was planning to roll out to 10+ sites, with a total of more than 25,000 possible ad slots... I met with Google and they recommended doing this with custom targeting, using category & sub-cats. Unfortunately the targeting they proposed would not work for us, and I'd already set up the first batch of Ad slots so i posed the question: "Can your application handle 30,000 ad slots and 2500 placements?" The answer was yes, but it may slow down forecasting... so no big deal.... Well, as it turns out the real answer is NO, GAM can't handle that many Ad slots. Sure the underlying system can handle it (Doubleclick perhaps??), but the Inventory Tab becomes completely unusable and the I can no longer create new Ad Placements! So, I ...