Woo Blog

And we got the new laptop cases to prove it! (Or at least to have something to show for.)

Mike and I had coincidentally together seen the laptop case featured on NOTCOT.org. I had no idea that Mike saw the post as well, who surprised the office with the case along with custom Lifeyo embroidery! Cases hand-made and homemade by Byrd and Belle, sold through Etsy.com.

Over a day old, Lifeyo is slowly making its way over the internet. We are happy to finally release to the world our special product that has been worked on for a couple years.

What is Lifeyo? It is a website that lets you make websites! Even better, it’s free! Lifeyo believes that making a website shouldn’t be so hard or costly. I think if you were to imagine the simplest way you could make a website, that is what Lifeyo is. Featuring click-and-drag tools, easy photo uploading, professional templates, and unique photo galleries, anyone can be a web design pro from a elementary student to your grandmother. You can have a site with multiple pages, with a blog, share YouTube videos, and more.

Try it out! It’s so easy, it’s FREE, and it only takes a couple clicks to begin editing right away! Check out the videos I made at Lifeyo.com as well. Also check out http://coffee.lifeyo.com, a test site where I throw up some favorite Youtube videos. Enjoy!

The Lifeyo glasses are goin’ around! Lifeyo.com launches September 9th.

Remember the good ol’ days of Geocities, Angelfire, and Homestead, when people had their own homepages? Those days are a-comin’ back!

Lifeyo.com is launching next week, 09-09-09. It’s a website that lets you make websites. No coding required. It’s the answer to every business and hard-working/bored/creative individual that has needed a website but didn’t want to pay a few hundred dollars to pay for one. It’s the answer to people who wish to be able to edit their site quickly and by themselves.

Lifeyo.com features a WYSIWYG editor, click-and-drag photo/text/video objects, and a fool-proof site publishing. Forget FTP, hosting accounts, and servers. You can even pay an affordable year price to get your very own .com/.net/.org domain name!

Here is a photo below that gives a little hint to Lifeyo:

Check out Lifeyo.com and come back on the 9th to get your own free website.

After working for a couple blog-based companies, I got into the practice of blogging. I mainly wanted to see what it was like to be doing something consistently, how to find something to always be able to talk about, and what it would do for me.

After starting a couple different blogs and deleting them, I started Woo Blog (now WooBlog.com). I recently have also started a couple others: GuessWhosForDinner.com and TakeOneTwenty.com.

Guess Who’s For Dinner is a site that my friend and I just started. We talked about doing a photoblog, so with the wonderful help of WordPress, we started this site. It’s a site where we share photos of faces we made out of food (tagline: “We make a face and eat it”).

Earlier this year, I bought the domain, TakeOneTwenty.com, in hopes to start making random 2-minute videos, interviewing local individuals and businesses. I didn’t have much time for that ultimately, and still had the domain. So I forwarded it to a Lifeyo page, and have turned it into another sort of WooBlog/photoblog site, featuring photos of photographers and artists. It’s a site where people can take a couple minutes to check something out online when they are bored, things I at least find worthwhile.

So there they are: Guess Who’s For Dinner and Take One Twenty. Lifeyo.com will be launching soon, September 9, 2009. With Lifeyo, you can make your own entire website without any knowledge of coding or design, for free. You can also have a blog on the site, easily share photos and videos, and much more. Check it out in September!

Lifeyo launching in September! Check out the sweet shades that came in the mail.

Have you heard of NOTCOT? It is a fantastic blog that people can offer submissions to. The blog is filled with square eye-candy images featuring unique concepts, products, designs, art, and much much more that gain the interests of numerous kinds of artists.

To be honest, I was just thinking a couple minutes ago why my submissions never make it live on NOTCOT.org. I had even been considering minutes ago about writing a mock blog post to list steps of what it took to be in NOTCOT’s favor (consisting but not limited to “impractical installations”, a so-easy-to-make website that the person who blogs on it must be an intellectual artist, plants and lawns in places where they don’t belong).

But to be fair, I have really only shared two. There was one I came across, a stop-motion video created by Brandon Goodwin  featuring Darren King, drummer of MuteMath (I’m a fan). The video consists of what looks like photo cut-outs of the characters that act out a cute scene of a boy and girl getting along, and a mean cowboy who goes after them. All this takes place in a house.

I thought, girl in cute dress, boy in fedora and the decades clothing, cute story, unique video concept taken to a new level, how can NOTCOT not post this?

So I admit, a few minutes ago, I thought that this second submission was a true sign of NOTCOT maybe just not being all that I had hoped. I came across another one of their postings which took me to a website that had a white background, simple and large clean text of two solid colors, and large images. I thought to myself, this is what it takes to be in the NOTCOT club. And I’m not in that club. I sent them a link to a YouTube video.

I scrolled down. I see a P.I.S.S. invention, a contraption that allows a guy to pee into what looks like leads into a watering can-like spout to feed plants. This is what they like, not a YouTube video featuring a drummer of a progressive rock band.

I scrolled down some more. And there it was, in its own box. Darren and girl dancing on a magazine, with my name underneath, and a caption with words I submitted:

http://www.notcot.org/post/23341/

So there it is. Does this make me officially part of the NOTCOT club? I feel like I have done a good deed. Whatever, it isn’t much, but I will always remember my first, just as I remember my first IMDb credit (I believe it had something to do with a project related to Lindsay Lohan’s dad ….). In any case, it is there, for NOTCOT readers to click on and also join in on the love for Darren … and girl.

So what does NOTCOT like? Apparently, drummers of progressive rock bands … and paper-cut music videos, very Gondry-esque … and P.I.S.S. contraptions. So it’s a whole variety, but the point is they catch your eye, whether with great interest or great doubt.

(Now why they didn’t take my first submission of amazing camera shots of Ken Block’s stunt driving and why they took a submission of a bad skateboard commercial, I’ll never know. It was Ken Block with Rob Dyrdek. Maybe it was the Dyrdek part that held the submission down.)

An awesome band and good friends, Fairlane, are throwing an epic house show this weekend. This is as indie and low-budget as you get. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all learned some pretty useful DIY tips in rigging and hooking up everything in Dan’s living room.

Of course, even with low-key shows you do at home, you still want to approach it with a great amount of professionalism. Keep safety in mind, predict any kind of accident, think of traffic ways, and make sure you won’t blow out your breaker. Rooms in houses won’t have the kind of amperage and easy hookups as music venues would have.

One thing I’ll share in this post is how to work safely with cables running amok on wooden floors. Because this show is designed to not only put on a full performance for friends and family but also for our cameras for DVD recordings, we’ve got cables from lights as well as from the instruments and gears.

The room has a lot of white walls, so light easily bounces off. Luckily this enables us to work with just three lights in the front and one in the back, and Christmas lights around.

You’ve gotta always be careful with working on wood/wood-like floors. I’ve worked on many productions where the floors are too easily disregarded and end up getting ripped from the surface because of gaff tape.

Another important thing to worry about is amperage. In a house, you normally have about 1500 to 2000 amps. Check your breaker to see what your room can handle. I believe even with all our amps, monitors, lights, etc., we are under 1K amps.

The electrical items on the stage right run across the room to plug into outlets toward stage left. These items are a flood lamp, monitor, and a speaker. The photos below show the process of how to tape them down.

STEP ONE:

You definitely won’t want to put gaff tape over the cords right on the hard floors. That kind of tape is still strong enough to rip up the surface or cause splinters. To avoid this, place paper tape on the ground, underneath where the cords will be (and if needed, be sure to sweep up underneath before, since paper tape isn’t that sticky). Paper tape is very thin, thinner than masking tape, and can come in various colors. We had blue painter’s tape on hand, so I placed three long stripes of it straight across the room underneath where the cords would be lying.

STEP TWO:

I know this sounds anal, but you’ve gotta be OCD about these things, whether it’s a house show or a big theatre, to save you time later from worrying or having to re-tape things. You want to lay out your cords side-by-side, like in the photo, and make sure they’re not running on top of each other. Remember we’re just using tape here, so if it’s stepped on, you won’t want one cord being pressed onto another. Unless you have cable protectors, you’ll want to keep these side-by-side. MAKE SURE that you give enough slack at the ends. If someone steps on a cable at the end of your wonderful taped work, you want to make sure it won’t knock something over or unplug anything. Giving it slack for the cable to be rested on the floor up until it reaches the wall or electrical object will ensure even more safety.
 

STEP THREE: 

Now I can lay down the gaffer’s tape over the paper tape and cables. Chose a 2-inch black, of course, to hide the blue and make it not so noticeable during the show. Before you lay down long strips of the black gaff, place short strips across the cables (leaving slack at the ends) first. This not only makes it easier to place down long horizontal strips, but this is also commonly done to avoid messy clean-up. If you only place horizontal long strips on the cables, imagine pulling up the cable during wrap-up and the tape getting wrapped around the cable, stuck to itself. It SUCKS to try to pull off. So this is a very necessary step especially for taping down just one cable (see below).

STEP FOUR:

Now tape away with your long horizontal strips of black gaff! Not that important, but I just placed one long strip to cover the first half of cables, and then another long strip for the other half, and then did a couple more to cover the blue edges. See the end results below!

 DEALING WITH ONE CORD:

You would treat this the same as with doing multiple cords. One useful thing I’ve learned is to make an X with two short strips for a single cord, and then place the long horizontal strip over. Remember that ugly annoying thing I mentioned that happens when you have a long horizontal strip get stuck to itself around a cord? Making X’s will help avoid that and easier to clean up.

Now just tape down as usual!

Check out a couple more pics from our setup! The show will take place end of this week, so I will be sure to post up more pics and share some video from our awesome DIY house show!

You don't have to be a big signed touring band to have a lighting tech! Lights are hooked to household dimmers that someone will be dimming/switching on and off to synch lights with the music.

Velcro is your best friend (along with gaff tape, rope, and clamps). If other things won't work, velcro can help rig or attach something, like this lamp to a small light stand. With a little screwing of a bolt to keep the lamp angle in place and some tight velcro wrapping, the lamp is now steady and ready.