Fire-Wired Blog

If there's one thing that keeps a job fresh and worth waking up for everyday, it's a fun workplace. My previous job at the Communications Research Institute in Oskaloosa was probably the closest to a 9-to-5-Chuck-E.-Cheese-play-land as I'll ever come with a gang of fun coworkers, weekly fun projects, and regular after hours social gatherings, but there's one annual event at the Iowa State University Foundation that rivals any and all of the festivities from my days at CRI. Every February the ISUF holds a employee dessert bake off competition. Departments combine their creative juices and presents a themed dessert to the staff. Prior to my joining the Foundation in 2012 I'm told the event was fun, but I'd like to believe the competitive and creative forces of myself and Ryan Peterson, the Foundation's graphic designer, pushed it to a new level of ridiculousness. In 2012 our team fashioned our dessert around the election year, baking up Cauc...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Why is the Internet full of lists? Headlines with numbers in them? Pictures filling out social network feeds? And what is with all the random bolded text on the Internet? The answer to all of the above is your brain and eyes. Our eyeballs are naturally attracted to pictures over text, bulleted lists over four-sentence paragraphs, headings that promise exact values over ambiguity and areas of importance in text over uniform print. Remember in school textbooks how pages broke information into color-coded sections with diagrams and bolded keywords? That is exactly what the Internet has become. Buzzfeed is huge because it has mastered all these techniques. At any point on Buzzfeed’s front page, a good deal of the headlines have numbers in them, promising listed information for easy consumption. Lists are akin to information junk food easy to consume and process for quick consumption. Altogether these concepts form the id...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The last couple years have been a nonstop thrill-ride for Hollywood. While box office revenues have broken records, the real suspense-filled adventure is not happening on the screen but inside the theater projector. Fewer terms are more analog than film, a physical medium that stores single frame pictures in sequence. But the last decade has seen everything analog supplanted by the more cost effective digital. Actual film is rarely used, theater sound is digitally disturbed, 3D, iMax, and high frame rate projection have made choosing your movie going experience akin to building a custom burrito, and studios now digitally distribute movies instead of delivering film reels to theaters. How will this transition impact the moviegoer? Unless you live in a rural area not much, but for the industry as a whole it’s outright revolution. Digital projection is both a godsend and a death sentence for the entertainment world. Shipping ha...