I’m willing to bet that the one factor slowing down your websites is image size. Optimizing your images can reduce your loading time, and if you have an image-heavy site, can reduce the bandwidth usage, potentially saving you cash on your hosting.

If you save images using Photoshop, then the File>Save for Web and Devices dialogue can save you a little memory with your images, but there’s only so much it can do.

Punypng is a free web service that promises great lossless reductions, (more so than smush.it even!) of up to 44% reduction…it supports .jpg, .gif, and .png, and dirty transparency. Check out their benchmarks for a side-by-side comparison.

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After a lot of hard work, auto-didactic self-discipline, and cups of tea, I’ve managed to finish and upload my portfolio website. I had designed several self-promotional pieces, but was hanging fire with the printing and distribution until my folio site went online.

Well, the wait is over…as of this friday, http://xanderashwell.co.uk is now live!

(I strongly suggest you check out the hire page too, if not only because I’m wearing a fetching little number on that page)

I’ll now be concentrating on thonlyshape.com, my new zine, featuring loads of creative geniuses.

I’ll also be revamping this blog at some point, as I hate having a generic theme.

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If, like me, you own and love your Macbook Pro, then most likely you’re looking at installing Snow Leopard soon, if you haven’t already.

The sensible way to install Snow Leopard is to get Time Machine to back up all your files just before you upgrade to Snow Leopard, use the Install Disc to run a fresh install, and then restore your files using Time Machine. It takes half an hour longer than an upgrade, but it’s worth it, trust me.

Snow Leopard is a welcome new OS upgrade…It smoothly and silently supports 64bit processing, it’s been ported to Cocoa, and makes native apps launch and run like Usain Bolt.…and it frees up about 6GB from your harddrive.…not bad eh?

However…

I spent a few days wrestling with my Macbook after the upgrade, and it was obvious something was up…opening itunes took literally hours, forget about any Adobe software…and I could tell just from listening to my Macbook Pro that the processor was working overtime just to provide the Finder interface.

After some detective work through console and Terminal, I discovered that a preference list file called coreaudiod (path /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist ) was eating up virtual memory all the time. If your macbook is having a simlar problem, there’s a pretty simple solution: delete it, and restart your Macbook…problem solved!

Enjoy Snow Leopard!

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If you are truly lucky, at certain points in your life you will have moments of searingly beautiful realisation. These moments might happen once every ten years, or more, but they are brought on by a realisation of scale, a realisation of existence, or an acceptance of truth.

For me, they are often brought about by witnessing a fantastically special moment, often involving nature, and often involving a sense of the absolute honest scale of our home. Most recently, I was sitting on a plane from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador da Bahia, shortly after sunset, watching lightning storms dance across the sky all around the aeroplane, and seeing several shooting stars drifting across the sky. The sudden sense of proportion, not just in physical dimensions, but also in terms of sheer power, was awesome.

Those who wish to believe in something might give this moment a name attached to their beliefs; a religious experience, or a moment of enlightenment.

I choose to see these moments as a tiny ricochet of realisation, bouncing off the surface of what is real. We are trapped by our senses and physical being, obeying the boundaries of our capabilities, but every so often we can get a brief glimpse of life outside these senses, raw power and life energy.

Witnessing nature’s brute-iful (sic) power is incredible, and reminds me of just how diminutive and feeble we are, despite our technological advances/advantage. Experiencing the serendipitous nocturnal display from a “safe” distance accentuates this; I only had a long-distance insinuation of what those lightning storms were like, and even that was incredible.

Less than a week after I experienced this in-flight spectacle, Air France flight 447  was brought down by a similar event. Nature is gigantic, and powerful. It’s easy to forget, sitting in a cotton-wool country such as the UK, where only flu and adders threaten us.

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In this super-simple tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to turn natural skin tones into a golden hue. Ad campaigns such as the recent Chanel “J’adore” have used this stylization to good effect. Not to second-guess that production team’s workflow, but I’m willing to bet that the vast majority (if not all of) of this effect was done in post-production. The technique I’m about to show you can’t reproduce the high levels of glossy chiaroscuro that come from actually painting a model in high-gloss gold (think bond girl); This would require some seriously advanced retouching (digital painting, for want of a better term), and would look pretty obviously retouched. (more…)

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Contrasts

It´s a cliché, but Rio (and Brasil) really is a city of contrasts. One minute you will be surrounded by rich suits, and take fourty steps in a specific direction you can trip over someone sleeping on the street, with literally nothing to their name. One minute you can be surrounded by massive polished marble skyscrapers, the next, seeing people living in wooden shacks smaller and more rickety than your garden shed, perches precariously on a hillside, surrounded by jungle. The avocados are the size of melons (I shit you not) but coffees are smaller than even italian espressos.

The most fantastic of these contrasts (more of a contradiction actually) is deep-fried sushi in batter, something that surely should never have existed.

Beaches

The beaches here are no less part of the city than the metro or the park; lives are lived here, and it is a space that is used for much; vendors walk past sun-worshippers, selling everything; suncream, kites, prawns, fried cheese, drinks, biscuits, jewellery, cloths, clothes, hat s, fruit, etc. They all have their own mantra, stating the sum of their wares, sometimes with such a unique style as to set them apart from their contemporaries; I´m talking about the pineapple man, with a wide, flat basket of abacaxi (pineapple) balances on his head, bright yellow washing up gloves on his hands, who sneaks up on unsuspecting sunbathing ladies and shocks them awake with a yell, brandishing a half pineapple at them, smiling all the while. The beach is used for surfing, bodyboarding, bodysurfing, volleyball, football, futevolei (volleyball with everything but your hands) peteka (think badminton with a feathery ufo and no rackets or net), running, acrobatics, and lazing about. Some homeless guys sleep under palm trees on the beach, pissing behind them, weaving bracelets to sell and collecting empty coke cans to sell for scrap. The beach sustains all walks of life just as sufficiently as any neighborhood, the difference being the lack of buildings.

Capoeira

Capoeira in Rio is hard to find, but not inaccessible– you have to look for it nonetheless, it´s not quite as prominent as I imagined, here at least. Training is held in buildings just on the edges of favelas, just within the boundaries of society, maintaining its history of social periphery. The level of game is higher than the UK, they play closer (in general) than we do, and are more efficient and swift with well-placed kicks and sweeps; it seems that we play to miss slightly, whereas they play to hit, and will only pull their kicks at the last minute, if at all. Training in the heat is hard, but emphasis is placed on music just as much as the game, which is refreshing. My girlfriend and myself have been writing down as many sequences trained as we can remember.

I don´t want to use this blog as a ‘this is what I’ve done´ space, but I have little time to formulate opinions properly, and my time is spent experiencing, assessing levels of safety or otherwise, planning, and most of all, enjoying and relaxing. I’ll try and post some photos up when I get a minute, but they are still on me camera right now.

Much love to you all, be good now,

Xander

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There´s something about being in motion, about seeing new things, experiencing new places, that is a fantastically enriching shock to the system. All your senses work overtime, assessing the alien environment. It´s not just the physical differences in location that is apparent, not just the temperature, climate, or immediate environment. It´s the new sounds, lingual, animal, or mechanical. It´s the rich, fullsome smells, a jumble of fumes muddled together by the humidity and heat. It´s also the feel of a place, that indescribable sense of atmosphere that is a heady mix of every potential possiblity, fed into one ripe location, at one point in time.

Travelling also gives you a sense of yourself, what you truly need, what you simply require, what you possess through a need to consume and own, rather than simply what keeps you going. It gives you a sense of what you use most, what you don´t need at all.

Seeing street kids in Rio, living truly hand-to-mouth, with no thought for the future, no sense of planning ahead or a potential for anything other than the immediate need that the present demands, brings this home to you with a thud. They live only for the now, and as a result, they are disparate, hopeless, angry, and confused.

A future is a true luxury.

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All being well, in less than 48hrs, I’ll be in Rio de Janeiro. I’ll have flown at least a third of the way around the world, after catching a train to London and attempting to sleep in Heathrow. I’ll have struggled to get comfy in economy class, (Mr Jason Finn, you know nothing of this torment) attempting to tuck my knees behind my ears, my head onto my shoulder, and (if I’m lucky) managed to get a jerky, awkward, surreal few minutes sleep.

Not that I’m complaining, about any of this. Galatea and I have been planning this trip for over a year, scheming, dreaming, and willing it into reality. Now that it’s less than two days away from being real, I wouldn’t change anything. We’re going to see Brazil, the country the size of a continent. We intend to play, train, and watch, the beautiful game of capoeira. We hope to mooch our way up the coast, swimming, sunbathing, mucking about, and generally enjoying ourselves. Sounds fantastic, no?

There is a massive knot in my stomach, one that has sat there for a week or so, gradually getting bigger and bigger, more and more domineering, like a spiteful unborn fear, wriggling and twitching it’s mean little dance inside my stomach, beating out the jumpy rhythm of its fear on my torso, and manifesting my apprenhensions in a tight, ropey ball of the unknown, wedged in my midriff. Ironically, the only times I have appeased this little black hole is by playing capoeira, in the two rodas we played to celebrate our departure. The closer I get to flying, the bigger the fear gets. I don’t know that much about it, other than it is borne from the unknown, from a thousand decisions as yet unmade. Brazil is (so I have heard) a dangerous country, especially in the cities. Armed gangs, muggings, robbery, scamsters, etc, are all prevalent. But it isn’t this I fear. (although I might be wise to fear it)

It’s the thought that I, and I alone, am responsible for my journey through life. It’s the thought that I am padded, insulated by the country I live in, and that I might well get a short, sharp shock as to how life is. I’m aware that I’m naïve, but exactly how naïve is yet to be told.

Wish us luck, we’re about to be beach bums for a few months, and we need all the luck we can get!

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