Tylor Sherman

About a week ago Boris and I showed up early to the Raincity office and were discussing sending and receiving MMS messages on carriers in Canada. Apparently people in the US do this all time and I thought we should give it a try. So, at 9:07am I sent an MMS message with a low-res photo just to see what would happen.

Because we were sending from my old Motorola V710 on Telus to Boris' Nokia on Fido/Rogers we didn't have much hope that it would arrive immediately. I expected that we would probably get it by lunch but as the day went by I forgot about our experiment.

The next morning I get a text-message from Boris: Got the mms at 11pm - go realtime

Now why does it that it take 14 hours to receive an MMS message? Is this why I don't bother to using this?

Of course, Telus' website is classic:

Have you tried picture messaging? Was it quick like you expected? Did you use it again?

Just stepped in the door from a night of quality music! Some friends of mine hosted a show at Lick in Gastown and I thought I would give a brief description of the night. First up was...

Search Parties — These guys got us all to a great start with their limitless energy. Too bad it was too hot in the venue for more dancing...

Catamaran — Their cutesy guitar lines and lyrics are still rolling through my head, I just wish they could have been clearer as the drums were too loud. I've seen them before and they still resonate for me as a band worth watching.

Library Voices — I had seen this group before in their band National Frost and it didn't take much convincing to bring me back. They have tons of collective energy and manage to stay away from being muddy despite having eleven members. They have a great mix of rhythm and fun melodies and someone complimented later saying "these guys make me happy and good music should do that." I even bought their CD! Definitely check them out if they hit your town or city as they seem to be touring constantly.

The Barcelona Chair — Mikey and Adrienne created the perfect blend to help bring the evening back down. They have lots of emotion and complexity, something I am finding more each time I see them. They are somewhat reminiscent of groups like Boards of Canada or The Album Leaf but with considerably more edge.

Library Voices at Lick photographed by Steve Louie

Here's a great way to find music from Muxtape.com. Say I am looking for Chicane's song ‘Offshore’, then I would search Google for something like this:

site:muxtape.com chicane offshore -amazon (link)

By using '-amazon' I avoid all of the outgoing links to Amazon.com and just get the Muxtapes that match my keywords.

I'm finding this is also a good way to find new music as it's likely if someone included one of your favourite songs they might have similar musical taste!

Do you have any Muxtape hacks?

I have always been able to do almost everything I want within Photoshop, but now that I'm playing around with vector graphics, I'm finding that Photoshop has limitations. So for the first time I'm getting a real taste of Adobe Illustrator.

Some of the main references I have touched are:

• A huge post from Noupe.com with tutorials, tips, and best practices — while the article is pretty fluffy, it points to some nice work and lots of tutorials.
• A large dose of inspiration from this post on Vectortuts.com
• An icon design tutorial from this post by QBrushes.com

With this information I have created some UI mockups annnd... the following icon. I am pretty happy with how the icon turned out and, for now, this kind of stuff will probably fuel my interest in Illustrator!

Anyone have some cool Illustrator resources? Send them my way!

I just switched radio stations to 'The Beat' 94.5, a decidedly pop-centric station, and it turns out this is one of the top songs right now (?!):

Kinda catchy but not that great. The whole song is simply Am - C - Dm - F over and over again, here's how:

Nice and simple – sing along with your friends!