Category: Design

Why I love Kickstarter

Bryan Thatcher Design , , , 1 Comment

I just backed a project from db clay line of wallets, it’s just in time since my Paul Smith wallet has started to fall apart. It will be hard to part with my old wallet, it has a cool picture of a Jimi Hendrix looking musician with a guitar on the inside. I like the thinness of the db wallet, not sure which design I’m going with yet. I do rather dislike wallets though, it makes a bulge in your jeans and makes sitting on hard surfaces somewhat painful, I’ve heard, but can’t substantiate that it messes with your spine. I would like to migrate this card carrying device part of my life to my iPhone as well.

This is not the first kickstarter project that I’ve backed, I recently backed +art for an upcoming project. I got, but for some reason I haven’t used yet, the very cool iPhone tripod mount from glif.

I like some of the more creative campaigns that have been poping up on the site, I watched the video from Freaker USA. I’m not usually a fan of those bottle cozy things. I think the videos are brilliant. It makes me want to back them and I might just out of respect for their creativity. Take a look at the video, kick on over to kickstarter and start backing some great ideas.

don’t forget to follow me on twitter 🙂

Get your own waterfront slice of Montauk paradise

bryan Art, Design, Life , , , , , , Leave a comment

We have decided to sell our other piece of property in Montauk. We purchased this some years ago and painstakingly designed our dream home, but sometimes the serendipity of life takes you in other directions. On the eve of breaking ground to start the construction, we got a call from a local broker about this great house across the lake from the property. Knowing the location and the fact that the land had been cleared before all the environmental restrictions were put in place, we immediate made an offer and bought the cottage

Thatcher 4

It is listed on the Atlantic Beach Reality website, so go ahead build your dream house (or mine scroll to the last picture)

Rare Pondfront .56 acre lot has all permits in place for a 2,800 sq.ft. breathtaking waterfront home. Owner has done all the hard work of getting permits and has plans in place for this spectacular property! The design of the house was to keep in harmony with the surrounding landscape and climate, while balancing simplicity, sustainability, functionality and affordability. Situated to maximize southern exposure and eastern views. Open upper living room, dining and kitchen that afford views of the Pond and distant ocean views as well. Call to view plans or design your own dream home on this amazing piece of property. Listed Exclusively for $999,000.

More workflow thoughts

bryan Design, Fusebox, Tech , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

While I was putting together my post on how I manage my picture workflow and archiving, it got me thinking about an even larger problem, the archiving and workflow of the production server here at Empressr and Fusebox. This post I’m going to talk about archiving workflow.

At Fusebox we have a climate controlled server room with about 3 racks of assorted machines, these are all used for development and staging of applications and Web sites. We have a couple of co-lo racks in a hosting facility here in the greater NYC area and a redundant facility located in a top secret location somewhere in the middle of the US.

First the production environment, we do incremental backups from our rack to our office thru a VPN tunnel every evening, these backups go to a partition on our development server that has restricted access. This partition is synced to another partition on a different RAID and that is backed up to tape. Then, whatever service that falls into needing redundancy (or disaster recovery) is synced to the respected server at our top secret location, yes somewhere in the midwest.

So then on to our development environment, at a high level, we use a combination of Max OS X. Windows and flavors Unix in this environment, so back up gets tricky. All the front end graphics, images, video gets stored on a Mac Xserver that is hooked to a 16TB RAID 5 storage unit. That gets synced on a nightly basis to a Xserver with a 7 TB RAID. The Unix machines also back up to the 16TB RAID. Then this all gets written to tape as a nightly incremental backup, some of the windows machine get backed up directly, some thru a similar process as the Unix boxes.

I find this to be a tedious and expensive process and really want need to change the way we archive. Tape seems too archaic (and unreliable), backing up to the cloud is to expensive, my only thought right now is to have redundant RAIDs making backups of data.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated, oh and another drawing, this one is a bit sketchy, as I only spent 5mins doing it,

co-lo

My Picture Managment Workflow

bryan Design, Picture of the day, Tech , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A nightmarish problem that just keeps growing and growing is how to deal with all your personal data when it comes to pictures and video. I’ve been using this work-flow for some years now, I thought I should share it and get some feedback. I do plan on making a few changes to it in the near future.

I shoot mostly still images, in RAW format and then process them into JPGs or PSDs. So the first management issue is, once the images are processed, do I delete the originals, no, I  keep it, the same way that you would save the old film negatives for later reproduction, same apply’s here, you may want to develop that RAW image in a different fashion at a later date. I save developed images in the same directory from that shoot. Speaking of file system, I have recently shifted to dumping the days shoot into a single folder with the date, I sometimes will add additional date to the folder as well.

I organize each daily folder into a monthly folder into a yearly folder. I use Expression Media as my cataloging tool and I catalog based on a years worth of images (I use to have one master of all years, until it corrupted one day and I lost all my meta data 🙁 ).

So the hardware flow is as the following, dump to my Pictures folder, (or lately I carry a portable Seagate 500gb drive that I have been using since I keep filling up my Laptop drive, to a 2TB LaCie RAID that I connect to my laptop one or twice a month (more often if I have some really nice shots that I don’t want to risk). I then sync the 2TB desktop RAID with my 2TB NAS RAID that is in a server rack in a climate controlled environment.

Somewhere along in this process I have processed and uploaded some images to flickr, or maybe facebook, or even here to share, I sometimes send full rez, occasionally If I really like the image I will only upload a medium rez and save the high one for just me, I know selfish…) Then every so often (I should do this more often) I will upload my favorite images RAW and JPG to smugmug for archiving. I currently do not allow browsing of this library, but plan on doing so in the future.

So that’s it, yes I know it sounds like a job, and sometimes it feels like it, but It’s heartbreaking to have a hard-drive failure and lose precious memories, especially since I can’t remember shit these days (gotta work on that next)

Oh and it was fun to actually draw a picture, yeah I have skilz

New York Designers Trunk Show

bryan Advertising, Design , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Beat the crowds, meet the designers, shop and have fun in true New York Style, come to the New York Designers Trunk Show happening this Saturday December 6 from 12-6pm.

Looking for the perfect piece of jewelry? That one-of-a-kind dress that will turn heads? The perfect accessory to show your unique sense of style? Join area designers at their first Flatiron District trunk show. Shop from one of the city’s most unique selections of jewelry, belts, vintage clothing, knitwear, bridal attire and more.

A great way to beat the economy, and look good doing it.

Remember the holidays are right around the corner.

For more information check out the facebook event, to RSVP (optional) check out the eventbright page

Designers
Alex Story
Angelica Cammarota
Anna Kula
Becca Straus
Douglas Silk
Elise Langenohl
Elizabeth Fillmore
Janel DuRoss
Jimena Roel
Laura Michaels
Massive Silver
Max Steiner
Meridith Griffin
Michelle Fantaci
Peri Allen
Shari Stadel
Svenja Timme-Bastian
Tracy Stoloff