I'm not 15 minutes late posting this episode for NAPODPOMO, the clocks go back tonight right so it's really only 11pm Friday! Oh it doesn't work like that? Well it's still Saturday somewhere and that's what counts right?
Back in March we has a discussion about me being an extra in The IT Crowd and ending up with a line to Moss and Roy. The episode is called "The Final Countdown" and airs on July 2nd and will be on 4oD not long after.
Eyjafjallajoekull glacier volcano grounds all UK flights. All over the news today but Darren mainly wanted the chance to try and pronounce the name of the glacier.
Transitions between Doctors to be "LSD like" (man, wooh) Quick chat about the new Doctor Who. Video link: http://www.vimeo.com/10606790
The Dumbed Down Life podcast is recored by Doug, Darren and Lance. Over the years we've had guest presenters too and some contributions from friends and family.
Bobbi, Doug's wife was a special guest in show 66.
Ben recorded a show with Lance last year.
"I hear pod people" which is used at the start of some of our shows is a recording of Darren's daughter.
Ken from Derby has contributed a few times.
What we're looking for now is some recordings of you telling a joke, just something short and corny to fill a gap between two songs. MP3 or WAV file formats are fine.
Email your joke to ddl.podshow@gmail.com and we'll email you back to let you know which of our shows your joke is in.
Also, if you have a podcast, blog or web site that you would like to promote we'd love to hear from you. Record something simple like "Hi this is Fred from Fredsfishshop.com and you're listening to the dumbed down life" or if you have a full promo track for your podcast we'd love to hear it!
We have a special guest this week and talk about porn shown on childrens TV, police officer attacked by a dick and Darren's five minutes of fame as and extra on The IT Crowd. Parental advisory, recording contains unnecessary swearing.
My brother has made the iconic DDL logo in the Sony Playstation 3 game "Little Big Planet". Here's a video of what he's started. Aparently you can change all sort of aspects of the object which will allow him to create a mini level. This is a sort of "behind the scenes" video but I was so impressed that I have to share! He even made the little I.T sack boy.
Here's the first section from DDL65 on web cam. Frame rate is not great but gives you an idea of what we look like. Warning, sweary language from the very start.
The frustrations with e-bay and have you named your car? Sound quality for Darren is not the greatest this week which is probably a good thing since he seems to have a bit of an attack of tourettes syndrome. Parental advisory, recording contains unnecessary swearing.
First we would like to appologise for the poor presentation of this particular episode. The track name is missing the number, there's no album art and I hope you don't use the track number to sort your podcasts as that is missing too. Lance really did a bad job on this one and should be ashamed.
On the other hand... Without Lance's determination and dedication to keeping this show running I'm sure it would never have got this far.
Oh and the unusual sound quality is because this show was recorded in the Priory (no, not THAT Priory) in Wellingborough over a nice lunch.
What's The Buzz? Remember last week when everyone was talking about Google's new social Networking tool Buzz? Well before it gets shut down over privacy issues, human rights problems or what ever Google are being accused of, Lance and I had a little chat about it.... down the pub.
When Lance and I started the Dumbed Down Life podcast we knew from the beginning that we'd need a web site to go with it.
Lance modified one of the standard templates supplied by Blogger, the service which we'd chosen to host the site, giving us the orange colour and space for a logo.
We talked about a logo and Lance came up with the idea of a graphic to represent each of the words in the title. For "Dumbed" we had a dunce cap, "Down" an arrow pointing down and "Life" a heart.
Initial concepts for the logo made the hat and arrow more pictorial.
Although we didn't have big plans for the podcast and associated web site we still wanted an identity that would look good printed on business cards, letter heads and t-shirts. We simplified the dunce cap to the triangle at the top of the logo, the arrow to the triangle at the bottom and proportioned the heart shape to fit into the triangle shape of the logo.
From the first cleaned up attempt at the stylised logo we cleaned it up, making sure the "D" triangles were equilateral. Now we had the template for our logo.
While simple and clean would be great for print and scaling it was clear that for use with the Internet, where we had more colours to play with, some subtle art package tweeks were needed.
Playing with layers, putting a coloured logo over a black one gives a very simple drop shadow. We interchange the white and Orange colours, sometimes having the orange logo, sometimes having the orange background.
As the logo is so simple we have sometimes used it as a stencil with other images to create album art for our podcast that is relevant to the recording.
When the merged image is simple it works pretty well. However, mixing pictures in the logo with a complicated background was a little over ambitious.
The simple design scales will for displaying on the web page even when rendered on a portable device.
We printed off some DDL t-shirts after first testing the design on a model in Second Life.
The DDL racing car was a plain white car with some paint package trickery to place the logos.
In the 80's a brand of compilation albums titled "Now That's What I Call Music" was launched. The logo for the brand went through a few incarnations. As with the DDL logo it started off two dimensional. When they reached "Now That's What I Call Music 20" they settled with a three dimensional logo which, with little variation, has continued in use up to the present day. Even when the series reset the counter for the US market they've kept the same, brand logo of the 3d model. It was this logo which I'd seen emblazoned on albums, cassettes and CD's that inspired me to wanting a similar 3d rendering for the DDL logo.
As part of a test for the 3d software I created a basic copy of the NOW logo.
Lance used a graphic program called Moray that creates files to then be rendered in a specialist program called POV. The program uses simple shapes combined to make complex ones.
The "D" was simple to create and we created that as a test not long after we'd created the original 2D logo. The heart for the "L" was more complex. This render of the logo in glass shows how the heart shape is made up of intersecting cylinders and cubes.
We've not found yet if it is possible in Moray to render the transparent materials without showing the complicated parts of the workings inside the "L".
With this model we are now able to change the texture, lighting, scale and positioning. We can combine the logo with other 3d models.
Something to note about our 3d model is that it can't actually be made, well not made and stood up, at least not without "cheating". The center of the "D" floats in mid air.
We'll be adding a gallery page to the DDL web site, look out for different album art, desktop wallpapers and various other DDL images in the future.
