More on the Aston Martin's Green

It's has been demanded that I be more honest about the Aston Martin's green.

The picture I linked to had so many lighting tricks that it really didn't show off the color unless you already knew it. The picture on the left is more accurate.

Yes, it's a lime green, only with more red and yellow. It is a shocking color. In yesterday's picture you could believe that those colors were highlights, instead of the real color.

And that brings us to the second point. It's not just the color, but also the paint. Even a 10 year old girl’s plastic glitter pony cannot compare to the amount of metal suspended in that paint. And there are a lot of layers to suspend the particles, and then they throw in a lot more layers just to be on the safe side. It would not surprise me if they told me that the paint job alone costs more than the average family car.

And it’s not just color and paint, but also the car. This is considered one of the most beautiful cars going. They guy who created the Jaguar said that the reason they were so beautiful was because they had an “eye line”. A band of light that drew your eye from end to end and helped the viewer get comfortably lost in the car’s sexy curves. The Aston has several eye lines. Actually, its eye lines have eye lines.

It’s the combination of the depth of this shocking color blanketing this car’s amazing curves adding almost a magical sparkle but keeping an aggressive, road eating feeling that make looking at one of these a mind blowing experience. They are very rare cars, so spotting one of these is like spotting a rare Blue-Spotted, Red Crested Gull would be to a bird lover. We saw it at a car show, but if we saw it on the road Mike and I would pull over and follow it while we spoke in reverent whispers “Did you see how that mud puddle was beautifully reflected on the chrome grill?”.

Putting a coat of the same lime (+red +yellow) green on a pick-up truck would be shocking, but it would not be the same.

Color Science

Don't get me wrong, I really love what I do for a living, but there is a new field that if it had been available when I was in college I might have gone for.

I might have majored in Color Science.

You may be thinking, "What, you didn't get enough coloring books as a child?" and you would be wrong. Well, umm. Actually, you might be right, but that isn't the point.

Think of a 1970s bathroom and there is a certain orange that comes to mind.

The green of the Aston Martin this year is an amazing triumph of Color Scientists. http://www.bergoiata.org/fe/voiture-sport-90/cars_aston_martin_006.jpg, although you really have to see it in person. One more hint of yellow and it would be tacky. One more hint of green and it would be boring. A little lighter and it would hurt your eyes. A little darker and it wouldn’t contrast with the bright work. It is amazing.

The new colors in Vista are good. In many ways, Web 2.0 sites can most easily be identified by their color choices, although that doesn't always hold up.

And that 1970's orange? Make it a little brighter and it's back in style.


I think my next personal project will be to write a side bar application where you can click on a color on the screen and the program will show tints and hues and suggest color combinations for the new scRGB. The math for this isn’t trivial, but it would be so beautiful. When not in use I think I would just have it step through the spectrum.

If you think I’m exaggerating the math, here is a blurb from a color person’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/10/25/hdr-and-color-spaces.aspx

"For sRGB, the 1/2 brightness gray image will result in a numerical value of around 186, not the midpoint value of 128. This is based on an sRGB gamma of approximately 2.2. (The actual gamma calculation for the sRGB color profile is a little more complex, but we can use a value of 2.2 for an approximation for our
purposes.) This means that the sRGB profile uses 186 steps to represent the lower half of the luminance spectrum, and only 69 steps (255-186) to represent the upper half of the luminance spectrum. sRGB defines a non-linear luminance curve to provide more detailed information in the darker or shadow areas at the expense of the brighter or highlight areas. Since we're far more likely to see visual differences between each of the 255 total luminance steps, this non-linear representations significantly reduces the chance of seeing those artifacts.

What's become of me?

Jeeze. My last blog was titled "Maximize Ad ROI".

What the hell??? When did I lose my sense of humor??

It wasn't even:




"Clippy says: Maximize Ad ROI."
























It's just a matter of energy. I haven't been putting energy into humor. I did help Digg.com ship Microsoft ads, but it wasn't that which sucked my humor away.

I will fix this and hopefully not make this mistake again. But if you ever see another title that is as dry as the last one, please put a sign on my back that says "Kick me!"

OMG!!! Pilot funded in Ozzie's org!!

There are games that geeks play with each other. One type will go “I programmed on punch cards” and may more variations like that. A Second type will be “Only true geeks understand the fragile beauty of Popfly/Lisp/OOP/… A third type will say “I shook Bill Gates' hand”. Another of this type will say “I came within 10 feet of running over Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.”

That last person would be me. And although it’s a great story over a beer, it is certainly a rather sad high point to my individual contribution to the computer industry. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done great things. For example, Word for Windows 1.0 and actually more significantly 2.0 are giants among all products, but they were team efforts and that is just different.

There is a fourth type of geek that can say something like this:


I got a pilot program funded. With only Mike’s help I figured out something that Microsoft should be doing and how to do it AND then chased down enough of the details, and then sold it to the right people and I freaking got a pilot project funded in Ray Ozzie’s org.


I don’t know anything else yet. I don’t even know that I will be involved in its actual execution other than as an adviser. I’m hoping.

This just happened Friday afternoon. An hour later I had the last “Go For Launch” meeting with all the Digg guys. And then I stumbled home and drooled. Only in the last few hours have I come back to myself enough to wipe off the drool.

I want to be that fifth type of geek. The one that says “When I shipped the version one product from my idea …”