Contact Dave

Through The Phone

• My business line is 603-889-3589.

Through AOL Instant Messenger

• My public screenname is DaveSeahContact.

Through FAX

• FAX me at 603-889-3275, but tell me you're FAXing before you send so I know to look out for it.

Calling All Collaborators

As a freelancer, I love the freedom but miss the contact with other hu-mans who know their stuff.

So, a number of us have established a creative organization that is less about business/networking and more about hanging out and sharing our work. It's not so much a user group with formal presentations--we tried that once--it's more about creative fellowship with your peers. That's the direction we appear to be heading, anyway.

Topics covered: Digital Media, Interactive Design, Theatre, Graphic Design, Music, The Arts, Flash, Photoshop, Video... we are an eclectic group of people.

For lack of a better name, we call it the New Media Group New England. We're mostly serving Southern New Hampshire and the Greater Boston Area / North, and meet regularly in locations convenient to I-93. The Barnes and Noble in Manchester, NH (right off exit 1 on I-293) has been one place we've been meeting, as it's within a 30 minutes of Nashua, Concord and Portsmouth. It's even easy to get to from Boston, about 45 minutes.

UPDATE

The group has been in hiatus for a while, but will likely re-emerge in Spring 2007 in a different form. If you're interested in finding out more, shoot me an email:

Extended Biography

I'm Dave Seah, and I'm a freelance Digital Media Architect. In other words, I am skilled in creating computer graphics for interactive computer systems. I've been making graphics since 1981, back when computer art, well, required a lot more imagination to see.

My educational background is slightly unusual in that I have degrees in both Electrical Engineering (interest in digital electronics) and Computer Graphics Design (fine arts). It's a useful combination of skills to have.

Prior to getting into New Media, I worked in video games. My favorite stint was with startup Qualia, where we made our bid to become a 3rd party developer in 1994-1997 with a 5-man team and a game called Crixa. Other games I've worked on are Star Reach, NCAA Football 99, and DuelTris in various artist or manager positions. This period was exhausting, and I was quite burned out by the age of 32.

I got into New Media during the heady bubble days of 1999 and 2000. I worked on a number of small interactive projects for companies Interactive Factory and Active Edge New Media, specializing mostly in Director and Flash, with a healthy pinch of project management thrown in. I designed the GUI for an interactive sky chart, made the 2001 MIMC award show animation, some tradeshow kiosk work, some Flash-based product demos, and a couple of interactive kiosks for the Boston Museum of Science.

In 2003, I needed to take a break. That break become an extended sabbatical as I reassessed my goals. The reason I got into computers at all was because I wanted to deliver interesting experience that wasn't possible in the real world. This could be games, it could be something else. I'm pretty sure it won't be through through corporate multimedia or web services. I need to find my own voice.

In the meantime, I've been doing some education and web projects. The first one is Showing Evidence, created with learning science specialists Inquirium. Showing Evidence wrapped in July and is now out in the field on Intel's Thinking Tools website. The main code is ActionScript 2.0, architected and coded in great part by myself, with project management and code support provided by Inquirium.

My current focus is to get back into development using C++ and similar languages, with an eye toward Windows application development. And maybe back to games, this time of a smaller and more personal nature.

Though I'm distancing myself from Internet and New Media Design in order to redevelop my programming chops, I still take on projects from people who still have that personal "sense of mission". The whole point of this blog is to establish a rapport with people who get that. What Sean Kernan has to say about creativity and career seems spot on.

Dave 09.2004

Colophon

Technology

This site is driven by WordPress, a dynamic blogging system written in PHP and MySQL. The template is heavily tweaked from the original to get this fixed-width layout. I'm using three plugins to make the site a little nicer to format: Markdown, an in-line text formatting tool; WP-Cache, a caching system that speeds up page display by caching unchanging dynamic pages; and Lazy Image Layout, a plugin I wrote to provide the image layout and dynamic caching thumbnail generation. Because I hate resizing and uploading thumbnails :-)

For managing files, I used Dreamweaver MX 2004 as the main interface for maintaining the layout of my site. But I don't use the visual layout tools, goodness no! Hand code all the way! However, I find the visual tools are good for quickly highlighting the code you need to touch...just click on the thingy in the layout view, and the HTML editor jumps and highlights the right spot.

I'm giving StatCounter a go for page tracking. I like how their web page sounds, and the tools look more convenient than Analog or Webalizer. And it's free, for a log size of 100. If you want more, then you start to pay.

I'm using Shaun Inman's Mint counter too, as of September 2005. I'm keeping StatCounter in place for continuity.

My web host for the past 5 or 6 years has been Pair Networks. It's been a good experience until I started getting more traffic, so I switched to FutureQuest for a few months. After getting hammered with traffic at the end of 2006 and told I needed to upgrade, I jumped ship to Media Temple. The blog network I have joined, 9rules, has worked out a partnership deal with mt for member hosting at a discount.

Graphics

Most of the site and its graphics are created by and © by me.

The photography is on this site is also © by me. Gotta put that digital camera to use. It's a Canon G2. As of December 2006, I'm now also shooting with a smaller camera, a Fuji FinePix F30.

Um, more when I think of what to say.