Free Day of Music at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center

Saturday-October 4, 2008, 11:00 a.m.- Schermerhorn Symphony Center

For the third straight year, the Nashville Symphony opens its new home to the entire community for theRegions Free Day of Music, a festive open house with a variety of local musical acts performing throughout the building.

Passes will be issued starting at 11 a.m. on Symphony Place (near the north front stairs of Schermerhorn Symphony Center). Each guest will receive a pass upon entering the building. Guests may then stay as long as they like to explore the different spaces inside and to enjoy the many musical performances; when leaving, they will be asked to return the pass. In addition to the myriad of performances, guests can enjoy an instrument petting zoo, the Symphony Store and a variety of inexpensive food or drink options. The Nashville Symphony box office will also be open and offering 20% discounts on tickets to select concerts.

Please note that free shuttle buses will be running between Schermerhorn Symphony Center’s Regions Free Day of Music and Scarritt-Bennett and Metro Parks’ Celebration of Cultures in Centennial Park, also sponsored by Regions. Shuttles will run from 11 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., approximately every 20 minutes. The Centennial Park pickup/drop-off point will be located just inside the park near 25th Ave, in front of the Sportsplex. The Schermerhorn Symphony Center location is still to be determined.

Click HERE for a Schedule of the day’s events.

Bartending at Celebration of Nations

The O’More School Of Design Celebration Of Nations is tomorrow night from 6:00-9:00 at the O’More College of Design in Franklin, TN and I will be their bartender.

Come on out and I’ll pour you a cold one.

Read all about the event over at Ethos. See ya then!

Newest addition to Sturgill Manor

The time has come to put a fence in the backyard for Diesel. And of course, being true to myself, I want it to be different than everyone else’s. ha-HAAA!

Enter the 4-Board Farm-Style Fence.

That my property backs up to resource protected land is the reason for going with said fence. Everyone else in Lexington Farms has just your basic, generic 6-foot privacy fence. BOOORING! But to be fair, if I were living on the lots that other people live on, I would want a 6-foot wall of privacy too.

But I don’t, so I don’t.

The 4-board fence will allow me to keep the view of the woods behind the house while also keeping the dog within his borders. “Won’t he slip through the boards?” You ask. That’s taken care of by putting a 2″x4″ welded wire a long the inside.

It’s quite unique and will be a nice addition to Sturgill Manor.

Before and after pictures will follow.

CS4 announced yesterday!

Yesterday Adobe announced the CS4 releases of their software applications, affecting basically every program they make. Bundles are available in the configurations below for their video applications (Production Suite Premium, $1,699), imaging/design/desktop publishing (Creative Suite, $1,799), web apps (Web Premium Suite, $1,699), and if you just can’t decide which one you like best, get them all in the Master Collection for $2,499. All of the CS4 products will ship in October.

Now that it has been a couple of years since the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe is really pushing the Flash integration and mobile device authoring across the board, so those who need to get magazine content to a web page ASAP will be pleasantly surprised. On the interface front, Adobe is expanding on changes done in CS3, and the look of most apps has been updated for a more consistent experience.

The entire list of changes across the line is too lengthy to mention in passing, but here are some major features that are being touted for some of their popular, heavy-lifting applications:

Photoshop CS4

• GPU-based drawing of documents onscreen
• 64-bit for Windows
• Expanded 3-D paint, lighting and rendering tools

Illustrator CS4

• Multipage documents with different sizes
• Indesign-style separations preview
• Many updated tools like gradient and blob brush

Indesign CS4

• Live Preflighting
• Easy Flash document creation
• Smart guides and spacing tools

Flash CS4

• Powerful Animation presets
• H.264 encoding
• Expanded 3-D transformation and object support with inverse kinematics and bones

Dreamweaver CS4

• Better interactive Live View mode
• Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript
• Photoshop Smart Object support

After Effects CS4

• Better 3-D compositing and 3-D model support
• Better mobile device authoring
• XMP metadata support for asset management

Premiere CS4

• Speech search for finding dialog within footage
• AVCHD, P2, XDCAM EX, and XDCAM HD camera support
• Better batch encoding via Adobe Media Encoder application

Encore CS4

• More sophisticated Blu-ray authoring support
• DLT exporting for masters
• Firewire video out and DTS support

Fireworks CS4

• Adobe AIR authoring for output to a variety of formats
• PDF and CSS export
• Better asset management and libraries

At the moment, thirteen applications were revealed to carry the “CS4″ suffix, and will ship in October.

(Read more here)

be FLORed

Welcome to design freedom.

FLOR carpet squares let you easily design area rugs to fit any size space or install wall-to-wall in minutes. Available in a variety of beautiful colors, patterns and textures, FLOR’s easy-to-install tiles give you creative control over the largest canvas in your home – your floors!

Eco-friendly and recyclable, FLOR is the perfect combination of style, practicality and responsibility. Proving that green really can be beautiful, easy, flexible and above all else, attainable.

Prices range anywhere from $11.99/ Tile ($4.46 sq ft) to $19.99/Tile ($7.43 sq ft) so if you’re not careful and have expensive taste, like I do, then it can be a bit pricey. However, some things are just worth it.

I’m all a twitter

It’s official. I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Follow me at @tobysturgill.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.

As of July 2008, over 2,200,000 accounts were registered.

Twitter began as a research and development project inside San Francisco start-up company Obvious in March 2006. It was initially used internally by the company’s employees, and officially launched in October 2006.

The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Jack Dorsey, widely acknowledged as the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”

In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc., with Jack Dorsey as its CEO.

HT: Wikipedia

my dog diesel

I took this a few weeks ago and thought I’d share.

A rescue dog who was being raised to fight in an abusive home, Diesel is an American Pit Bull Terrier. When he was rescued he was underfed, beaten and bleeding. He’s got scars and puncture wounds all over his legs and back. He is the sweetest thing EVER. I’ve had him for about three months now and can’t imagine life without him.

If you know of a dog that’s being abused, please call your local ASPCA. I don’t want to go all Sarah Mclachlan on you here, but really… dogs deserve better.

Up and Running

Well I’M not up and running (some of you crazies already have put in your 19 miles by now I’m sure), but the new TobySturgill.com IS!!! Happy Day.

Poke around and let me know what you think. There’s still more to come on the portfolio page…

iTunes 8 is Genius

Just when you think Apple can’t get any cooler, or sexier (yes, I think my iPhone’s sexy) they come out with iTunes8. Wow!

Meet Genius: a brilliant way to create perfect playlists. Play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together. Genius playlists help you discover songs in your library you never knew you had — and rediscover forgotten favorites.

While you reacquaint yourself with the music you already own, let Genius introduce you to new music you’ll love. As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it. The Genius sidebar won’t recommend songs already in your library, and you can preview and buy recommended songs directly from the sidebar.

Plus, there’s a really cook new Grid View to view all your album art. Select Albums in Grid View and iTunes 8 displays your entire music library using cover art. Select Artists, Genres, or Composers and iTunes automatically creates groups of albums based on your selection. Simply skim across a group to see the albums inside, and start playing an album with a single click. Movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks look great in Grid View, too.

What WILL they think of next??

Hello. Hello.

Welcome to the online presence of Toby Sturgill: designer, print broker, and bartender.

I will continue to blog about design and creativity as I did at Utobia2.0 as well as some new stuff like posting current and past projects in the portfolio section.

Keep checking back. I will be constantly updating little by little until I get all moved in.