Under Construction
I make things on the internet
I needed something new for my desktop, was starting to get sick of the photo that was there. Of course the results are posted here for your pleasure.
The image links to the file on flickr. I also have two versions available here: 1024px and 1280px. Made use of the second brush set from the howiezine site, mostly for the arrows and dots. It took 3-7 hours depending on how you feel like counting time.
The NYTimes is running an article about life hackers. This quote sums it up perfectly, “Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is”. A large portion of my HCI classes were spent discussing how to notify people without actually interrupting them (aka attentive user interfaces / more). It’ll end up being one of the larger problems facing the computer industry for at least the next 10 years.
We’ve reached a threshold in terms of information availabily and devices to interact with that information; be it iPods, cellphones, laptops, whatever. What we need are devices that work for us. A microwave is pretty convenient, but wouldn’t life be a lot easier if your frozen dinner had an embedded RFID chip that told the microwave exactly how to cook it? What about that punk kid on a skateboard listening to music? Should you hit him with your car, or have it send a message to his iPod? The ability to invade music devices probably isn’t that smart, but you get the idea.
The time has come for me to write a book. Yes, you heard me correctly and no, it’s not crazy talk. The reason: Seth sent me an email about the NaNoWriMo challenge. I was going to dump it in the trash, but the brain started ticking away. Basically, it involves writing 50,000 words over the month of November. I remember Wes trying to do it a few years ago. It’s doable if you break it up in managable chunks.
I haven’t done too much on the creative writing side of things since my tenure at Golden Words ended a year and a half ago. So, there’s no point half-assing things with a few short stories, may as well dive right in.
There’s a large community aspect to the challenge (if you’re into the workshopping sort of thing). I probably won’t do too much of that, it’ll be hard enough for me to avoid distractions long enough to pump out a few thousand words every day.
This announcement is mostly to prevent me from jumping out of the frying pan before this shindig gets started. Now, I need to finish off some work that pays the bills. Stay tuned for further details.
Apparently, Nintendo is (or will be) running this commercial (4mb mov) for the Gameboy Micro here in Canada. It appears to be the work of QMG. The ad directs viewers towards Too Much Fun, but there’s only a place-holder page that redirects you to the main Nintendo page.
Some may say it’s a bit risque for Nintendo, but I’d just say it’s just something you’d usually see in another market (like parts of Europe). I was watching actual television over the Thanksgiving holiday, and found that Canadian commericals were becoming bearable for a change. There was a point not long ago, when most of them seemed like they were created by the drooling 3-year old nephew of an advertising exec.
I’ve been taking a few photos with a Canon Eos Rebel G, on loan from my brother Pete (who’s headed to med-school in Bristol). I haven’t used film in awhile, but the lcd on my digitial camera is broken so I’m shooting blind either way. At least you get a lot of control with the SLR. The downside is the cost of developing, although they’re trying to remain competitve with digital and offering up photo cds with you prints. Anyway, here’s a funny shot from a black and white roll that I just received back from processing.
High winds from the tail-end of a hurricane brought down some trees around here last week. Apparently the car was a rental, I can just imagine how the phone-call with the agency must have gone. Also check out this photo of a man on a bike and some graffiti.
I’ve been working on a number of web-based projects lately, some that pay, some that don’t. At this moment, I’d like to officially announce one of those projects: Seal Club, a small art and design group. It’s not an agency or anything like that, just a few people that like to make pretty pictures. Really, it’s been operating for a few weeks now but we haven’t been promoting it. There have been some hints around here, namely the Conform Project domain redirecting to Seal Club and the del.icio.us feed in my links.
The site is essentially an old-school ftp-style design site, glued together with a bunch of new tools. We all used to be members of art groups in the pre-y2k web (Swanky, Suffocate) and have some desire to relive those days. Mostly, it’s the motivation of having other people to kick you in the ass when you’re not getting anything done. Everything is done by hand via ftp with some efforts to stay standards compliant. We use del.icio.us to help us maintain our lists or links within the site and the forum is powered by flickr.
WordPress.com is one of the latest entries into the field of hosted weblogs. I signed up for an invite awhile ago and received one sometime last week. My site over there probably won’t see too much action, but it’s useful for testing purposes.
Right now, the service lacks somewhat in customizability (mostly on the appearance front) but it does offer a preview of what WordPress 1.6 will have to offer on the administration side of things. It’s also an example of the WordPressMU (multiuser) install, although most people probably don’t care too much about that.
I have an invitation to the service to give away, figured may as well offer it up here. If you’re interested, just drop me a comment and let me know why it should be yours. I’d rather give it to someone who actually wants to start their own weblog or migrate from blogspot instead of someone who’ll use it sporadically like me.
Hey boys and girls. Time to rip the site apart and redesign it. I’m talking pull the guts out and start again. The current layout is an evolution of an evolution of some metaphorical layered object. Actually, it’s based on a version of Kubrick from around December last year when I first installed WordPress. There’s a lot of legacy, there’s a lot of mess. I’ve been putting it off for awhile and may as well do it now.
If you were an adventurous soul that actually looked under the hood, I commend you. I have trouble keeping track of what I’ve done. Someone asked me about releasing this layout as a theme. After I get the new layout up and finish up some client work, I’ll try to clean up the style sheet and pags and release some semblence of a theme for WordPress.
I’ve been frustrated with the format of my own website. I need to make some bits of information more prevalent. The layout of the site will likely go towards something like one main entry and five quick posts on the main page, with a footer highlighting other content on the site. That footer would like appear in some shape or form on all pages.
Anyway, it’s going to be a live work in progress. Things might not work particularly well in the next few days. We’ll get through it. I’ll try to keep track of some updates in the Change Log.
Update: Templates are stripped down for the most part, working on structure and basic layout of the site right now. As far as design goes, I haven’t started anything in photoshop, so that will be coming later (11:22pm EST).
Update 2: I’m getting there, header graphic is up now. Still a bit of old code to clean up. Have the comments to work on and start delving into some of the sub-pages. (Sep 27 – 1:45am EST)
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a high-school yearbook, a indie zine, a campus humour newspaper or a national rag, you turn to your friends for help and stories. Omar and I did the CompSci thing at Queen’s, but neither of us was particularily enamored with the corporate culture that everyone seemed to be pimping. Now, he’s writing for Globe, I got a teaching degree and he’s decided to write an article about it.
The gist of the article is there were a lot of tech jobs, so a lot of people went into computer science. Then the tech industry blew up and there weren’t any jobs left. But the industry is bumpin’ again, and they can’t get monkeys to do the crap jobs.
The article is partially targetted at getting people interested in Computer Science again. However, the problem isn’t just a lack of enrollment at the university level, the roots go much deeper. Enrollment is down across the board, high-schools are dropping computer courses like rocks due to lack of interest, translating into very few teaching jobs for someone marketing themselves purely as a CS teacher.
Personally, I feel that a lot of the problems lie in the disconnect between the curriculum and how students actually use computers. The curriculum is very business and/or programming oriented, there isn’t a huge focus on the internet beyond research purposes. These kids use the internet for everything and have been using these machines for most of their lives. Telling to type up a form letter in Word excites them about as much as a fat man in a speedo.
That said, the internet creates a massive level of freak-out on the part of admistrators. “We can’t give these kids unrestricted access, they’ll be downloading bomb recipes, porno and rap-music.” Honestly, they’ll be doing that anyway and will end up more inclined to do so. Throwing up a big barrier just makes kids want to get around it. Besides, we all know there’s always a way to get around the human element of software configuration.
What can we do to get kids interested again? Teach them interesting stuff. And that goes for all levels. You can teach a 6 year-old to program, you can trust a teenager to build a website and you can actually teach something useful to university students.
Theory is great. Math is great. So are algorithms and logic and everything else that they teach us over the course of a CS degree. But where are the scripting languages? Where are the database-driven web applications? Where are the make files? Where are my CSS and web-standards? We don’t need ’em all but it would be nice to have an introduction to some of these things. I knew people in their third or four year that didn’t know how to ftp/telnet into the lab server so they didn’t actually have to walk over to submit programs.
Anyway, I thought Omar’s article was going to be a bit more along the lines of, “People don’t want to work for the man” and less, “Hay guys! We need worker-bees”, which might help this quote make more sense:
“I see no need to get myself stuck in a grey box somewhere pounding out code that may or may not be used inside some whale of an application,” Mr. Kellam says.
It’s not so much that I don’t want a tech job, more that I’d rather spend time freelancing or on my own company than being an under-appreciated, underpaid codemonkey. Anyway, it got my name, picture and wonderful work ethic into a national newspaper, so I’m not complaining.
I don’t know what the Globe archiving policy is like, so here’s a pdf copy of the article:
PDF: Where jobs are and students aren’t (online)
JPG: Where jobs are and students aren’t (print)
A few people have been asking about how I style the images in the sidebar and I’ve been lazy in replying. Basically, we just need a list of images and then apply a few css style to it.
For the flickrRSS crowd, go into the options panel and set before image to <li> and after image to </li>. In your sidebar code/template/whatever wrap your flickrRSS function in a list. We also want to add a <div> so we can style the list. It will end up looking something like this:
<div id="flickr">
<ul><?php get_flickrrss(); ?></ul>
</div>
That’s it on the html front. It’s the styling that’s left. There are two essential things that we want to do, remove the bullets and remove the breaks. These two bits of css should take care of that:
#flickr ul { list-style: none; }
#flickr ul li { display: inline; }
Everything beyond that is gravy. Personally, I take all the margins and padding off the list and then style the images with a thing border and a bit of padding. My code looks something along the lines of:
#flickr ul, #flickr ul li { padding: 0; margin: 0; border: 0; }
#flickr a img { border: 1px #ccc solid; padding: 3px; margin: 5px 3px 0px; }
#flickr a:hover img { border: 1px #999 solid; }
That’s pretty much it. You could start doing fancy things like backgrounds, fading the picture on hover, etc. But we’ll leave that as an exercise in Google research. There may be better ways to do it, you’re welcome to comment.
Caught the Kid Koala show at the Elixir last night. He’s pretty sick. You watch him standing up there mixing, he’ll put something on, smile to himself and turn around to grab something else. Thirty seconds later you know why he’s smiling. It’s the bits of Radiohead or Monty Python’s Holy Grail or whatever.
My camera was being a bit flakey, but I grabbed a few decent photos. I also caught a bit of video footage of him doing his trumpet thing, it’s about 24 seconds long. Here it is for download:
Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.
I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.
Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:
This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.
An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.