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August 13, 2010

house keeping

Posted by dogpossum on August 13, 2010 8:11 AM | Comments (0)

I am, very slowly, making my way through the styles on this site, fixing things up. But it's a bit annoying because Movable Type really does suck these days. I'm looking at moving over to something else (Wordpress perhaps?) but I don't really think that's going to happen any time soon. There's too much backing up and installing and so on involved. Plus I'd have to start again from scratch with the CSS. Argh.

So apologies for the obvious wonkiness and the continuing fiddling.

"house keeping" was posted in the category dogpossum and webbing

July 4, 2010

website

Posted by dogpossum on July 4, 2010 10:00 PM | Comments (1)

I'm going to try to sort this site so that:

• you don't have to look at those boring fitness updates;
• that annoying line/space problem on the entry titles is fixed
• the individual entry pages look better;
• it's easier to navigate back through entries

Best not hold your breath.

"website" was posted in the category design and webbing

December 14, 2008

look, no hands

Posted by dogpossum on December 14, 2008 6:28 PM | Comments (1)

I'm copying Alice's work and having a bash at some photoshop tutorials. You MUST go and look at Alice's work - it's freakin' sweet. Mine is a little dodgier:

If you can't see all the image, best to click through to the permalink.

It's not really finished. Basically, it took me hours to get to the point where I had the figure on the textured background. I'm not all that happy with that part - there's not enough texture on the figure (mostly because I gave up on the layering). The text is shitty, but that's because I gave up before I got to the bit in the tutorial about adding layers of 'paper'.

I'm really enjoying it, but I have to follow the instructions _exactly_ because I don't know very much about photoshop at all. I'm just a baby with layers, buggered if I know anything about masks or any of the fancy shit. So, really, I don't actually know anything, I've just been copying. But I'm going to have another go to see if I can actually _learn_ as I go.

I quite like the colours (this whole image is probably the result of too much Deadwood this week), but I _really_ like the colours on Alice's latest effort.

My eyes are kind of square, too.

Ok, here are my sources (and most of them I just found via Alice or the original tutorial):

The basic picture of the woman is from facebook, and it's a picture of Michelle from Sugar Blue Burlesque.
Then I added a hare's head from stock.xchng.
The background paper was also from stock.xchng.
The sunray thing was from deviantart.com.
There's a bit of nice wallpaper in there (as in the stuff you put on walls) fromlovelamp.
There're some brushes (now, there's something I'd never used before) from brusheezy.
I think the font is from dafont.

I'm going to have a bash at some more of these photoshop tutorials. I wish I was a bit more visually creative, or that I had something specific to design for. I just couldn't think of anything to write on this one (it's pretty dumb, I know).

I'm also a bit concerned about putting animal heads on women's bodies. Especially on burlesque bodies. There's something weird there. And I'm not entirely comfortable with burlesque as it is - my politics suggest that there's really nothing all that ok about stripping and women dancing erotically for (predominantly) male audiences. I mean, just 'cause it's old timey stripping, don't mean it _isn't_ stripping and _doesn't_ carry all the accompanying problems that stripping carries generally.
... part of me is also thinking about the Dietrich film 'Blonde Venus' and all that feminist film stuff about female bodies as 'pieces' cut up by the male gaze. I also worry about animal headed women not being able to 'return' the male gaze.
But there you go. I dare say my using that picture of a woman I know without permission is also problematic.

I have a couple of ideas for animal headed men, but I think I'm kind of over them. We'll see, though. I think I'd like to go for a more modern look as well - I'm a bit over that dirty look. But it is useful to know how to do it, now.

But what _I'd_ really like to know how to do, is add those 'pieces of paper' with the text on them. I also discovered that I'd forgotten how to do shaped text (as in following a free form line). Sigh.

...and, my foot is still bung. It's about three weeks, now, and I'm only up to 10 minute walks. They make my foot hurt and hurt, though. But yesterday I rode my bike and it didn't hurt my foot. Ace. I still have a bit of a cold from MLX, but I'm absolutely dying of cabin fever and lack of exercise. I MUST do some sort of exercise before I go nuts. I also plan to get into yoga again after christmas. My house-bound-ness has made me very dull, I'm afraid, so nothing more from me. There's more Deadwood to watch. :)

"look, no hands" was posted in the category clicky and crafty bastard and people i know and webbing and yoga

January 12, 2007

round up

Posted by dogpossum on January 12, 2007 4:10 PM

Just in case you were wondering why I'd suddenly gone all boring...

I've been very busy writing a paper for a media convergence collection/special ed of a journal/thingy. So I am making a really crappy rough draft at the moment. Soon it will be beautiful, but before it's beautiful, the editing will be horrible. I really enjoy writing (when I'm not all blocked) and write very quickly, so I feel like I'm accomplishing. I do not, however, write good first drafts - I need to edit and edit and edit and edit to make it look nice.

This paper, briefly, is about the AV stuff in my thesis. I've added on a nice bit about youtube, which was very exciting - youtube has made major changes in the world of online dance clips, and the whole 'free' and 'easily accessed' thing, as well as embedding clips in blogs and the sheer, wonderful quantity of obscure footage uploaded to the site make it a fabulous resource for dancers. It's also made some interesting changes in the economy of clip exchange in the swinguverse (to a certain extent). I've added a bit about the Silver Shadows stuff I wrote about in this entry, as it makes for a really nice example of the sorts of things I'm talking about. Not to mention the whole convergence thing.

I still haven't done the 'guest' post. But at least I've had some ideas. Once I've gotten this convergence paper done, I'm going to write something about radio and swing dancers. Now there's a bit of convergent action. I'm especially interested in the way the Yehoodi Talk Show used video podcasting (a visual element to its radio podcast) in the last edition. That's some awesome shit. Especially as they spent a fair bit of that podcast watching video clips they'd found on youtube, google movies, etc. Talk about nice timing. It all flows on nicely from my stuff on DJing and uses of sound/audio technology there.

I actually had a paper in the latest edition of Continuum if you're interested in reading some of the sort of work I'm doing. It's actually a refereed paper from the CSAA conference-before-last and I'm not actually convinced it's much good. I know I've written better. Hopefully this paper I'm doing now will be nicer.

...ok, so the other thing I've been doing is working on this. It's still looking fairly crap, but I do like the way it's going. I've not tested it in anything other than Safari (bad me), so if you're using Internet Exploder - sucked in! I doubt I'll ever actually do anything with this site once it's done (despite it's fairly high hits when I was running it more regularly), but I do like a bit of focussed web design. Viva la css!

Anyway, doing a little work on that this afternoon (paper in the morning, coding in the afternoon, then a mandatory tranky doo break in the late afternoon), I came across this thing on aural style sheets in the W3 website.
It caught my attention as I'd recently read Barista's entry on deafness stuff and my interest was caught. I'd read another comment on Barista's blog a while back about accessability, and I guess it's just been percolating in there for a while. I'm a bit strict about accessability (to a certain extent) because living with The Squeeze has made me aware of things like colours and how underlining links all the time is actually very important for colour blind people. Or even people who see colours in different ways.*

So the thought of styling websites to make them more accessible for people who use screen readers...!
I will read more about it and report back later. Meanwhile, if you know anything about this or have any ideas, points, please do drop them in the comments.

*The Squeeze actually bypasses all this shit by just reading the internet on his feedreader. Except when he's looking at photos.

"round up" was posted in the category academia and article ideas and lindy hop and other dances and webbing

October 16, 2006

spam ON!

Posted by dogpossum on October 16, 2006 6:39 PM

Is all this spam about diet pills trying to tell me something?
And this stuff:

How many times did you get unhappy after noticing you keep ordering pizza after pizza?

would carry greater weight (tee hee) if I hadn't recently rediscovered Crust (the seafood pizza was more wonderful than words can describe - and all this for a Brunswick girl who Knows Pizza).

Though I suppose I could be tempted by offers as exciting as these:

Feel yourself more powerful and confident with [deleted name] [tool of the patriarchy] enlargement pills.

I must admit - if this stuff could really make me feel more powerful and confident, well...

Sounds like they're promising me a shot at superherodom. Here is your cape, here is your super power, and here is your confidence.

And then, there's the spam from people who're actually reading my site, but seem... shall we say, a little less than informed? I mean, maybe it's just me, but I really hadn't pegged 4 Corners as

onesided, sensationalized journalism

But then, what would I know?

I think I'm going to call myself Italian Sausage Calzone Girl.

"spam ON!" was posted in the category webbing

October 12, 2005

Creativity +

Posted by dogpossum on October 12, 2005 7:07 PM

Things are getting interesting over here at the House of Nerd.
The Squeeze has contracted me to do him a new website. I have worked up a lovely page using CSS, and have just sourced a most amazing looking system for publishing galleries of photos: stopdesign gallery templates which also uses photon, a neat plug in for publishing photos from iphoto to your blog. The whole thing also uses Movable Type, which The Squeeze was keen on anyway.

It's all a bit of a tricky project (for me, anyway): Dave works with masses of photos, rather than just the 30 or so at a time that ordinary people use. The other night, for example, he shot 300 photos at a party. That's just a starting-total for him, really. On a big night, he shoots zillions. So we needed a way of handling and publishing hundreds and hundreds of photos - whole galleries - at a time. We used to use picasa (a nice, free setup which does this sooo easily), but it's not a mac thing.
Blogging software rocks: it's an easy way to upload information quickly and easily.
Dave wasn't keen on using flickr (the usual option for blogging photos), and I'm not sure it's really the tool for this quantity of photos.
So we're going to install the photon plugin (which could be useful anyway), we'll check out the stopdesign templates, and we'll explore the MT plugins. Once I figure out how it all works, I'll see about styling it up to look like the mock site I've already done for Dave (which isn't up anywhere, I'm afraid - I'll see if I can source a screen shot). He really doesn't want too much: white/grey colour scheme, simple, san-serif fonts. It's going to be fat with images, will ignore screen-reader accessability issues (because the blind aren't really his demographic) and basically be somewhere to hang all his lovely photos.
Yay!

I'm looking forward to this. I'm especially interested in the way the stopdesign guy uses MT to do unbloglike things. I'm getting a bit facinated by categories myself, so we'll just see how we go, shall we?

And why am I so interested in all this? Thesis avoidance, of course!
It can't be helped: I've developed this massive case of thesis anxiety. No reason for it: the thesis is actually going very well. I guess it's thesis-completion anxiety. The job-searching continues, however.

"Creativity +" was posted in the category webbing