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January 12, 2007

round up

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 by dogpossum on January 12, 2007 4:10 PM in the category academia and article ideas and lindy hop & other dances i have known and webbing

October 16, 2006

spam ON!

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 by dogpossum on October 16, 2006 6:39 PM in the category webbing

October 12, 2005

Creativity +

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 by dogpossum on October 12, 2005 7:07 PM in the category webbing