Category: Technology

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Neil Young Mixing Sound and Words and Pictures

Normally, I try to stay away from posting things here that are overtly political, though I have to say that I do agree with the sentiments that Neil Young is expressing in his song “Let’s Impeach the President” and his album Living With War. And I like Neil Young well enough.

But I just thought that this video for the song “Let’s Impeach the President” was really brilliant. It just does a really good job of parodying/imitating the genre, of mixing words and images and sounds, of reporting research data, etc. It’d be great to show students in FY Comp– well, except maybe the politics would stir things up too much…. Or maybe that would be a good thing.

Here it is also available via YouTube:

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Facebook in; MySpace out?

From today’s Washington Post, “In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year.” Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they’re over MySpace.

“I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.

From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she’s gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day — decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends’ pages — to deleting the whole thing.

“I’ve grown out of it,” Kim said. “I thought it was kind of pointless.”

Dang– and this after I’ve tricked out my MySpace page! (well, okay, maybe not…).

For what it’s worth though, I think this is one thing to point to as evidence about why “blogging” and “social networking sites” like MySpace are actually two different things.

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Is this the next "big" thing?

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but boing-boing had a link pointing to Vox the other day. I had actually heard of this site earlier (and btw, if I have heard of something before it shows up on boing-boing, does that make me super-duper cool or what?), but I haven’t set up an account yet.

It does look promising though; basically, this it’s like a blogger-type space that allows you to easily incorporate lots of video, audio, pictures, etc., etc. That’d be pretty handy for a class where one of the goals is to get students to do stuff with a variety of different online medias but where there isn’t a lot of time or computer lab access to take students to work on iMovie and other software.

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Sony Reader reviews are so-so

I read this review of the Sony Reader (by WSJ reporter Walter S. Mossberg) in the AA News Sunday paper (even though it was published earlier). Pretty interesting review; this particular reader is clearly not ready for “prime time,” but maybe this is a sign that something that’s actually a workable “electronic book” is around the corner.

Oh, also according to this article, they’re going to sell these things at Borders. Since Borders is headquarted in AA, I have to assume that I’ll be able to check one of these things out at the flagship store downtown at some point.

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Cursive drying/dying, and that's okay with me

From the Madison, Wisconsin The Capital Times (and really, I think it’s a reprint from something that was in The Washington Post), comes this article, “Cursive is drying out; Pen not mighter than the keyboard.” A quote from the opening couple of paragraphs that I thought was interesting:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less.

To me, that 10 minutes a day or so (and I think my son spends more than that in his fourth grade class, but I could be wrong about that) is just fine. As one person in this article says, the only place adults use cursive in our society is to sign their names.

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Google buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion

From iPod Observer (and I am sure other places), news that Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion (that’s a B, my friends) in stock. From the story:

Google on Monday announced the acquisition of YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The company said in a press release: “Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community. YouTube will continue to be based in San Bruno, CA, and all YouTube employees will remain with the company. With Google’s technology, advertiser relationships and global reach, YouTube will continue to build on its success as one of the world’s most popular services for video entertainment. “

Dang, why can’t I come up with some crazy idea for displaying videos of people mixing mentos and coke?

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Good CSS Article (or, something else that has been pushed to the side lately…)

I have skimmed through this morning an article on A List Apart called “12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards.” It strikes me immediately as the sort of thing that would be perfect for a class I teach about once a year, Writing for the World Wide Web.

Then I remembered that I was planning on developing an online version of this course for Spring 2007. I had intended to get this into the pipeline/python of getting the proper departmental approvals and such at the beginning of the school year.

And then I remembered: of course, the strike.

It is funny (not in a ha-ha way, of course) the ways in which the strike and its on-going aftermath rears its ugly head.

In any event, it’s a good article on CSS….

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New iMac/Distraction…

iMac w/monitor

EMU sometimes does smart things, and one of the smarter things they’ve done in recent years (IMO) is agressively “refresh” older computers in faculty and staff offices. Generally, folks get a new desktop computer around here every three or so years. There are some problems with that system still, but it is better than it used to be for sure.

Anyway, I was due and and got a new iMac on Wednesday. I also managed to waste piddle away spend too much time getting this machine set up and to get my old computer for someone else in the department who really needs a new machine. Oh well; I guess it means I’ll spend tomorrow working instead of reading the newspapers.

I had an extra monitor in my office left behind by the thieves who took the Mac Mini server that we used to have in here (we now, at least for the time being, are using an iLamp configuration Mac for that). So I decided to hook it up to this new desktop. I did it mainly because I could, and yeah, I know it has a bit of a “these amps go up to 11” quality to it, but I couldn’t resist. And I am enjoying the screen real estate this gets me, too.

Click the link on the picture there to get the flickr with notes tour.

Also, if you’re really curious, you can take a look at this little movie I shot with the iSight camera on the iMac— as much to see if I could do it as anything else. It’s 5 MB. Yes, I have a lot of stupid junk in my office.