magicmacguffin — Camp Magic MacGuffin

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Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Wow, what a week it has been at Camp. Everything is going okay, but this stress of keeping everything upbeat is taking its toll. The campers are all engrossed in their creative activities, and Martha and i seem to have gotten a few of the lagging students up to speed. We are seeing the beginnings of a lot of creative output, some starting simply. A number of them are not getting the stuff about embedding media and a few others could be writing more stories.

But everything is going to plan.

Yet I worry. I hear whispering in groups of people that go silent as I walk by, and the nasty anonymous notes appear under my door on a regular basis. I think they dont like me; and IO hate that cause I am giving my all to this camp, working 20 hours a day, commenting to everyone, spending a ton of time in the control room tweaking the pipes and feeds. Stuff no one sees. I’ve been also banging the pipes on the Assignments collection making some functional improvements (has anyone evne noticed the random generators we added? Do they know all the cleanup I am doing each week to prep the new assignments?)

Mostly I am getting worried because Martha appears so paranoid, and more and more she acts like she does not trust me. I have gone to every effort to calm the worries of the CVI staff; they do not know how things get tricky when they put me in a position of looking like I am being secretive.

And how can Martha think I am not even in camp? I wave at her all the time, yell out her name in the mess hall. I was sitting there right opposite her at the last campfire, she was looking my way, but her eyes kept unfocussing like she did not even see me. I’ve knocked on her door a few times the chat after the last rounds, but she never answers; I can only hear the low tones of that old Morrisey LP “Maladjusted”.

Why does she think I am keeping shed 4 a mystery? I know no more than her- I’ve not gone in, and now she is expcting me to show it to her tomorrow. She seems really creeped out by Marco, and I suggested he pick some flowers for her tomorrow.

I saw her this afternoon walking down to the lake, and I ran to catch her, but she ducked inside the library. I was going to follow her in, but found this curious sheet of paper that had slipped out of her backpack:

lines of ???

On the back it was scribbled “be #4life”. I did not know what to make of it until I saw that one of our students had done the blackout poetry assignment. With some guesswork, I laid the found paper over a print out of Martha’s recent camp post Embedding is #4life- on its surface, this was a very important message for our students, and Martha writes them so well.

But see why I am worried now? I get this message by combining what I found with her blog post:

I get:

I see ways I could share ways I want to link what I did there, a poopy way, I have to look at a prettier way to get to a bunch of other stuff

Its cryptic, but she seems stuck on the things that happened last year. What is a “prettier way” – is it being nice to me? And what is this other stuff she wants to get to?

I really do not want to alarm the home office, and honestly, it feeds into the paranoia I already feel, and the lack of trust. So I am sitting on this and looking for more clues. It might backfire to not report to CVI, but they just take my stuff in and never give me much feedback. They just give orders.

Posted in magicmacguffin, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments11 | Comments Off on Unscrambling Messages

Bending Time

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

"Rift in the Space-Time Continuum … Convenient". by aforgrave, on Flickr

“Making night time work,
A convenient answer,
Bending the space-time.”
FlickrHaiku, TwHaiku, InstagramHaiku

I came across this solution, while seeking answers.
While still not the long-promised DayDoubler**, it’s nonetheless a start.
– At the Petro-Can, 10:10 pm. June 11th, 2012.
______________________________________________

I would have seen a mock ad for **DayDoubler sometime in the mid-90s, posted on a bulletin board outside the technicians’ work room at our DSB. (The room later served as our training lab, our PD library, and the home to our original web and email servers.) At the time, Connectrix marketed a variety of software solutions that served to attempt to extend memory (RAM Doubler) and storage (Disk Doubler) so that the computers of the day could do more with less than they actually needed.

The fictional Day Doubler never materialized. LOL.

Searching the web this evening discovered this text:

DayDoubler is a new product from Connectrix that gives you those extra hours in each day that we’ve been asking for. Using sophisticated time mapping and compression techniques to double the number of hours in the day, DayDoubler gives you access to 48 hours each day. With the shareware hack MaxDay, you can easily stretch your day to 60, 72, or even 96 hours! Connectrix warns that at the higher numbers DayDoubler becomes less stable and that you run the risk of a temporal crash in which everything from the beginning of time to the present would come crashing down around you, sucking you into a black hole.

Should this occur, be sure to reboot with the shift key down.

Source: Nov. 21, 1994: Brady Johnson,
TidBITS: DayDoubler.

A few years later, a colleague would regularly compliment me by wishing he had two of me. At one particularly important juncture, he wished he had three.

Over the years, I have also tried to find the companion product Clone Yourself, to no avail.

Sigh.

Posted in #haiku, 25, 25 hours, Brady Johnson, bunk1, Connectrix, DayDoubler, ds106, imaginages, koans of poems, macintosh, magicmacguffin, openonline, Petro-Can, software, tantalizing text, thoughts, TidBITS, time, twHaiku | Comments Off on Bending Time

Ain’t it though?

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Day one of week four and I’m getting my grips on the Design Assignments.

I tried the Lyric Typography Poster assignment, which can be found here.

Waddya think? I chose the lyrics “Ain’t it just like the present to be showing up like this” from Bon Iver’s Blood Bank. A beautiful song by Grammy award winning artist Justin Vernon, if you haven’t heard it yet, listen to it!

Watch this video on YouTube.

If you haven’t heard of Bon Iver, clearly you were living in a hole in February when it angered many pop culture fanatics when the band won Best New Artist. While I love Bon Iver, it angered me too because as I like to remind people just because it is new to you does not make it new.

Anyway, I used Photoshop on my father’s design computer for this project. I started with a blank canvas, typed the lyrics separately into Text Boxes, then moved them, resized them, etc., until I came up with a design that I liked. The clocks I got from openclipart.org… Check it out!

Posted in bunk4, DesignAssignments, designassignments529, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12 | Comments Off on Ain’t it though?

Start with a Bang . . .

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Assignment (Visual): Photo It Life Peanut Butter . . .

I confess that I’ve never before seen the appeal of animated GIFs. Weren’t those the goofy little hyper cartoon characters that ran rampant in PowerPoints in an early era?

So I’ve had a bit of a change of heart, though I still think you can get too much of a good thing when it comes to animated GIFs and that the animation needs to contribute to the visual story’s compellingness (that should be a word) substantially. Animation for cuteness’s sake just doesn’t cut it for me.

To date, these are the most compelling animated GIFs I’ve seen — CogDog’s Animated Water. I get a real sense of being there. I can hear the splashing. Feel the mist. Yes! The animation makes the story richer. I also love the subtlety of this water-enhanced image “Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos.”

So you may laugh when you see my first animated GIF. I realize you may feel that I’ve resorted to cuteness, but I’d like to think that the fireworks shooting around me (my avatar) conveys a bit of the sense of the wonder I feel every time I pop into this virtual world. I am there. And when I watch this GIF I hear sizzle, pop, and bang.

I thought of sharing the experience of flying among the fireworks over the Bookhenge on Star Island because one of my students, Jennifer, emailed recently to say that she still often returns to the Bookhenge just to fly among the fireworks. And I thought I was the only one who loved to do that.

So do come visit the Bookhenge some time and fly up among the fireworks. If there’s no display going off, just let me know — 2B Writer — and we’ll create a fireworks celebration just for you.

GIMP is new to me but I’ve had some excellent tutoring from a PhotoShop pro. Still, there’s nothing like tying yourself to a Herman Miller Aeron until you come up with a decent product. The most valuable lesson I learned is that you need to make sure that the dimensions of your image fit your theme. I’d remembered that 640 filled the blog column so I went with that. Thank goodness I did. I later, when trying to troubleshoot the lack of animation on my blog, found a chart with the max dimensions per blog theme. 640 it was for my Twenty-Ten.

I think beginning with the GIF was actually a good intro to GIMP because it helped me begin to grasp the layers concept without actually having to do any real editing yet.

I’ll look forward to making more GIFs when I see that the animation serves my story.

Posted in bookhenge, bunk3, Camp MacMuffin, crissman, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments347 | Comments Off on Start with a Bang . . .

Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

A few months ago a students started playing “Call Me Maybe” in the library. He played it over and over and over again. I thought I was going to kill myself, and I told him as much. His response, “It really grows on you.” And so it does. I went home that night and instead of putting my head in the oven, I pulled up the video on Youtube and listened. Over and over and over again.

It looks like Slide Guy likes Carly Rae Jepsen just as much as the rest of ~~the~~ ~~world~~ teenage America.

There’s nothing better for sliding than a soapy windshield!

I started working on this assignment in Photoshop, but I find it too overwhelming at the moment. I saw GIMP mentioned a few times, so I decided to download and use that. I downloaded “Slide Guy” from the visual assignments page. I downloaded the “Call Me Maybe” video from Youtube. I then imported the video into VLC and found the scene I wanted. I went through the scene frame by frame until I reached the one you see above. To capture the still image, I used the “snapshot” option under “video.” Once I had the two images, I opened them both as layers in GIMP. It took me some time to familiarize myself with GIMP, but it was definitely manageable. I still hope to master Photoshop… or at least become competent in Photoshop… before the summer is over.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Visuality (week 3)

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Dear Mom,

Things are picking up here at camp, so much so that I don’t really have time to write to you. In fact, I hardly miss you at all, what with all the projects and activities. This past week I did several daily creates that were image-driven, though I didn’t particularly love any of the ones I did.

On the Rocks with a Twist

I also created a new assignment, not yet listed in the assignment bank, called Gnomify Yourself. The first step of this assignment entails listening to Simple Minds’ “Sanctify Yourself,” after which you must sing the song to yourself incessantly–changing the lyrics to “Gnomify Yourself”–while transforming yourself into a garden variety gnome.

Oh, and one last thing: I made a pic into a sketch. (Props to WikiHow for this tutorial.)

Will write more next week if I have time.

Ally

Posted in bunk2, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Visuality (week 3)

Copy Right Daily Create 155: Mood Inversion – read something…

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Copy Right

Daily Create 155: Mood Inversion – read something profound and make is sound banal, or vice versa.

Posted in bunk2, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Copy Right Daily Create 155: Mood Inversion – read something…

Embedding is #4life

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I think the notion of “embedding” photos on blog posts is causing a few DS106 students to stumble. Let’s see if we can make this all a bit clearer.

Let’s say I’ve uploaded a truly awesome photo to Flickr, and I want to share it with the world. There are a couple of ways that I could reference this photo on my blog:

I could link to the Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marthagrace/7363496548/

See what I did there — I copied and pasted the actual Flickr page URL (which happens to show the image on it) into my post, and I turned it into a link to that same URL. Generally speaking, this is a poopy way of referencing a photo. As your reader, I have to look at that ugly URL (although, if I wanted to, I could make the link a prettier phrase or sentence) and then I have to click away from your truly awesome blog to do see that actual image. Then, when I get to the page you’ve linked to, I can see the photo but I have to see a bunch of other Flickr interface stuff to.

But, most importantly, the Web is a visual medium. You’re taking a class on digital storytelling, which means you’re learning how to use digital MEDIA to create stories and narrative. What’s the point if you’re not actually using the images in your posts?

Yuck.
I could link to the actual image file that I uploaded to Flickr:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8010/7363496548_890c0e5fbf.jpg

See how that link also points to another URL, but this time it ends in “.jpg?” That’s because I’m literally linking directly to the image. If you click that link , you’ll only see the image, not the whole kit-and-kaboodle of a Flickr page.

How did I do this?! It’s like MAGIC! No, it’s not really. What I did was right-click on the actual image in Flickr and then chose “Copy Image URL” in the menu that appeared (depending on what browser you’re using that menu item might be worded differently).

Here’s a Pro Tip: In Flickr, if you go to the “Action” menu on any image page, you’ll see an option to “View All Sizes.” This is nice! I get a whole selection of image sizes to choose from, and then I can right-click on the image when I get the size I like to grab the right URL. Isn’t Flickr cool?!

BUT this is still sucky. I still have to look at that ugly URL and I have to leave your lovely blog to go see the image. Blech.
I can EMBED the image into my blog post. This means the image actually APPEARS in my blog post, instead of just being a link. In WordPress, you’ve got an icon above the main post edit box to “Add Media” (it kinda looks like a camera). If you click on it, you have two basic options: “From Computer” (which means you’re going to upload it to WordPress) or “From URL” (which means you are going to simply point to the image somewhere else — like Flickr).

Now, you COULD upload the image to WordPress and embed it that way, but you have a limited amount of space on your Web host, so why waste it? And, if you’re already uploading stuff to Flickr (like your Daily Creates), why duplicate the effort and upload it somewhere else? Instead, chose the “From URL” option, and paste that image file URL I talked about in #2.

Also, with this technique, you can theoretically embed images from ANYWHERE on your blog — all you need to know is that right-click trick to grab the image file URL. (Of course, you want to make sure you have permission and provide adequate attribution if you’re embedding someone else’s images on your site.)

When I EMBED, I get this:

Isn’t that so much nicer? Embedding images is #4life. Learn it. Use it. Love it.