Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Last December, new media professor and Pool head lifeguard Jon Ippolito spoke at the School of the Arts Digital Media Center at Columbia University. Jon’s lecture is entitled “Hacking Copyright for Fun and Profit”; he provides a great overview of current copyright issues. He also explains the Pool in depth (ha, ha) and shows off a couple of the projects we’d been working on. I’m also quite honored that he used me as an example for Jerome Knope’s Pool grapher and showed my “Use the Source” Flash remix.

If you’re trying to keep up with copyright, Creative Commons, or the Pool, I highly recommend you watch it.

Yahoo acquires Flickr. Can’t say that wasn’t predictable.

It’s a really good time to create a useful personal Web service. I hope the Ludicorp people are enjoying their Big Piles of Cash. I just hope it doesn’t change.

My friend Bananas started out at the Bear Necessities store here on campus and has had quite a trip. He’s been from Maine to New Jersey to New York to Pennsylvania to Louisiana, and now he’s landed in Washington. His journey so far is 3,932 miles. He’s posing in the picture above with his new friend Meeka somewhere in Washington in a picture taken by Geocaching user Outward Hounds.

How do I know this? Bananas is a Geocaching Travel Bug. People move him from geocache to geocache around the country (or the world). His mission was to visit other colleges, but he’s been all over the place.

Check out his progress on his very own Web page.

The West Wing, “The U.S. Poet Laureate”

The Senate voted to drill ANWR. And yes, The West Wing is a fictional television program, but they researched it. To make things worse, the “case” for drilling can be easily summed up as “we need oil.”

Meanwhile, supporters’ clever “How long would your state run on ANWR oil?” question, unfortunately, doesn’t stand up considering that they’re using the “best” possible predictions and – oh yeah – they’re going state by state. Let’s just give all ANWR oil to, say, Indiana. Yay, 68 years of oil! Tough luck for the rest of the country. 10.4 billion barrels divided by 18 million barrels (U.S. consumption per day) = 577 days (about a year and a half). Woo. Glad to know that we’ll be set from January 2020 through June 2021, considering that it will take 15 years for the oil to reach market. Who knows if we’ll even need oil by then.

Get a Prius. Or get an Echo. The caribou and Mommy Earth will thank you.

Upon listening to a new-to-me song (REM’s “At My Most Beautiful” {iTunes|Amazon}), I realized that I’d do something I do fairly often: head to Google, do a search, and try to find lyrics. Fortunately, Apple’s AppleScript environment allows some automation of these routine tasks. I went online to see if I could code one of my own; before I could start researching, I found Google Lyric Search at the amazing Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes page (for the record, I’ve used a bunch of his scripts for other tasks before).

I was 95% of the way there – and more quickly than I could have imagined. I changed its browser preference from Safari to Firefox using a small script from g-WH!Z and made the button default to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” behavior. The result was a menu item that automatically opens the first search result in a Firefox window; in most cases, this means that lyrics are literally a click away.

I asked Doug if I could share my tweak. He agreed, so here it is:

Google Lyric Search (Firefox) (ZIP)

(p.s. donate to the guy using PayPal, Kagi, or Amazon in the right column of his page. he’s cool.)

Act now and get your very own digital MP3 player!

You don’t want to get stuck with one of those analog MP3 players.

Due to the… umm… overwhelming (?) public response to my last post and the encouragement to move on, I’ll do just that. Thanks to the people who did respond.

I don’t normally talk about personal issues on here, but I’ve been looking through a lot of my past journals and notes lately. I’ve noticed that I really enjoy having some sort of substance to reflect upon as I grow older (for example, reading my predictions about college from 2001 is quite hilarious). That said, I’d like to record an update on where I stand now (as well as a chance for people to catch up with what’s going on).

School

Yes, I’m still in school. In fact, I’m about a month and a half from graduation. After that, 18 years of schooling will be over… at least until I figure out that I want to keep going. But for now, it’s done.

The biggest project I have right now is my capstone. For those not at UMaine, a capstone project (required in some form by all graduates) is a work that ideally encompasses all four years of UMaining into some form of tangible work. For some majors the capstone is a research project; for some (as it is for me) it’s the development and presentation of some piece of work. If you’re still confused, it’s a senior project. There. The UMaine administration obviously finds it necessary to obfuscate the obvious.

I’ve dubbed my capstone “MultiMediaMagic”. It’s basically a real-time video conversion system for the Web. It would allow users to convert any form of video to a more Web-acceptable format, much like you can do with photo sites such as Flickr today. My capstone deliverable(s) will be a paper outlining how the technology could be implemented and – hopefully – a rudimentary working application of the system. While it may seem like a novelty today, I think it will have much broader applications as video becomes a more popular format of media distribution.

If you’re wondering what happened to my capstone idea last semester (Universal Data), well, it died. MMM took its place.

I’m also working on a photography project for my Theory and Practice of Photography course. I’m investigating signs of the past that appear in present Maine; the project involves traveling around the state and taking photographs (a horrible burden, I know) that would match the project. The final project is due at the end of the semester, but we have a preliminary portfolio review this week. I still have a lot of work to do for the project (in other words, a lot of places to go); the one issue with the concept is that it’s time consuming to drive at a time when I have other work to do. Regardless, it’s fun and it allows me to get off campus. It also allows me to lighten my pockets due to the $2.11 I pay for a gallon of gas. Yay!

My other classes are going well. There’s a lot of reading to do for my History of Mass Communication class, but we’re learning about some interesting topics. A fairly large amount of time has been focused on blogging and its relation to and effect on journalism. It’s quite interesting. My management information systems class is also going well; it provides a different (business) perspective of some of my favorite topics.

Sephone

I spent break working full-time at Sephone. It’s hard work at times, but I’m able to play with some things I normally wouldn’t do. Now I’m working 15 hours a week while classes are in session. It’s nice, too, because some of the work I’ve done is already being used online.

Social

I’ve been doing a lot with my friends lately, too. We went to see a wonderful production of Fiddler on the Roof on Saturday, and I’m hoping that I’ll get to go see the Romeo and Juliet ballet at the MCA on Saturday. We also took an overnight trip to Portland a couple weeks ago to eat at On the Border and IHOP. On March 31 we’ll be going to see Gavin Degraw (a very nice early birthday present). I should really just set up camp in the MCA.

Semsym

Unfortunately, everything I’ve listed doesn’t leave a lot of time for my personal Web projects. I have some really great ideas that I want to start, but I think they’ll have to wait until the April Rush is over with school. I feel bad for the people who signed up for an e-mail over at gre.gario.us – but then again, they’re not getting spam. My top candidates for projects right now have to do with blogs, pictures, trash, Abraham Lincoln, newspapers, maps, forwards, and more (though not all projects involve all of those). Intrigued yet?

The end… for now.