Behind The Scene

It might look like I haven't been writing anything for days, but just because there's nothing visible on the blog it doesn't mean I haven't been productive! This week I have been working on at least three different drafts, although I'm not sure I'll ever finish and publish any of them. The one I started on Wednesday for example really got me "going" inspired as I was after Stuart Moulthrop's talk. Moulthrop is something of a guru within his field of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, and that lecture indeed gave me something to chew on. Lots of stuff for my paper, hopefully.

I say hopefully, cause the last thing I was told when I asked at the office for the "missing" schedule, was that "Sorry, there's been a mistake. That course isn't on this semester after all." Sorry, my ass. That's simply not good enough, and that's what I'm going to tell them. Politely, of course. But still, they can't treat us like that, and then expect us to follow every whim. In fact they have told us clearly that what's in the "Student portal" is to be considered as valid at all times.

Otherwise it has been a strange week. Personally I feel better than I have done for long time, more calm and grounded, so that's good. But I certainly need it, having some issues here in the home to attend to. I'm sure glad I still remember how it was to be a teenager, if not I think I'd go mad...

There's also another thing I've been neglecting for a while now and that's my friends web page, he has on the other hand been kind of absent too, so I don't think he'll complain. But I wasn't happy with the result when I first published the page, so I really wanted to do something about it. I haven't yet done anything about the layout, but I have found a better way of creating the image gallery. Instead of using Photoshop's automatic features, I have now downloaded a imagewiever which I have customized, and it's sooo much easier to update. Now I can replace only the images when needed/wanted, and just run the PHP script again. Clever girl, right? I'm not pretending I actually know what I'm doing, but if it works it works...

I have finally got my new PC to run smoothly, the viruses are gone, and I have my Photoshop and other important programs working. And the next thing then on the list is to install the wireless router I bought the other day, so both me and my precious teenage daughter can be online at the same time.

Better start thinking about getting to bed soon. My other two kids are coming for dinner tomorrow, and even if I'm just cooking up something as simple as a spaghetti it's still nice to put some time and engagement in it. I guess that's one thing I really miss - a large kitchen table where everyone is welcome. But I'll get that too, one day. No doubt.

Just Testing Out Jamendo...

The music could be anything, but this was the one that brought me to Jamendo in the first place. It was featured in a game made by Grolsch! Now that's clever marketing; I can really imagine myself enjoying one of those now. And I believe my writing would improve as well...

You're Just Too Good To Be True

This song is 40 years old, and it has probably been covered in every thinkable way. And a few more. It has also been used films on more than one occasion. Wikipedia can tell you a lot more about "Cant take my eyes off of you", but here follows a small selection from YouTube:

First the original with Frank Valli. Only the music though, the actual movie has nothing to do with the song itself. "Standard" YouTube method so to speak...



Next is a upbeat disco version. Say no more...



Are you ready for Japanese Idol? (Or whatever this is)



In the movie Conspiracy Theory Julia Roberts sings along to Lauryn Hill's cover of the song while Mel Gibson watches her through binoculars from a taxi cab. Here we'll see the original scene from the movie, while the cover is Morten Harket's. Odd really, but just the sort of thing you'd find on YouTube.



And can you possibly imagine what a Japanese boy band can do to the piece?




At last you can see what a poor soul with a crush on soap star Josh Casaubon (or rather his character Hugh Hughes in One Life to Live) has put together - Lauryn Hill's earlier mentioned cover version together with clips from the show.




Shirley Bassey made a quite acceptable cover in 1976, but for that one you have to visit YouTube directly. My guess though, is that you probably had enough already. Especially if you endured both the disco and the Japanese Idol versions...

The Time Machine

Most people love to travel, and a couple of weeks ago we traveled in the three dimensions of space, by the means of computer technology and Google Earth. Last night we travelled into the fourth dimension, this time aided by YouTube. By simply putting our minds a few decades back, and type in relevant search criteria, we could watch old episodes of Dave Allen, Monty Python, Not The Nine O'clock News and videos of ancient rock stars. We're talking the seventies here... And who won't laugh at the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show?




H.G. Wells (1866–1946) said in the first chapter of The Time Machine from 1898: "There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it."

Wonderful evening, and I could swear I was still sixteen when I left the building. But maybe that had more to do with my travel companion than anything else...

I Think The Earth Moved

I might have mentioned that I'm the honorary treasurer of the club where my son plays basketball, and in connection with that I have just wound up last years accounts. All which is to be presented at the annual meeting. Last night we had a final board meeting before the annual, just to tidy up next years budget and some other things. I didn't tell you this because it's particularly interesting, on the contrary, it's actually quite boring. Figures and numbers that need to be correct, and a lot of talk around it. That's why I needed a little break last night after the meeting.

So what can you do in the middle of February, thats free, and won't take long? Easy. You'll travel the world! With the help of modern technology and a good portion of vivid imagination you can go anywhere in a jiffy.

I drove directly from the meeting to a dear friend of mine. We had something to celebrate, and did that with some cake and coffee and... Yummy, indeed. A little later I said something about wanting to visit Monte Negro sometime. Not exactly sure how far up on the coastline it was situated (it turned out to be much further south than we'd expected), we decided to check it online. But why settle for a crude graphic map when you can use Google Earth? In your own living room you can zoom in on every single spot on the earth, it's absolutely amazing. Not all the maps have equally good resolution, for example my hometown doesn't show that well. But when we started our trip to places he'd been, it became a totally different experience. Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and so on are extremely well represented. But the travel there went further, beyond the actual places. When we came to Babylon, I made some associations to an assignment I had last year. While working on that essay I came across Hammurabi's Code of Laws, and also wrote a blogpost about that.

And like that we traveled here and there, sharing memories and experiences. I took him to Australia and Canada, with a stopover in Sardinia, while he showed me Curacao. We also had a look at a few places neither of us had been before, but that looked tempting. Like the Maldives.

Well back "home" again we suddenly realized that the world had turned upside down on the screen. In Google Earth you can control the map of the world in almost every possible angle and direction, and when we'd zoomed out somehow there was another perspective to it. Refreshing.

Temper Tantrum

I just caught a glimpse of an old episode of "America's Funniest Home Videos" this evening, and as usual there's too much of people who more or less willingly hurt themselves. Not funny. Well, not to me at least. But this one is hilarious, and it really says it all:

5 Things You Didn't Know About Me (Maybe)

Toril has tagged me for a meme, which I actually would like to follow. This time it's about 5 personal "secrets", or at least things you usually don't write about in your blog. As in Toril's case episodes and behavior from younger days naturally comes to mind, so here are a few things you perhaps didn't know about me.

1. As a very young kid I was afraid of the sea and wouldn't take a swim in anything but fresh water. The idea of monsters like crabs, jellyfish and worse kept me far away from the waves. I came to my senses of course and now I just love everything about the sea.
2. I hated fish too! To eat I mean, and getting steamed cod for dinner was the worst punishment in my opinion. I came to my senses in that area too, and today cod is a luxury. In every aspect, since overfishing and global warming almost has landed the cod on the endangered species list.
3. As a kid I played the violin. Nothing more to say about that really...
4. And I danced ballet. Same with that, I quit. But maybe I should reflect on these two activities and why I quit? You see, I have had a habit of quitting things as soon as I didn't feel good enough, and how could I be? Comparing myself to the ballerina I saw in Swan Lake at the opera, or the fiddlers we had for guests in our home, and who woke me up in the middle of the night playing folk music. I loved it though, and it has probably shaped me as well, but at that point I figured I'd never be as good. I was 9. I remember my tutor calling my parents begging them to persuade me to keep on playing, but I had made my mind up. These days I try to let the experts inspire me to improve myself instead of giving up.
5. At last - I was a rock girl, and quite heavy rock it was, with bands like Krokus, AC/DC, Motörhead and Iron Maiden. I dressed accordingly, probably to my mothers disliking, but perhaps she was smarter than me keeping quiet, 'cause I can't keep my mouth shot when it comes to my own 13-year-old. Guess what her favorite music is?
   

This has been fun, and I think I'll pester my teachers and tag Jill and Hilde. Then I'll also tag Pia, who left for Hong Kong this semester.

New Year - New Gadgets

The Holidays are for several reasons perhaps not the time for spending late hours by the computer, and I have myself these past days been somewhat detached from the online communities I usually frequent. Last night and today I have however been more active, and look what I found on Jill's site! Like she says; snap.com offers an "über-cool see-the-site-before-you-click-the-link effect". Just my kind of toy, and what ever statistical information they can gather by tracking activities on my blog I don't mind. For now, anyway. I have no secrets, you know...

Diversion At Hyperspeed

How many steps are there from Corpus Linguistics to homemade furniture? I should be reading for my exam tomorrow, and I'm even trying to, but it's ever so easy to do one click too many, and then you're lost in cyberspace.

I started off quite alright with the web-based compendium, and began to read about different ways of presenting and adapting text that are digitalized on a symbolic level.

• The text can be displayed in different fonts and colors.
• Elements of texts can be linked to other texts or parts of texts (hyperlinks).
• Specific parts of the text (e.g. footnotes, hyperlinks) can be either visible or hidden.
• The text can be translated to another language.
• A summary of the text can be made (e.g. "SweSum")
• We can extract keywords etc. and find structures and relations within the text itself and with other texts.
• We can generate a text from a database, previous texts or other information. (e.g. "SciGen", "PoMo")
• We can create statistics over words and other textual characteristics (e.g. "Ord i dag")

Deliberately I chose not to keep the links from the original, otherwise you might get lost too, but the one that set me off was PoMo, a text generator that delivers nonsense academic papers. Quote from the creator: "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator [...] using a system for generating random text from recursive grammars."

So, what did I find on PoMo, besides the fact that I absolutely love "silly" things like that? (And the fact that it's not silly, considering that actually a few generated papers like these have been accepted as real. That opens up for a series of important questions, I believe.) What I found else was a "Sites I Like" link list on the right, and from there I jumped to MAKE: Blog - hilarious! One of the posts drew my attention, and I clicked again. Then I decided to blog about it myself, after all, that's what's is all about, isn't it? Diversion At Hyperspeed ...

Reaching For The Stars?

Well, here's an excellent site which can bring the whole Universe, and the stars with it, into your own living room. Beautiful.

What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

One idea is to dive into something you know very little about, just for the fun of it.

Any of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I have tried quite a few different layouts, and just recently I stripped it down to a very minimalistic style, with only a picture header as a personal touch. Except for the color choices, they are mine too. But I get very easily bored, and I want to fix the template all the time. Rather stupid, but I found a way to justify it this time. To really reflect the kind of person I am, I thought it would be cool to have a random picture in the header, and I was quite sure I could find something in my JavaScript book. Except for the fact I didn't want to use JavaScript. A Google search for "random picture header" sent me to PhotoMatt, and I immediately started some serious copying&pasting, while also preparing a few pictures for the folder which everything should go in. This is PHP we're talking about, which applies to my opening sentence, i.e. I know very little about it, so when it didn't work I really couldn't figure out why. I suspected it had something to do with Mozilla; I love Mozilla, but sometimes they're just handling things in their own way.

Sure enough, it had to do with how Mozilla handles image caching, and after reading comments on Weblog Tools Collection I found a very useful one from snuf, who directed me to A List Apart. Now why didn't I think of that? Should've remembered how good that site is. Anyway, more copy&paste, and then off with everything to my server, and the result is here. But like one of the comments said; it's not like the users are going to hit the reload button every fifteen seconds, it's more that they get a different picture each time they visit the site. Maybe not all that exciting, but at least I had some fun.

Now I just have to update the photos once in a while. But that's really one of the benefits with PHP compared to JavaScript, as you don't have to alter the code everytime you put new pics in your image folder. Neat. Just like programming should be.

Who Else...

...but me, would spend an entire afternoon republishing every singel post in her blog? Well, not everyone, I have only worked my way through 50 of them so far. If I continue at this pace I just might be finished before my exams. And why all this trouble? If anyone hasn't guessed it yet, I'm a controlfreak. (In a sort of complicated, unorganized way.) I simply like systems that work.

And with this new Beta Blogger I can label my posts, and I think that's a nice feature. But the old posts won't go tagging themselves, so I have to do it. Yes, that's right. Have to. All 192 of them.

Diversion

Last night I finished, if not exactly to my satisfaction, my latest project, and it will hopefully work sufficiently until I have more time to look at it. Last year during the webdesign-course here at the university I made a website for a friend of mine. As gallery owners and alikes constantly asks for his webadress, we thought it was about time to get his own domain. Fancy indeed, and I feel a strong pressure to fulfill the expactations. As long as this was sort of a studentproject, I could hide beneath that, but from now on there's just me. A disclaimer maybe, on the site itself?

Now I have to dash, got business to do at the policestation. I didn't loose my license, and accordingly to their records I don't even have one. I do, but it's Swedish, and it has worked perfectly fine for all these years. Better go down and show it to them...

And maybe a quick coffe, Toril, while I'm downtown?

Rebuilding My Life

I'm trying as always to reorganize things so I'll eventually get my life at least resembling a good one. A blog might not have to do so much with that, but here's a little change on the layout anyway. I'll come back later with more, as I don't think it's done as it is. Not my life either.

A Spanish Fox

Hola!
I'm stunned. I can write in Spanish! And I didn't know before. Just kidding, but what I didn't know is that Google has a translation tool, and someone used it to have my page translated. It made me giggle.



So many things I don't know, every day is exciting: what will I learn today?

("time elapsed, about 5 min...")

I'm back after checking out Googles tools, and it turns out that I can write in a lot of languages including Korean and French. Excellent! It's also evident that I never before really have taken any time in exploring Google. Sorry about that, folks! I'm sure I will find many uses for Googles Help Central in times to come. But that's also kind of typical, the most obvious things can take forever to discover, even if they're right in front of your nose.

No Syntax Errors

I have just discovered something really satisfying. This spring I'm trying to get the grasp of Java, and it is fun. Basically it's like learning any other language, and it's equally as important here not to be shy. Just dive in, and make a fool of yourself, it won't kill you. Imagine yourself trying to learn french, and after only a few lessons be sent into a shop to buy 2 litres of milk and a bread, only to end up with yesterdays newspaper and a football in your hands. Does it really matter? It's just something to laugh about later.

In this Java-course they are taking advantage of an interactive learning environment called BlueJ, and it's here I found my new little thrill. Programming code written in high level language, needs to be compiled into low level language machine code so the computer knows how to execute the program. If compiling in BlueJ is successful it will tell you:

file saved - no syntax errors

Rewarding, I must say, but as usual I had to reflect a little over it. As computer programming could resemble using any other language, and language is what makes us people human, I couldn't resist a thought. Why don't we have a compiler, a program that takes our high level thinking and translates it to something that can be put into action by our mindless bodymachines? And more important: warn us when it doesn't make sense? I think we all, from time to time, could have use for something that prevented us from behaving erroneously .

Fakin' It?

I read about the Postsecret art project the other day, and started to do a little pondering, about which secret of mine would be the hardest to admit to. There are a few, but maybe it's time to come clean:

I'm an imposter.

Almost everyday I have this feeling that someone will reveal my true nature, and catch me as The Great Pretender I am. First of all, I try to speak and write in languages that not are mine. I am a traitor to my roots. Then I try to act intelligent and educated, and I even pretend to be nice and caring. How rude!

But this is probably just my poor self-esteem talking, and my sometimes desperate need for confirmation. The identity issue, you know. 'Cause I think real imposters most likely are completely devoid of any guilt regarding deceiving honest people.

Gadgets

As I'm supposed to be writing an essay right this moment (due tomorrow) and I can't seem to find a good entrypoint, I thought I'd rather post a few words here. Just to start things up, so to speak. And what could be more innocent than just happily show off my most recent gadget?

On and off, I think I've been a Gadget Girl for all my life. Nowadays I try to be more sensible, and really think it through before I buy anything, but the feeling now is the same, as when I got my first Nintendo Game&Watch back in 1981. Gadgets are toys for people who claim that are not playing.

I like words in general and some even more, "gadget" being one of them. So I thought I would look up what Wikipedia had to say about the subject, and I found that the top example of a gadget is a Mp3-player! Can you now guess what I bought?
This probably just shows how predictable I am, more than anything, but yes, I am now the extatic owner of an Creative Zen Micro. And yes I know, late as well. I know people have been using Mp3-players for a long time, I just thought I didn't need one. A walkman would do just fine for me, or a MD-player. I've tried that too.

But just imagine bringing your whole CD-collection (or a large chunk of it, anyway) with you, whereever you go. Usually I'm too tired to enjoy any music when I get home, this way I can listen to my favourites outdoors, crisscrossing the City of Bergen.

While I was doing more "important" stuff on the computer, I ripped about a thousand songs and transferred them to the player in no time. Nifty! Tom Waits, Barbara Morrison, Nicolas Repac, Van Morrison, Jan Garbarek, and all that Jazz...

Here's another Gadget Girl with things on her mind.

(Four Things) Meme

Yesterday I was tagged by Angela in this "Four Things Meme". I must confess I didn't know to begin with what a meme is. But that's me, amazingly unknowing at some points. My excuse then is that if I don't know, I do my best to educate myself. Dictionary.com is a good place to start, and here I found a rather short and handy explanation. Further, more substantial reading, was found on Wikipedia. Excellent!

Now that I had regained my belief in not beeing totally unaware and ignorant, I started to trace this meme backwards, to see what I would find. I must say, if this had arrived in it's original form, and without me reading Angelas inspiring ponderings about the online meme-phenomenon I would probably not have been doing anything about it. Because this meme thing is, to quote Bruce Lawson some seven steps back, "just geekspeak for “Chain Letter”", and I don't do them. (Stopped doing chain-letters when a "foolproof" one came around which should have provided me with lots and lots of nice wine. I delivered my bottle personally and went home, eagerly waiting for the followers to execute their part. Needless to say, but no bottles ended up on my doorstep.)

Only two steps back from me I found "The Ramblings Of Linden Langdon", and it's about now I once again realize why I don't read too many blogs on a regular basis. For the same reason I try to stay away from some new TV-shows and Smith's Crisps - They're too good!, I get so easily hooked and then I just have to continue. (reading, watching, eating...) But I think Lindens blog will be added to my daily sitevisits, much thanks to the artistic perspective. Very impressive! (and Langdon senior is a ceramist, what can I say?)

I followed the memetrace even further and 14 steps and only 4 days earlier Michele Finotto in Italy was tagged. A couple of days later he made this statement which I in a way can relate to.

It soon became evident that it would be quite impossible to find the source of the meme, not to mention absolutely pointless, so from here I instead tried to find out how many chose to continue the chain. That turned out, not surprisingly, to be a rather tedious task as well, but I think my conclusion is that not too many can be bothered. So we're kind of back with Angelas thoughts again, because even if we perhaps don't like these kind of memes, we'll still need them around if we're going to elaborate around the actual concept. Trapped once more!

I think I've mentioned it before, but I really don't like lists. I'm always afraid that some misconceptions could be read between the lines, and that might validate the reasoning of "favourites as identity markers", as Angela and Linden suggested. Very much in my own line of thinking, and certainly worthwhile pursuing sometime. Perhaps the fact I'm not going to write a list of likes and dislikes, is telling just as much about my personality and identity as if I had?

Somewhere else in the line I followed, I found this handsome young man. He seemed to be quite enthusiastic about this meme, but it might have to do with his young age, in time he will most likely be as cynical as the rest of us... He's even sticking to the "rules"! I'm not! Another trait of mine, beeing unruly (but yet conscientious - what a contradiction).

So my deepest apologies, Angela, for not following through, but hopefully it wasn't a total waste of time. I enjoyed it, even if this particular track stops here. Perhaps I'm just too lazy?