Entries Tagged 'Ramblings' ↓

Just one extra “i” and so much cuteness… I probably shouldn’t be allowed to blog at this time. I think I’m still feeling the effects of my crazy indulgent Monday Yum Cha.

I could smell summer in the air tonight, it was wonderful but slightly disconcerting… just as I get used to one extreme of temperature, another is on its way.

I’m doing a week of Latin summer school this week and it’s great fun. I’m totally rusty and can barely string the most basic sentence together, but it’s really wonderful how (some) things are coming back. The class is very relaxed so I’m just listening and learning, peeping up now and then when I actually know something.

I doubt I’ll ever be extremely skilled at it, no long-term patience. I also have a tendency to forget things way too quickly which makes it all quadruply hard if I take a break from it. I’m hoping that I will keep it up after this week is over though. It’s really fun, translating sentences, they’re like little puzzles. I imagine it’d be like Sudoku or acrostics if I were into them.

One of the best things about the summer school is the extra stuff organised. Yesterday, I went to a lecture on Roman values and today, I did a class on scansion which was brilliant. Hopefully, I’ll get round to writing up some of my notes. The scansion class also kindled a bit of a desire to get back to English poetry again. So much stuff to learn (and relearn, damn my terrible memory!), so little time.

It’s been such a busy month! I was procrastinating this morning and I read this:

I hate when a week goes by and i haven’t written in my blog. Most of the time, it’s because i’m too tired, don’t know what to write, procrastinate, etc. but this time i was just too busy to steal time for my beloved blog. (a crafty vegan: Meet the Improved Craft Corner)

I thought how I do love my little blog, but she is very neglected at the moment and it feels awful. I have a big deadline next week and then hopefully everything will be back to normal and I can go back to blogging regularly again. I’m determined not to let get Christmas preparations/celebrations make me TOO busy. That’s the hope anyway…

If you have a look at my Reading Now widget in the righthand column, you’ll notice a high proportion of vampire stuff at the moment (3 of 7 listed and another is a book on witches), so I guess I’m on a bit of a supernatural trip. Found this YouTube video today and I love it. It’s set to Rob Zombie’s Living Dead Girl which has the most hilarious lyrics. This makes the Underworld movies look so much better than they actually were and the song isn’t as stupid as it might have been on its own:

Looks like it has been pulled, it could have been this one. There’re a few remixes now.

Checked out this site and I have no idea what they do because I couldn’t get past their tagline: “This Is Your Internet! Are you ready to take control?”TM

Well if it’s my internet, why are you asserting that it’s your trademark*? It’s some P2P thing which is “patent pending”**… groan…

*The “TM” just asserts it’s your trademark, where “R” in the little circle means some trademark registry somewhere has actually let it be registered.
**Not a big fan of computer patents and even less so when it applies to just flow charts (business models).

The technology now exists for you to have your own face on characters that you play in games. I blogged about it briefly on Andrew’s blog. It’s a new frontier in technology, but also a new frontier in the effect on gamers’ psyches. It’s all a bit scary, but too cool. I hate that with technology, things you could only dream about are starting to become real possibilities and actualities which rocks but they also come with lots of new ethical dilemmas which really sucks. Ah the tradeoffs, I feel for those beetles.

One of Cory Doctorow’s students just started up a blog documenting the incredible small print that we’re subjected to daily. It’s called the Small Print Project and people are invited to post their experiences of dodgy clauses that they’ve noticed. It’s quite bizarre what companies try and impose, this one example from Cory:

Just last week, I had to cancel a speaking engagement at Disney Studios, whose speaker agreement includes a clause in which you promise never to use the word Disney again in an article or story without their written permission (!). This is apparently non-negotiable. [BoingBoing]

Because it’s fun!

Let’s Face It – Sydney’s City of Villages: The City of Sydney council commissioned Karen Donnelly, Raimond de Weerdt and Tony Nott to build composite faces of Sydney based on Bureau of Statistics figures. The Sydney faces are a result of 1400 photographs, layered and morphed using a specialist program.  They have used the stats to also create composite faces for four suburbs in the inner city: Redfern, the Rocks, Surry Hills and Haymarket. I think it’s funny how the male figure looks a lot like a cross between John Hurt and an American actor whose name escapes me. The Rocks faces also look disturbingly colonial (the Rocks was the site of Sydney’s first real European settlement and still retains many of the original colonial buildings).

The Face of Tomorrow is a similar project with an international focus. There are plenty other wonderful morphing projects, check out Meggan Gould’s Go ogle series where images are created from the first 100 images retrieved from a Google search. More unsettling is Jason Salavon’s morphing of every playboy centerfold in a given decade [I found the last two links through information aesthetics, a facinating site that explores the interaction of data and design].