Figures – Velo from Christopher Tirrell on Vimeo.

I just lost an hour of writing thanks to the local drafts glitch in the “free” WP iPhone app. When the core of something is flawed, it isn’t free. When the app you’re using fails to provide localizable usability, it isn’t free.

We’ll see now how remote drafts works and I could shoot myself for not simply selecting all and copying (which I considered before saving) now I must rewrite. dAm.

Prague in one week is too fast. The Czech food was for te most part salty and oversauced but the more contemporary foods we had were wonderful. The street food was of course wonderful- always try the street food no matter where you are. Yesterday was a solo day. I ran around the city just taking in what I had not been able to thus far. The parade or performance photos I got are great so check them out on flickr. I have to finish what I started with my last post, on traveling here from the US- it’s an experience with the need for detail so it will be expanded on when I have more time to sit down and do so. We leave today for Cesky Krumlov and then kremze- look that up in google, it’s quite quaint. Off to take my bags down to the first floor- good by 4th floor walkup- and it sounds like we will have web access…hopefully somewhat fast.

I’ve been banging by head against a wall over what I find interesting about using new media technology to assist in the production of art. Mostly, I’m disenchanted by what I see in New Media works of art. It often comes off like one liners- funny haha fuck you jokes, or simply bad craft with circuit boards.

So I have struggled to find a way to create something meaningful or at least engaging with some of the resources and tools used by new media artists. Personally, I view the camera as a new media device and that’s the tool I reach for first. But I am struck most by how new media can be used to create aggregate datasets.

Since I began my Junk Drawer Project a month or so ago, I have been on the lookout for a way (that I care about) to collect or recontextualize the information in those junk drawers. I started thinking about the kinds of information that we have available that people haven’t applied tag clouds to. We’ve seen tag clouds applied to presidential speeches and other things related to government policy and while these uses of text clouding is interesting- it feels two-dimensional.

I’ve been searching for days (weeks?) to find a tool that I could use to create clouds from large quantities of text and have so far come up blank. From what I have seen so far, it’s also not simply a tag cloud generator that I want. There are text sources of exclusionary terms like to, and, the, but, a, how, etc… I suppose it would be very useful to know what the exclusionary terms are, but for now I’m happy with the results I’m getting from the tool I’m using- which is online.

A starting point to see what I’ve been combing over can be found here-
and the designs that aren’t placing properly in my WP blog…I think I may have to rebuild my blog! shit!

I have looked at a lot of different slide show apps that are free online- but I think slideshow pro is really the best thing out there still. I haven’t paid for it yet- I’m using the demo but the fact that it interfaces with flickr rss feeds is tremendously useful for me.

So I didn’t think that Seinfeld had it in him. To go all undercover into the depths of the beast and fool them into thinking that they too could produce witty ads for customers of the digital age. Seinfeld has helped MS and the Redmond Brigade produce a compelling ad that promises to increase the sales of bargain shoe stores everywhere. As for promoting Microsoft and it’s great “new” operating system Windows NT, er… Windows 2000, wait no, uh Windows XP? No, um…Windows Vista. Yeah Vista. No Wait it’s um… Mojave. Yep. Mojave. I mean, Vista. Pro. Or is it, Enterprise? Home?

Even if I weren’t a Mac user of some 20 years now- this Seinfeld/Gates Bosom Buddies ad would be enough to send me packing for the hills. Microsoft, if you’re shit didn’t stink before, it does now. Sorry Bill.

 

 

El Velle de Anton a anochecer CRW_9713

Originally uploaded by g[wiz]

El Valle was beautiful today. We hiked for about 4 hours and if my gps is correct we hiked over 3000 feet in elevation. If my gps is incorrrect, you can at least rest assured that the mountain you see in the distance was under my feet. We went to the top and then hiked from the small trapezoid shaped bump on the right to about where the grey couldds begin to touch the mountain and then back down into a valley and went swimming in a small waterfall. Exhausted and ready for dinner. Over and out.