President Obama has posted the text of tomorrow’s speech to students. His speech is inspirational and has a worthwhile message. I’m sure he will deliver the speech well and I hope the students listen to his message.

I wish President Obama had mentioned the teachers’ responsibility to thoroughly understand and teach their subjects rather than simply saying their job is to inspire students to learn, but admittedly this is a speech about students and not teachers. (Although Ed Morrissey points out you could call it a speech about Obama given how many times he mentions himself.)

I’m sure some liberals will view this as vindication that conservatives were wrong to object to President Obama’s speech. I’m sure some conservatives will view this as proof that public pressure helped stop controversial statements from being included in Obama’s speech. We’ll never know for sure, but hopefully we can agree it’s a good message to tell students they need to work hard and get a good education.

– DRJ

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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.

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!

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 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.

Jesus Julca is a custom purse and shoe maker in San Felipe which is another name for Casco Viejo. Jesus incorporates traditional Mola patterns into his shoes designs so I wanted to come up with a logo that he might be able to use for branding down the road. I think that this could look really nice as a leather stamp as well.

Jolineth Souvenirs is owned by Hermelinda de Bourné who is also a talented Pollara maker. The Pollara is a traditional Panamanian outfit that is pleated and uses a drawstring for the waist. They are beautiful skirts with a somewhat detailed white top that is separate. My set of photos of the parade in Panama City from 2006 has many examples of the Pollara.