BCPL 23 things

23, end of the road

2007-08-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

The program was interesting and although I found certain parts a bit boring as I could find no immediate practical use for them, I can certainly see how they would appeal to others in the system who could use them to perform their jobs more efficiently and in an innovative way. Overall I would say the program was useful in showcasing the various services and constructive diversions that are available on the net. On the down side I found that some of the applications (Flickr) were a bit time intensive to begin to use and work with to get them to do what I wanted them to. I think I learned allot from the program and would recommend it to anyone that has the spare time to work on it, but would suggest that some of the activities be reworked a bit to cut down on the time that it takes to complete them.

thing 22

2007-08-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

I liked the idea of the audio book and I looked around for some titles that I would be interested in and found some, but it would be nice if there were more of them to choose from.

thing 21

2007-08-15T09:46:00.000-07:00

Two more to go. looking for pod casts has been interesting. There really is something out there for almost every taste and interest, and the quality ranges from amateurish to polished and professional. Again, unless you have an idea of what you are specifically looking for it is hard to just browse for something interesting as there is much too much material available for the amount of free time a typical person has available to them. My interests are more in music so podcasts did not interest me as much as streaming music sites do. As i like trance music two of the sites I go to often are http://somafm.com/ and http://www.di.fm/.

thing 20

2007-08-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

OK the end is in sight. I checked out the Youtube site and watched a few videos. Neat stuff but as with alot of things on the Internet now unless you know what you are looking for it is hard to browse for something interesting without wading through a bunch of boring stuff. I have the same problem with flickr, I know what I like but its had to search for it without getting allot of unwanted junk. I hope someone comes up with a way to quickly review result in a search by flicking a preview of an image at a speed at the edge of perception so when something catches your eye you can stop the process and go back to the image. Wading through typical results at normal scrolling speeds and having to read image descriptions is for the birds.

Thing 19

2007-08-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

Wow I looked over some of the sites listed and was impressed by the variety of free services offered. I could really spend a few days exploring them all. I already spend allot of time looking over the items offered on Craigs list. I also thought the Omnidrive site was pretty cool, although 1 gig of online file storage is maybe not huge by today's standards it certainly is more than enough for what I could use it for. I imagine there are new sites and services popping up daily far more than I could ever hope to discover on my own.

thing18

2007-08-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

I just tried out the Google word processor and it worked fine. I can really see the potential of using this as a way to access and produce documents anywhere you have web access.

16 and 17

2007-07-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

While I can see how Wikies can be useful, I would not exactly say they are fun. maybe they will grow on me.

number six thing 15

2007-07-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

I can see from the articles I read how the changes in the technology that are being implemented in various libraries would fit well into how technology is increasingly being used.

week 5 #12

2007-06-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

I created a rollyo account but at the moment I am drawing a complete blank as far as what I shoudl setup a search for. I'll have to think about it and get back to it when I can think of something. I can se how this would be useful for regular searches accross various web pages.

week five #11

2007-06-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

I Tried Library Thing today and added 5 posts of books that came to mind that I have read. I can see how this would be useful to someone that likes to keep track of the things they have read. Here is a link to my Library Thing account:

week 5 #10

2007-06-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, here is the Avatar I created in Meez. The back ground was as close to something art related that I liked that I could find. Since I like MC Escher's work, I thought it was a good fit.

Week #4 feed searches

2007-06-20T10:51:00.000-07:00

Out of all the feed tools Technocarti is the best looking one. I guess I have to practice how to search for topics I want because I did not have much luck finding feeds on what I was looking for. Then again I did not have much time to search for feeds more thoroughly.

week 4 Bloglines

2007-06-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

OK, I setup an account for bloglines and added some feeds to it, but I really don't have a feel for this yet. I can see in theory how this would be helpful but as of yet I really don't have enough things on the web that I check that I would not have trouble keeping track of individually.

New Blog

2007-06-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

Since I have more pictures I want to post of other things I have painted and made that really have nothing to do with 23 things directly, I have posted another blog devoted to just that. If anyone is interested, you can find it here: http://em-pulse.blogspot.com/. I will be updating it when i can and may also update my ancient web page and post a link to it here and on the other blog.

autostitch picture program

2007-06-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

I found a free stitching program... well actually a free demo, but it is pretty neat. I was able to create some panoramic views of some of the murals I have painted in the past few years. I will see if I can post them here.

There were some pics of some murals that did not have enough contrasts to use, and for some reason the program could not stitch together some of the pictures into one panorama so I split them in to two separate ones. If you are curious about the program, http://cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html is the site where I got the program. It was easy to download, install, and use and I would definety recomend it.

When I have a bit more time I will post more pics of my some of the fings I have done.

Stitching pics

2007-06-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have never heard of Stitching before (and I was one of them until yesterday), it is a way to take a series of pictures and "Stitch" or blend them together to make one continuous panoramic picture. This comes in handy when trying to produce a picture of something much too large to fit into one frame of your digital camera (landscape, large object, 360 room view, etc...).

I'm interested in this because I have mural that I painted in my daughter's room that I took pictures of but no one pic gives a sense of the entire mural., so I started looking for a freeware program that would combine all the pictures into one. So far I have found some sites with reviews of some software packages but I have not tried any of them yet. As I try some of these programs I will post the results.

Flickr mashups

2007-06-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

After figuring out how to post a pic from Flickr to the blog I tried some of the mashups. A lot of them did not work for some reason on my PC but I did get one to work that displayed pictures associated with points on a color wheel. I thought that was neat but I could see where it would get a bit boring after a short while. There was another mashup that I could not get to work, that associates a picture for a topic you choose with up to three other related topics and their pics.

Cool Pic

2007-06-06T08:57:00.001-07:00

It's a Big Big World...
Originally uploaded by Ya Ya

Ok, it took a while to figure out how to upload a picture from Flickr (about 20-30 min. of dead ends), but I think it is working now.

I found this picture while I was exploring Flickr. I think there is something very surreal about the entire scene, as if the observers are looking out onto a huge movie set, or they are completely disconected from the city outside. It also reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting.

Week 2: Blogging

2007-05-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

I setup my first blog. Since this is the first time I've done this it was a bit confusing, but I think I am getting a hang of now.

Week 1: Introduction

2007-05-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

I went through the the presentations and the information was straight forward.

Test post

2007-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

This is a test post. bla, bla, bla, yada, yada, yada