Someone's had too much to think

The Movie and musings on ICP

2006-05-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

You can find some info about "Free Lance" here.

I forgot how much Insane Clown Possee I had on my iTunes. I honestly don't mind, because I enjoy ICP, and I think a lot more people would if they didn't take the band so seriously. I'm sure that ICP take themselves fairly seriously, but I find that the less seriously I take them, the more I enjoy them. Come on, face paint, hatchets, joker's cards? I love it. And who couldn't use a dose of redneck hate every now and then? When you think about it, besides the murder (and yeah, that's a big obstacle for a lot of people) they're really good guys with a good message. Basically, don't be a bigot or you'll get your noggin' split. I can agree with that, for the most part. And a little fantasy destruction never hurt anybody.

I'm graduated, like a cylinder

2006-05-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I figured that once I was out of college I would be adrift in the world, without a thing to do and probably working a crap job in the service industry or clerking my life away at a Barnes & Noble or Circuit City.

Well, I was wrong.

It started with an offer to photograph a wedding that I received the week before finals. $600 is a pretty hefty sum, and certainly not-bad-at-all for a first gig.

Then I got a call from Brad, the entrepreneur, and he needed a photographer... 1409 shots, four hours, and one assistant later I had a hundred bucks in my pocket and a tune in my heart. What tune? Well, it kinda sounded like cash registers playing high-hat to a swelling chorus of Handel's Messiah.

Two nights ago, around 10 or so (which seems to be the time for me to learn about jobs), I got a call from Megan. A friend of her's is directing a film and he desperatly needs a Director of Photography. After a meeting over seemingly infinite baskets of fries, I sealed the deal and will be shooting a movie during July. So, gigs (as I've taken to calling jobs, to, you know, sound cool) are piling up and it's looking like I'll be able to put this "visual communications" degree to some use after all.

I plan on turning this blog into a little trip through the process behind all that movie magic. Stay tuned for pics and updates.

The Xbox 360, more than just gaming

2005-12-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

The Xbox 360 is going to be much more than just a gaming system, according to a Reuters article. The ability to rip music off of a cd, dowload game and non-game (i.e. music, movies, etc.) content from the Xbox Live Marketplace. It seems that Microsoft is trying to turn the Xbox into the next generation home entertainment system where all your digital content can be at your fingertips and on your teevee.

Is your Google search private?

2005-12-05T01:39:00.000-08:00

A North Carolina man was convicted of murdering his wife with the help of his google searches for "rigor mortis", "body decomposition", and other related topics. Now, this is a very clever strategy by the prosecution, but should it be legal? How private is what we do on our computers and should the government have a right to look at what we're searching for? In this case, I think the answer is a qualified yes. A person's google searches should be private, but they should also fall under the same category as any other type of evidence that may be found in a home, they may be collected with a search warrant or a subpeona.

All those poor yuppies...

2005-11-30T23:31:00.000-08:00

My sister is going to hate this, but BlackBerry may have to stop selling its products and shut down its service due to patent infringements. I can't imagine what a BlackBerry blackout would do to all those jetsetting young business people who need to be constantly connected to the infomatrix. I pity their poor souls.

Microsoft to offer classified service

2005-11-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is testing a new classified ad service called Fremont. With the ability to tie in to other microsoft products (alerts on your MSN Messanger when products you're interested in come up for sale) it seems like it could be quite the heavy hitter.

(un)Grateful Dead?

2005-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

The Grateful Dead are pissing off fans by asking our friends at the Internet Archive to stop hosting live recordings of Greatful Dead concerts. Now, this seems antitheatical to everything the Dead have stood for over the years, and I can understand the reasoning that now that Jerry Garcia is gone the Dead don't tour and make the millions they once did off of their concerts, but it seems to be a slap in the face to fans who have traded live shows for years with the consent of the Dead (the Dead went as far as to set up special recording areas at their shows where fans could place their equipment). If they want to start making money off of these shows, which have been free-to-all for the last 30 years, they need to make it worth while, offer special remastered versions of the most famous shows and sell those, offer rare shows and lost tracks, don't try to start making a buck on something that's been free for the last 30 years.

United States in charge of the Internet

2005-11-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

According to this report from the Associated Press, the United States has been left with ultimate oversight of the main bank of computers that control the flow of information on the internet. I wonder what the complications involved with this will be. Will international sites be forced to obey US obscenity laws if the flow of information is controlled by US computers? It seems from this article that the system that is being proposed is pretty much the system that is already in place, except that now it is acknowledged that the United States is in charge. So, I don't think that anything will really come of this from a media law viewpoint.

Bill Gates spots a "sea change"

2005-11-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates plans to move Microsoft products more and more onto the internet. This is following in the same vein as Ajax, which I mentioned in a previous post. Sorry, no in depth analysis, but this is something we should keep our eyes on. They're making web-based Office Suite software. For those of us, like me, who can't seem to get a copy of Office from BITS this is a godsend.

Democracy and the Internet Campaign

2005-11-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

The type of political campaign described by Gary Wolf in his two pieces for Wired Magazine is inherently more democratic than the trend in campaigning of the last few decades. What Wolf describes is a grassroots campaign that is not cliche in the least, and by cliche I mean a bunch of "wackos" with an extremist agenda that no one can get behind.

While MoveOn is certainly a liberal organization, it is clear from the advertisment that won its 2003 ad contest (an ad featuring children working to pay of the national defecit) that the members of MoveOn are not extremists; they are normal citizens who care about important issues. This can also be seen in the shunning of two ads that compared President Bush to Hitler. Although these ads were used in the media to degrade MoveOn, it is important to note that they were never popular with the members of MoveOn. If you look at this through the lens of ant theory, it is a very powerful moment. The members had hundreds of choices and those that refelected the group's interests were linked to more often and thus became more popular. The Hitler ads, Wolf notes, were found in the "less popular directories of the MoveOn Web site."

But the point is not the relative extremism of MoveOn, the point is that over 3.3 million people (according to the About page at MoveOn.org) have found a way to make their voices heard in a revolutionary way. What MoveOn has created is a group that can take the power of a national organization and turn it toward the local. Wolf mentions that MoveOn uses a network of unsupervised volunteers from around the country to man its phone banks. This means that volunteers from, say, New York, could be contacting voters in Arizona. A national force can be brought to bear on a local interest.

I'm slightly medicated right now due to a bout of the avian flu (or possibly just a nasty cold, the doctors are being hush about this and I can only assume the worst) and I'm feeling woozy. To wrap this up, a campaign as described in Wolf article is inherently more democratic because it puts the constitutiency to work and lets them form ideas that can filter up to the top levels of the campaign. A wired campaign is inclusive and the members form a backbone of labor and insight that modern campaigns have no use for. To take it back to ant theory, the queen does not dictate, the ants do.

The wonderful world of open source

2005-10-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

As I sit here, I'm looking at the Mozilla Firefox symbol at the top of my window and it makes me happy. In a window underneath that I have Gaim running. And in another window, I have Gimp waiting for me. These programs are all open source (which means the code is available for you or me to view and make changes to and upgrade and update and generally make better. which also means it's FREE). I'm also running a version of Linux called Ubuntu, which looks and runs like the offspring of OSX and Windows XP. It's all free and for the most part it is compatible with both Windows and Apple file extensions. That means I may never again have to spend my hard earned dollars on office, digital imaging or audio software. Everything you can get for free with Linux is as professional as it comes. I've been using Gimp for a few weeks now and I'm starting to prefer it to Photoshop CS2. So, if you have an old computer sitting around collecting dust, I recommend pulling it out, dusting it off and injecting new life into it by wiping the drive of that dreaded Windows virus and installing a shiny new version of Linux.

Microsoft enters the frey

2005-10-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

Microsoft plans to start an online book search. What fun. Microsoft executives admit in the article that they are far behind Google, and don't see the project as a money maker, simply an advance in online searching. How noble.

All online, all the time

2005-10-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

Ajax is the one of the first steps to a completely online world. I'm working hard to come up with a metaphor to get across just how this will change personal computing, that is, if it continues in this direction and becomes as powerful as it could. Think of it as watching OnDemand pay-per-view on your cable box, versus going to Blockbuster. With Ajax the movie you want to watch is there waiting for you to press play. You don't have to get a DVD player, go to the store, plug the DVD in and watch. In the future, you could conceivably use microsoft word without installing it to your computer. You would simply pull it up from a Microsoft server, use it and get on with your life. The files could then be saved to a personal computer or on the server itself. Right now we know that the web is not lacking in storage space (what with gmail giving out 1 gigabyte free accounts and even the laggards at Microsoft offering 250 megabytes at hotmail.). Similar systems would be the version of Outlook Express that we access as Berry students each time we use the school's email server. Except that when you delete something or get a new message you wouldn't have to wait for the page to reload; it would just appear. It's the internet in real time. This seems like a very exciting step in the right direction to me.

2005-10-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

Downtown Rome to be wireless I think this is more proof that Rome is the best small town in Northwest Georgia. Back home in Dalton I don't think the thought of WiFi has crossed anyone's mind.

Community

2005-09-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

So, it's the weekend and I figured I'd post about something fun (not that these posts aren't fun usually, but you know). Deviant Art is a web community where artists of all stripes and ages can post their work and receive comments and critiques from other members of the community. I've become a much better photographer since I've been posting photos to my page. Some of the artwork on DA is just amazing. I think that if you search around for a while you may begin to realize why I didn't quite buy the idea that technological advancements will destroy "art" or somehow diminish it's ability to strike awe into the human heart. Some of these people are good.

Show your sources!

2005-09-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

This article in and of itself is more Media Law oriented, but I think that it's interesting that Yahoo News has posted links to other sources where the reader can find a more extensive history of the pledge of allegiance. It's a very nice combination of journalism and blogging in my opinion: here's the news and here's where you can check the background of the story.

The Bad Astronomy Blog is a very informative blog for anyone who may have an interest in the heavens. The entires on the Impact Field Studies Group, the Constitution and Astrology are really worth a look.

Can't we all just get along?

2005-09-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

After reading Dr. Carroll's article, I can only think that the debate over whether blogs are journalism or not is a silly one. Simply because the creation of a blog post does not undergo scrutiny by many sets of eyes does not mean that the information is any less reliable. Blogs simply take this process and reverse it; the editing is done after the fact and the whole of the article can transform right in front of the viewer's eyes. This seems to be an advancement from a printed correction that may appear days later in a newspaper. The errors can be immediatly pinpointed and delt with. I belive that it is this type of error correction that makes blogs so popular: you, the receiver, can interact with the product and change it and shape it. This sense of control is much more comforting than being told what the news is by the people with degrees.

Blogs allow the viewer to become part of the filtering process by allowing the viewer to comment and interact with the story. The example Dr. Carroll uses in his article of Kerry Sipe's blog of the John Allen Muhammad trial is a perfect example of this. Readers of the blog helped to fact check the minute-by-minute updates that Sipe posted to the web. Family members provided correct spellings of names and provided background information that made the story more robust. Here we have a working model of a communication system. There are no passive receivers, everyone is a content provider and everyone contributes to the whole; it sounds like democracy.

Blogging should not pose a threat to traditional journalism: there will always be a need for the facts of the matter. Blogs are simply another tool that the traditional media can add to its repotire to enhance coverage of an event. Blogging can allow for firsthand accounts and opinions that flesh out a story and make what is being related all the more powerful.

Moving away from "blogging v. journalism", I think that the most powerful statement in Dr. Carroll's article was about blogging and digital community. What makes blogs powerful, in my opinion, is that they allow the viewer to interact with others and share ideas and experiences. Reading a blog is like sitting in a coffee house reading the paper with your friends; the news is there, but you get to talk it over and see what it means to you and those around you. An example of this type of community can be seen in blogrings, and in particular the Berry Blogring at xanga.com. I created this blogring (a collection of blogs by individuals who share common interests, in this case attending Berry College) in March of 2004 and there are over 250 members as of this post. I've met many people in real life because of reading their blog posts and everytime I go to a party I find someone who I know from the online world. Some would argue that the online diary of a college student is not journalism, but what is that person doing other than reporting where he is and what the place is like? Just because it's not interesting to you does not make it any less note worthy. I think that is one of the beautiful things about personal blogs, they are a window into someone's everyday world similar in a way to Joyce's Ulysses.

Blogging and journalism are not polar opposites, and they should never, under any circumstances, be viewed as such. We're not talking about Capitalism and Communism here; these are not competing idealogies. These are paths to the truth, and in the end I think the more paths we find, the clearer an understanding we have of what is truth and what is reality.

The law, software and fair use

2005-09-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against three software programmers who created a free, open-source program to allow gamers to play Blizzard video games they purchased with others on the platform of their choice.

More to come after class...

(also, don't steal this as a Media Law topic. I've got dibs)

24 Hours in Rome, ideas

2005-09-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

Krystal cop
b-ball
friday night football
late night waffle house studying
Old Havana

Dangerous Visions

2005-09-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

I was taking a smoke break with some people outside the library last night and we all agreed that we must be living in some sort of science fiction movie. The World Trade Centers are gone, New Orleans is destroyed... it goes on.

I really can't even begin to comprehend what is happening in New Orleans right now. This has to be the biggest National Tragedy we've ever faced. 9/11 brought us together at least; this hurricane has created a state of near anarchy. When cops are telling citizens that it's "every man for himself" you know you have trouble on your hands. The governor of Louisianna said this to the press earlier today: "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will." That's what this has come to, American soldiers killing Americans. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but then again I know how I feel about chaos and rape and murder.

We become just a pack of animals when the chips are down. It's amazing how quickly our civilized selves are stripped away.

:edit:

Here are some very good accounts of what is happening in New Orleans from blog entries by BBC journalists.

There's a hurricane a comin'

2005-08-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

So Hurricane Katrina is in the process of destroying New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast and the only news I can get from Yahoo's front page is that oil prices (and thus gas prices) are going to soar because off shore drilling is being disrupted. Now, oil prices are quite important to me, but I think that the possible loss of great numbers of human lives is a bit more important than how much I'll be paying for gas tomorrow. So... well more to come later as now I must go outside and save my car from the ravages of the Hurricane.

OK, back from the Hurricane and reporting for duty. A few hundred people seem to be piled into the basement of Krannert because of a Tornado Warning. Hint to those escaping to the basement for safety: go to the game room. I had a great time co-opting the tv. Also, when they tell you the emergency is over the first time, it's just that, the first time. Which means that you should get yourself out of there as quickly as possible and to your car. Remember kids, tornados are scared of cars.

Rumor has it (and this rumor comes from the guy running the gas station next to my house) that gas prices may jump $.30 overnight because of the hurricane. So go out and buy gas now I suppose.

In honor of the tornado I present to you one of the funniest things I've ever read. This was posted on my friend Alan Crocker's blog:

Tornado hates you. Tornado is hungry and tornado wants to eat your house. The purpose of tornado is to flip out and eat your house. Tornado is pissed. You can't escape tornado because tornado is faster than you. Tornado is the finger of God. I heard that one time tornado totally flipped out in this diner one time and then tornado totally ate everybody because this guy was like talking about low-pressure systems or something and that made tornado totally flip out and eat everybody. Tornado is coming to your house. Tornado might be at the door right now. If tornado comes your house, tornado won't knock on the door or ring the bell because tornado isn't a vampire. Tornado doesn't have to be invited to come in so tornado doesn't ask or knock on the door or ring the bell. Tornado will just eat your house, because that's what tornado does.

Welcome to the monkey house

2005-08-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Here's the first post, enjoy. I promise that this blog will be as interesting and informative as possible.