veerMe Holding Page now Up!

I have pretty much just finished editing the holding page for my major project over at http://www.veer.me.uk/. Check it out and let me know what you think. The plan is that any blog updates concerning my major will now be hosted over at that site instead of here.

Lately I seem to be learning alot of cool new stuff, probably because of actually doing more. Which is nice. I messed around with WordPress themes and some PHP to integrate the blog into that page, it is far from perfect at the moment but will do for a holding page. The forms are done using JQuery, and it’s ajax functions. Overall, I’m quite pleased.

I just signed up to AdSense, mostly to get an idea of how it works and stuff, but also because another site of mine www.gamefoe.co.uk – an old webzine I used to run back when I was much younger/more stupid – has a hell of a lot of content on it so I was thinking of trying to build a stack of incoming links (I suppose mostly from related blogs and Wikipedia) and seeing how that might drive traffic to the site, and also see how it might affect my PageRank, and also my search ranking for various terms (and how this might effect traffic from search engines which I imagine would be the biggest driver of traffic to an archived site like Gamefoe).

I think it would be quite interesting to get an idea of how much traffic is needed to generate click throughs, and how it all translates into revenue and if over the course of the year I can make £20 to go towards my hosting costs, even better!

I just need to find the time inbetween my dissertation, finishing my portfolio site redesign (the current design is horrid, too embarassed to link to it!) – which I will hopefully find the time to do this week, and my major project. The good thing is that I know I will inevitably wind up procrastinating time away that should be spent doing my dissertation by doing these other things so instead of feeling like ‘work’ it feels like a distraction, and I’m still being productive!

Interactive Media Showcase

If anyone actually reads this blog (Hi mum!) then they may well know that I am a final year student of Interactive Media Production (BA)Hons at Bournemouth University.

As part of an attempt to flog ourselves to prospective employers and gain meaningful employment we are exhibiting our major project work at a graduation show in both London and Bournemouth. The London show is part of Free Range – Europe’s largest free graduate art and design show – which is pretty exciting and runs for a few days from the 28th of May. The Bournemouth show will be a week or so later, but more info on that when it is confirmed.

We decided on Screengrab 09 for a name and more information will go online at our new website http://screengrab09.com/ so check it out if your interested in the cutting edge of new media etc. Now to big myself up a bit: As it goes, I wrote the code for the nice little Twitter update feed in PHP (didn’t style it though). And I find myself on the grad show’s organisation committee.

If you are Twitter-savvy then follow us here.

What Shall I get My Parents For Christmas? (Stream of Consciousness)

“For Christmas the perfect gift for my parents would be a toaster but I got that last year so maybe something that isn’t - boot lace boot camp liquorice allsorts allsports idon’t know mumble jumble sale kettle kettle kettle kettle toast.”

I stumbled upon a few articles about stream of consciousness and streamwriting techniques. Sounded like nonsense (I found the same streamwriting article in at least two different places), but the idea of teasing your subconscious out to see the results seemed interesting so I gave it a go.

I always considered that if I ever tried to lucid dream successfully, and had a conversation with someone in my dream, then I would actually just be talking to myself and so I wonder what sort of insight into my own motivations etc I could get? Or if it might be a way of accessing otherwise misplaced memories (like hypnotism)? anyway…

Basically, you write a title (I wrote a title, then the first sentence) then just write whatever comes to your mind – only I think its not meant to come to your mind but to the paper. This was my second attempt and I can’t really “switch off” from just thinking practically and ignoring unrelated thoughts. Will probably give it another go sometime.

The words after the hyphen read with a certain rhythm though I think, which is nice. Also, I can’t get them a kettle ‘cos the toaster I got last year matches the kettle they already have.

Touch Down

I wrote this on the eight of August, but my Internet crashed as I clicked publish and it got lost forever. I started it again but didn’t quite finish it. So here it is:

I touched down (in a way..) in Benfleet, Essex, on Wednesday afternoon. My first contact with the three swords since Easter and so far nothing has changed, at all. Since then I have spent my time catching up with friends long not seen and reading, in equal amounts. I have plans to very, very, soon continue on this continuing work placement work that is starting to resemble something like the finished tutorial we envisaged at the beginning.

As it is, working in Flash, and learning Actionscript 3, isn’t a wholly rewarding experience. Sure I like noticing my own improvement and seeing my capabilities furthered but when progress can be so slow and painstaking (often spending a whole day trying to defeat the most minute of tasks within the scope of the project) it can get frustrating. Still, looking on the brightside I won’t ALWAYS find Flash painstaking as long as I persevere!

Reading and thinking, has made me want to write things more. I think I could write quite extensively on the subject of The Feeling of Terror at Being Overtaken By An Articulated Lorry Whilst Cycling Along The Road. You could probably replace the lorry with any long and wide vehicle. See also: how one might ascertain the workings of someone’s personality by the car they drive (if they drive), or at least, my theories on the matter.

The other day I finished reading a book. It was a really good book, and I found it hard to put it down. This is something that happens when I find a book That Dan Finds Interesting. The day before I finished the book I trotted over to my local library (Rayleigh) and explained that although I don’t have a card, and neither have I been in a little while, that I am indeed (or at least should be) a member. Turns out I hadn’t gone in over 9 years, their new cards look pretty good though. I took out a book in anticipation of finishing the current one.

So, here I am, stuck in a bind. A limbo, if you will. A limbo in between books and a limbo where I know there can only be one outcome and it is both heaven and hell. Its hard to explain but when I get into a book I really get into it; the characters’ problems and insights stay with me once I have put the book down and tried to get on with doing other things. I can be standing watching a band thinking “I know what Henry Chinaski would make of this” or simply “I can’t wait to get home to find out what happens when…”. Its like the book has a hold on me and only once I turn the final page does it really let go, but then I am quick to try and hunt down a new fix.

I know how junkies must feel now. They (probably) really, really, love the hit; the rush becomes them. But once its over they know, they know, deep down, that another hit is probably not the wisest of ideas but it just feels so.. for lack of a better word… right.

Ah, Timing.

I haven’t blogged in ages. Absolutely ages. I tried to address the other day but only managed to write less than a quarter of what I wanted before saving that blog post to my drafts and forgetting about it. I’ll probably get it finished soon.

Such is the joy of laptops I am writing this from in bed with the spectacularly unjoyful and unhelpful case of food poisoning I seem to have managed to acquire. I don’t tend to get ’sick’ very often so tend to assume my immune system is usually quite efficient but I think it may have taken a bit of a battering in the last few weeks and the final straw must have came in the form of some dodgily cooked meat that beat whatever was left of my good health into submission. Nuts.

Whilst this is a combination of bad luck and my own fault (both of which I can’t really curse) I am still pretty fucking gutted at the timing of this – either Wednesday or Thursday is set to be presentation day for this final unit of the year and not being really able to eat/get out of bed/be more than 2 minutes from a loo severely disables me from preparing adequately for it. With any luck (and the aid of Actimel and bananas and sleep and water) I should be OK enough to actually present. Though I wonder how my peer assessment is going to suffer from my not participating in the final vital few days leading up to the presentation.

Gutted, been doing pretty well up to this point, too.

If you’ve never read a newspaper, and you want to be all you can be. Join the army.

I got the new Gay For Johnny Depp album ‘The Politics of Cruelty’ at the weekend. Absolutely stunning. What’s more there’s a very strong chance I’ll be putting them on in Bournemouth in the new year at iBar. Brilliant!

Wednesday is the birth of a new club night. Robot.Robot.Engage! is the name we’ve given to a new night run by our fledgling promotions ‘thing’ in Bournemouth. Sam from Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly is DJ’ing and apparently that scared Fat Poppadaddys enough for them to try and poach both Sam and the whole night. Scumbags, how can the Uni actively endorse practices like this whilst simultaneously hindering what we are trying to do by not allowing any promotion of other venues on the Campus or in the student magazine (who have been very supportive to us).

Anyway, I came across a problem in m project the other day. I want to let users upload images to their own cache and then have the browser display them, thus adding greater interactivity and a reason to register to the site (only members can save, or publish, what they upload). Oh, it’s an online comic book.

Although apparently PHP_SELF can be used for sending images to itself it can only display the various attributes of the image and not the image itself (not without saving the image to the site first, which I don’t want to do). At least that’s the impression I get from Matt and The Internet. Javascript doesn’t seem to be able to do it, either. All the research I did seemed to suggest Javascript can be dynamic but not quite as dynamic as I wanted.

I ‘ve been pointed in the direction of something called AJAX:

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is not a technology in itself, but is a term that describes a “new” approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, The Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the AJAX model, web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions.

Hopefully I can find what I want to do rather quickly because I don’t want to spend too long on this because although it was initially one of the important functions of the site I realised I could easily survive without it, people will just have to register to play on the create.php page.

Time clearly isn’t on my side.

Censorship On The Web aka Who hasn’t read the anarchist cookbook when they were 12?

I find this blog post (found randomly on the front page!) very interesting. It’s about censorship on the internet, in particular a plan to block certain websites if you’re accessing the net in Canada. The blog is here and I recommend reading it, though it is quite subjective and anti-censorship.

The comments after it are also read-worthy because they offer differing opinions but I got the impression that the general consensus was that censorship = bad. In my humble, mostly misinformed, opinion I think that the term “internet censorship” is a bit of an oxymoron; the very thing that draws me to the internet is the fact that I can find and readabout anything I want. If a website is breaking laws in it’s country it should be shut down and the owners should be prosecuted, they shouldn’t just block it cos I bet there’s people who can find their way round systems like that.

I think a mostly agree with this comment that was left on that blog:

Any form of censorship other than self-censorship is contrary to the very foundation of freedom. Keep your hands off my Internet connection.

If something is on the internet, I want to be able to see it EVEN if I don’t want to see it. In other words, I’m pro arresting web paedophiles, but anti internet censorship.

GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR! I’LL BROOM YOU, JEFF! I’M BROOMING YOU!

I can’t believe I missed The Mitchell and Webb tour coming to Bournemouth. That is so so shit, Peepshow is undoubtedly one of the most amusing TV programs of recent time and I’m sure the two people would create chaos and a live sow full of good wry humour. So tempted to go to the Southend date, pretty sure I’ll miss something important at Uni though.. hmm…

http://www.mitchellandwebblive.com/

Buzzzzzzzzz

I am the drama queen.

The Lion, The Blog, and The Wardrobe

I guess that the very nature of a blog means that when writing a blog with more than one topic you can easily split it into various posts for ease of clarity; I, however, currently like the idea of keeping it as a stream of consciousness so that’s how it’s going to stay. For now.

First off I want to moan about how long it is taking me to type anything without mistakes – I am still not used to this sodding laptop keyboard. Or I’m just a crap typist I dunno.

Second off I want to moan about how I’m ill. I missed everything on Monday and Tuesday because upon leaving the house on Monday morning I was shivering whilst wearing many layers and coats and gloves and hats etc, I had a headache from the moment of waking up, and was coughing severely. On top of that every time I opened my mouth I could only speak three or so words before find myself almost retching. This has been the case since saturday, and no it’s not a fucking bad hangover. Thrown up every day since Sunday, woo. Not had more than two hours of constant sleep before waking up in that horrible cold clammy sweat, woo. I think there’s blood in my phlegm too, …

Going to try and find the Uni Doctor tomorrow I think, guess sleep and rest doesn’t cure everything eh. I am feeling a bit better though other than The Throat.
Watched Requiem For A Dream for the first time the other day and wow is that a good film – both in the terms of it’s direction/editing and narrative. I didn’t know it was going to end with the guy losing his arm. Love films with happy endings, I do. I also watched all the bonus footage, interesting to hear the director waxing lyrical during the ‘making of’ which somebody else shot – it sounded like he hadn’t seen the footage before doing it!

Recently I’ve been trying to read William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch because someone recommended it to me in the summer but it is such heavy reading I’m a few chapters in and don’t really understand if there’s a plot or story at all. He’s built up a good atmosphere and image in my mind of some total hell, though. Anyway, today I remembered why the book got recommended to me – it’s because they said the film was good – so I go over to the IMDB and give it a little look over and find it’s called David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and it is based upon the book but has elements of the author’s live involved and some other stuff which I forget. Oh, a typewriter that turns into a cockroach. Ordered it from Play for like £6.99 or something, win! Maybe it’ll encourage me to put more effort into reading the book…

Learnt stuff about Mr Burroughs too, much like his depictions in Naked Lunch of other people he himself was gay, and was drug dependant (“addict” sounds so descriminatory, doesn’t it?), yet was Harvard educated and could live of his writing due to having a fund for him due to a, I guess, successful family business. He also killed his wife trying to show people a party trick (it wasn’t actually their party trick, he was just ‘drunk’) which was from William Tell – shooting an apple (or I think it was a drink in this case) off his wife’s head from a certain distance. It ended badly, he only served 12 days in a Mexican jail.

Moving on…

This is an essay now isn’t it?

Started to think about ideology and all I can remember from college was that, I think, Karl Marx said it was like “a colourless, odourless gas” in the way that you can’t see it but it is there and it effects everybody. Anyway off to wiki it. Could ‘wiki’ be a verb now?