I finally got around to uploading the Processing project I completed a while ago in my Workshop class. My project goal was to create a navigable landscape, randomizing as many parameters as possible. You can play with the interactive version here.

One of the courses we are required to take in my grad program is a Workshop, where we learn a basic variety of media production skills to supplement all our book-learnin’.

So far, we’ve done some work in Processing, creating computational art (which I will put up here once I get it working on my new computer), made a personal page in html (you’re on it), and for our most recent project, we worked as a class to make an online version of a book.

The book chosen for us was Des Imagistes, a collection of imagist poems edited by Ezra Pound that rarely circulates, and wasn’t online! We made a pretty neat online version that just we just finished up this morning. So check it out, and read some poems!

(My favorites are the short images from Allen Upward.)

First non-meta blog post in a long time!

Tonight, at 9, a classmate of mine has set up a Talkshoe show for the classmates to chat about whatever we feel like, hoping that we are interesting enough to engage more than moms. In any case, you can download the thing when it’s done as a real podcast. For the real details, I just copied her blog post for you:

While poking around the intraweb to find phone-post blogging applications, I came across TalkShoe, which is a new community podcasting site that basically lets you set up an online radio talkshow, except you could also use it to live audio blog with a bunch of other people, record a conference or class, or vent your frustrations about Governor Palin with a group of strangers (or friends) on the internet immediately after her latest TV interview (ahem).

To test it out, I have set up a weekly “talkshow” for Sunday nights at 9p called “MIT Media Nerds”. The first “episode” will be 30 minutes, and I’ve recruited some fellow CMS nerd compatriots to call in, so I won’t be talking to myself…although any TalkShoe users presently on the site can also choose to call in when the episode is live. How can I participate, you ask?

On Sunday at 9p, you can either call 724-444-7444 (call ID 26622) and start talking, or go to http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/26622 and start writing in the chatroom, or talking from your computer mic, either as a guest or registered user. Friends abroad, you can also call in via Skype (but in order to use Skype, you have to download TalkShoe’s voice app for free, so you might as well just go online). If you’re too busy to call in, fear not! Each episode will be archived as a podcast on this and other sites.

What will we be talking about? I dunno. Odysseus, video games, politics on YouTube, the latest George Clooney film, whatever. Call and find out!

Ta-da!

I saw Wordle on the blog of one of my future classmates, where she ran her thesis through it, so I decided to try it out on my own college thesis, just for kicks.

Basically, you copy in text, and it makes a picture of the top 150 words, varying in size according to their frequency. Here’s mine:

That appears to sum up my academic interests quite nicely. Maybe I should bring a copy to these meetings I’m having with faculty to explain myself.

(Words of note: the indistinguishable “indistinguishable” beneath the OR of “recording,” “woman,” above the D in “sounds,” and “Schafer” under the MU of “music.” I have no idea why woman would have shown up that often, especially given that I was particularly neglectful of female artists in my paper. Also, it appears that my obsession with Schafer-bashing turned up here. Also, it is so cool that “Metal” turned up at the top, capitalized of course because it usually refers to Metal Machine Music or Metal Acoustic Music.)

I had to add: I just learned that Metal Machine Music is sampled in the TV on the Radio song “Let the Devil In,” and that there exists a Killers song that begins in a similar way to a track on Metal Machine Music. Now I’m done.

Not actually done. I searched my thesis for “woman” to figure out the mystery, and it turns out it shows up a ton of times in a row in my description of Turing’s imitation game. So there you have it.

I figure I might as well get started on this blog right away, while the paint is still drying and the furniture hasn’t been moved in yet.

I am starting grad school in five months. I am not getting a job. I am going to use this five months to learn everything I have wanted to learn up to this point in my life, so that when I start school, I can learn something else. I am probably not going to finish everything, but I am going to start as much as I can, and I’m going to post about it here. I’ve got a reading list, I’ve got a to-do list, I’ve got a list of lists to be made, and I’ve got a lot of free time to use up.

One of those things is learning how to make a website, make it work well, and make it not ugly. I’ve finished one of those, and you can follow the progress on the other two right here, as it happens.

The Other Things will show up here as I find something to say about them. At least that way, I won’t embarrass myself with an extraordinarily long, public list of unfulfilled goals. But don’t worry; I fully intend to embarrass myself in other ways.