Peeeee. ESSSSS.
One week on, my iPhone still makes me giddy. Even when I’m wiping fingerprints off of it.
I will never turn my back on you, iPhone.
(Which is always.)
One week on, my iPhone still makes me giddy. Even when I’m wiping fingerprints off of it.
I will never turn my back on you, iPhone.
(Which is always.)
&I know that most of you are only familiar with my job in so much as it keeps me from talking to you as much as I once did. Dear readers, I admit this is chiefly what my job does. I have been far busier than I’ve ever been in my entire adult life to this point getting ready for this fall semester. Mostly I’ve been dealing with our Fall Training and Storytelling in the Digital Age – getting things ready and marketing the events. There is an upside to all of this madness, though: I’ve had the chance to meet some interesting people and see two enlightening events.
On the 6th, Noah Robischon, managing editor of Gawker Media, came to visit and gave a talk on the “End of the World as We Know It.” This was a really interesting lecture that gave us an overview of trends in the digital world, from Facebook to blogging to gaming. After the show, Noah came back to the Literary House for pizza and a discussion. It was nice to be on the “VIP” side of a gathering like this, sitting on the couch next to Noah and not in the audience. He’s a sharp guy and connected very well with all of us…certainly made me more excited to read Gawker’s blogs, anyway.
On Tuesday, SimpleTEXT came to campus. This was a really rad multimedia performance run by two Brooklyn-based nerds turned artists. The basic idea is that Noah and Tim (the fore-mentioned nerds/artists) collect text messages from the audiences’ mobile phones and computers. They turn these thoughts from words to pictures (gleaned from the internet, of course) and then turn the pictures into music. It was truly amazing, in a very avant garde, New York kind of way. The really neat part of the event was that it was only the second ever performance in the States…of a show that’s only been done 16 times! At this tiny, middle-of-nowhere school, it was quite the event!
So, while I’m completely exhausted, I am happy to report that very enjoyable things have come out of massive amounts of work.
My photos on Flickr.
The O2 Cocoon. If the Starship “Heart of Gold” had a mobile included, this would be it.
I’ve touched an iPhone. As Kate, Alex and I walked past the aluminum clad Annapolis Apple store, we were beckoned in with the salespeople’s call of “we have them…you know you want to play with them…there are three right here.” The thing is gorgeous. I’m glad Apple went with real glass and brushed aluminum instead of polycarbonate and chrome like an iPod. The screen wiped clean with extreme ease and looked gorgeous doing just about everything on it. Some notes:
Otherwise, this weekend was a whole lot of fun. I’m driving a box brown Ford Re-tardus all over the Eastern and near Western Shore, it seems, as Klaus is in the shop for his beer bottle injury. Alex had a pretty good time being lazy yesterday and learned how to shop like a fiend from the masters of H&M today. Many films were watched, all out of my collection but we probably fell short of getting him up to speed with pop culture. It makes a good case for a return visit, though.
Oh, and we didn’t fall off of the Bay Bridge, much to Kate’s surprise. 😛
Vacation: five days
All of you probably realize that I have a bit of a Nokia phone fetish. What you may not realize is that I’m currently testing a new Nokia for work! Hooray for fun jobs!
The phone that’s in my hot little mitts right now is the Nokia 5700 Xpress Music. This is a wonderful Series 60 3rd Edition smartphone that doubles as a music player and 2.0 Megapixel still and video camera. Now, I know most mobile phones offer those features, but the 5700 is different. Instead of just dedicating software to the three specific functions, Nokia decided to use industrial design to impart the device with three distinct arrangements. By rotating the bottom half of the phone, I can instantly “call up” the camera, music player and, well, phone. It’s really rather enjoyable and makes for a much less muddled smartphone experience.
Plus, since the 5700 uses it’s own Texas Instruments music chip, you can use the phone with no bogging-down of performance while the music player operates in the background…or even the camera, for that matter. It eats through MPEG-4 video with no problems, even clips converted from much higher data rate QuickTime files, too. And by “eats through,” I mean it creates and plays back these videos.
I’ve upgraded my AT&T account to unlimited data and I’m glad I did so because this little monster has devoured 55 MB of digital “stuff” in two days time. I’ve been accumulating podcasts from Moscow to Mexico City, video clips from the British Rocketboom, indie music tracks, etc, etc, etc. With stereo speakers (that are actually REALLY good) and a 2.2,” 16 million colour display, the phone proves to be a multipurpose entertainment device that I actually want to use.
And, if we only lived in Europe, the 5700 offers a final surprise functionality. Rotate the camera towards yourself and you are placed in video call mode. Seeing as we use the wrong flavour of UMTS in the States (where we use it at all) this is rather useless. However, it does make for a nice position to prop the phone up for media viewing.
I couldn’t be happier with the way the Nokia 5700 Xpress Music functions, looks and performs. This is a really solid phone and not a bad deal at $350 unlocked. I may even pick up my own when Nancy or Brian decide that I’ve had enough fun with the new work gadget. 😛
P.S. All of the cat madness that follows was captured with the 5700. Thought you should know…
My computer has suffered in its very short life. Warping and scuffing and scratching…poor, poor Desmond has seen a rough existence. But that doesn’t stop him from being glamourous. Oh, no. He’s now festooned in an array of lovely stickers and his collection is always growing and changing in new ways. Here he is in a recent incarnation:
He’s like a pop star. A pop star that is a computer. So, basically, Beck.
Disclaimer: This is an essay. You have been warned that it’s going to be an essay. I can’t really help but write it, though, because it’s been constructing itself while my brain has watched all morning.
The world today is at the mercy of the editors. I know this because I am one, but I suspect you are all well aware, too. We are drowning in a flood of images, narratives, and soundbites. Nearly all of the media that we consume has been transformed by the hand and mind of an editor, though we may not always (or ever) recognize that they’ve manipulated our reality. This molding of content and message is not necessarily negative, of course: editing often does – and should always – help to synthesize information, to make it easier to process, understand and act upon.
What intrigues me most about editing is where it is heading with the advent of Web 2.0 (the terrible moniker given to the amalgamation of Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.) Raw information is now being processed by a larger swath of people. The anointed few that once controlled “the signal,” if I can borrow from Joss Whedon for just a moment, are now being augmented by participatory amateurs. It’s a truly exciting time and it makes me wonder what’s going to happen as the next cohort comes into their own as adult consumers of media.
You see, I feel that I bridge a gap between ways of thinking. I was born in January 1984, which coincides nicely with the birth of the Macintosh and home publishing. Really, accessible rich computing as a whole was born then, too. The internet existed in my childhood but I didn’t have a connection until I was 14. Even then, the web was really in its infancy, as was much of the software and hardware that people used to populate it with content. But, I’m certainly a wired, connected person and I feel that I have a very inherent understanding of the way raw information can be formed by anyone with a desire to “speak.”
Where the bridging comes in is between work and home…though it’s certainly more broad than this. Many of my coworkers were trained in creative computing tools or found them in their adult life. They are extremely competent and enormously talented people, but my personal feeling is that the overall environment is not exactly a natural habitat. On the other end of this divide I span is my sister. She’s 14 now and has never known a world without the web. Her formative years are happening post-bubble. She’s entirely 2.0 in her thinking about media – posting her photos on MySpace after editing them in iPhoto, uploading videos of her friends dancing from iMovie to YouTube, and the like. I knew that she was a new sort of creature when she asked me to give her a copy of DangerMouse’s The Grey Album mashup at 13. I’m incredibly jealous of her and immensely proud.
And this is what’s so intriguing to me, watching on both sides of the gap: will my sister’s people even need the editors? They are all being primed to create their own entertainment, their own media and their own signal. I’ve heard a lot lately about the death of newspapers, the death of books, the death of cinemas but I think we should be pondering the death of pre-processed information. What I truly believe is that the day is coming, very soon…by the time Hannah reaches her 20s…when raw data will be distributed directly from the source to the public. News video feeds, live concert recordings, off the cuff reporting and more will flow from the author to the masses and be edited in a million different ways, each suited entirely to individual sensibilities. And then re-edited and commented upon and emailed and included in 1000 Facebook profiles and…
It’s dizzying, but I’m ready for it. I just hope Hannah and her friends are patient teachers…
So, the free interwebs that I was ‘borrowing’ from my neighbours stopped working last night. I can still mostly see the creatively-named linksys network that I had been connecting to, but my MacBook Pro cannot seem to talk to it properly. *ugh* There were/are electrical storms going on here, so perhaps it was disconnected and no one has fixed it yet? I hope so, because April 5th† (otherwise known as tomorrow) is looking very far away indeed.
† My Verizon DSL is being fully enabled on the 5th. Yes, I’m pathetic.
This holiday started early for me. I gave myself the greatest VD gift I could find:
My very own Seagate Momentus 5400.3 120 GB hard drive! I’m so pleased with myself for not only installing it but for also not breaking my computer in the process. I love me! Thanks, VD, for reminding me of this best love of all.
My hard drive is seriously making me insane. All I’m trying to do is get everything into one nice, tidy image before I get my new drive and toss this corrupted, corroded, crap-tastic pile of platters into the trash. However, it’s not going into the night without a struggle. Tonight’s battleground: iTunes. Apparently, random tracks are going to be corrupted one by one and I’ll only know which are junk as my iPod tries to absorb them during autosync. So far, “High Times” by Jamiroquai, “Dividing Island” by Lansing Dreiden and “Rexall” by Dave Navarro have fallen victim to its evil ways. Nothing quite like reimporting a whole album just for one track, eh?
*gah* Further compounding this annoyance is the fact that I accidentally ordered the wrong drive (ATA-6 vs. SATA) and will have to wait until at least Tuesday before I can swap it out. What else will go wrong?
Update: Now my fucking iPod is acting like it can’t start up and will only work properly when connected to the computer. UGH!